A welcome home for the Museum of Jewish Montreal: online venture gets a physical space (Gazette)

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April 26, 2016

Montreal Gazette
By Susan Schwartz
April 26, 2016


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For six years now, the Museum of Jewish Montreal has been sharing the history and experience of the city’s Jewish community in myriad ways: through online content including interactive maps and virtual tours, and an oral history initiative with the Jewish Public Library. Popular walking tours, including a food tour called Beyond the Bagel, of the once heavily Jewish neighbourhoods of Mile End and the Plateau, have drawn locals and tourists.

There have been compelling pop-up exhibits, including the 2014 immersive multimedia exhibit Parkley Clothes: 1937, about Montreal garment workers toiling in the downtown Belgo Building back when it was a hub of Montreal’s bustling shmatte industry. A 2015 exhibit focused on Moroccan-born Samy Elmaghribi, a legendary figure in the Arab music world; born Salomon Amzallag (1922-2008), he had a deep love for Jewish liturgical music and served as a cantor in a Montreal synagogue.

The museum originally opened in 2010 as the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal with a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Montreal.

Online “is a really great way to start a variety of projects – but it came to be more and more important for us to have a place to do programming year-round,” said the museum’s 32-year-old founder and executive director, Zev Moses. “We were working out of cafés and our homes – four to five of us full-time, and during different times of the year, a variety of students and interns. Even four people can’t really spend their whole work day at a café.”

Soon they won’t have to. The museum now has an actual physical home – on the Main in the Plateau, in the heart of the city’s historic Jewish core. “It’s an area that has a lot of life, with interesting businesses and artists,” he said.

The space is a bright and airy 1,200-square-foot loft-like storefront with 80 feet of windows, on the main floor of 4040 St-Laurent Blvd. at Duluth Ave., an eight-storey building erected in 1912 by manufacturer Abraham M. Vineberg: It housed garment factories for many years, when the needle trade was an integral component of the neighbourhood’s bustling Jewish community. Renovations and alterations to the space, which used to house a magazine and newspaper shop, are under way; a soft opening is planned for mid- or late May.

It’s not a traditional full gallery permanent exhibition space but rather “stage one before we maybe go in that direction,” Moses said. “Ultimately, it’s good to have our own space if we want to grow and become a permanent piece of the cultural landscape of Montreal.”

For now, what is exciting to the staff is having a welcoming gathering place for visitors, a food and event space – and a venue to welcome partners from the Jewish community and beyond.

Going from virtual to physical will mean many things but, chiefly, it will permit the museum to better preserve and celebrate the history of Jewish Montreal and to serve as a community cultural venue to explore its present, Moses said. “We’re working with groups like the Jewish Public Library and Klez Kanada, along with many others, to create new types of programming to highlight in the space,” he said.

Moses, who studied urban planning and design in graduate school and political science and history as an undergraduate, describes himself as “very interested in cities. I’m thinking of how you mix culture and history, technology and urban space,” he said.

The museum’s walking tours will leave from the St-Laurent space and there are plans for a boutique that will stock everything from T-shirts to fiction and non-fiction about Jewish Montreal. The food component will include kitchen facilities, a communal table and a café serving Montreal Jewish food – Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Food historian Kat Romanow, who was the museum’s community manager, becomes director of food programming, and she’ll run the food space, to feature activities from cooking workshops to special events. The Wandering Chew, a grassroots group that celebrates the culture and history of Montreal’s diverse Jewish communities through food events, will have a home here, too.

One morning this month Moses, Romanow and the rest of the staff – communications and operations manager Anna Rotman, research director Stephanie Tara Schwartz, who is a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University, and community manager Aviv Milgram – gathered at the museum for a picture. They were enthusiastic and upbeat as work on the space was finally getting under way: A demolition crew had just finished stripping the place and tape on the concrete floor marked off the locations of the compact kitchen space and a small office area at the back.

Just as work remained to be done in the space, the museum itself is in many ways still a work in progress. An informal brainstorming session earlier this month drew close to 50 people to talk about what the space could be. The event generated “really good response and a lot of excitement” – and others are planned. “We want as much input as possible,” Moses said.

For now, the mere physical presence of the museum is generating positive reaction: A gallery of posters of vintage photographs from Jewish community archives hangs in the windows – and people have been stopping to check it out or to come in and share a story about their connection to Jewish Montreal, Moses said.

Until now, the museum has been financed mostly by community donors, with some government funding – and revenue from the walking tours. Last year’s budget was just over $150,000; with the new space and renovations, this year’s will be about $500,000.

The staff is waiting to hear about grants that would make it possible to open an exhibition space at the museum or nearby. “The long-term vision is to create a few spaces that historically recreate parts of Jewish Montreal so that we can be a year-round place to visit for tourists and also locals and school groups,” Moses said.

The first exhibition would provide a bird’s eye view of what it was like to work in the garment industry; in its heyday, it involved virtually 75 per cent of the Jewish community in some way, he said. “Even if you didn’t work in the business you knew someone who did.

“If we do it well, people will walk into a space that feels like a shmatte factory 80 or 90 years ago.”

AT A GLANCE

To learn more about the Museum of Jewish Montreal, 4040 St-Laurent Blvd., call 514-317-6580 or go to imjm.ca. The schedule for its walking tours, which have begun for the season, is there, too. The museum also has a Facebook page and a blog.

sschwartz@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/susanschwartz

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