Located in Downtown Portland, The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education will reopen this weekend after a four-month closure.
The reopening will feature new exhibitions, including works from an Oregon artist.
OPB’s Paul Marshall spoke with Judy Margles about the reopening. She’s the executive director of the museum.
Henk Pander's “Retief Straat, Amsterdam” from the Jews of Amsterdam, Rembrandt and Pander Collection on display at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education
Henk Pander (Courtesy of OJMCHE)
Paul Marshall: There’s been a rise in antisemitism nationally. Can you talk about the significance of this reopening?
Judy Margles: We are most certainly reopening the museum against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, both in the United States and around the globe. What we’ve always tried to do at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is make connections to other communities and other groups of people who are also experiencing hostility, atrocity and indignation.
It is an opportunity because our reopening is really focused on Human Rights after the Holocaust. Antisemitism is most definitely a part of the challenges that we’re facing. It is one among many.
Marshall: The atmosphere in downtown Portland has gone through a lot of changes in the last three years. How did that affect your approach to the reopening?
Margles: When we moved into this building in 2017, it was already a humanitarian crisis on the streets. Given the pressing issues that have come out during the pandemic, things are way, way worse.
Things are more violent. The people on the street are much more in need. It’s really redoubled our efforts to bring to the minds of our visitors — the injustices that we experience.
At the museum, we do have already in place three core exhibitions. We’re adding this forth about human rights after the Holocaust. One of our three existing core exhibitions is called Discrimination and Resistance, an Oregon Primer.
When we moved into the building (in 2017), we didn’t know that that was the exhibit that we had to tell.
It wasn’t a history that we had assumed that we would tackle. But it was so clear to us as we were coming into Old Town and looking in the neighborhood and realizing that there is this world of suffering on the streets that we had to as museum workers, as citizens of this city and this state, we had to figure out where our activism was going to be.
I always say that our activism is in education so we seized this opportunity to educate our visitors about the history of discrimination and resistance in Oregon because it is so clear to us that someone houseless who is living in the vestibule in the entryway to our museum is suffering for a boatload of reasons that we don’t know.
So I like to think that what we’re trying to do in Old Town as we’re working assiduously to try and overcome some of the problems that we face on the streets, is to also build awareness of the humanitarian crisis.
These are human beings that we have an obligation to take care of as well.
Marshall: One of the things you mentioned is a connection to other communities and there will be a festival outside, you’ll be collaborating with Asian organizations downtown. Why was this collaboration so important?
Margles: This was the brainchild of Becca Biggs, our communications manager. Understanding that this new core exhibition that we’re opening — Human rights After The Holocaust has some distressing materials in it. We’re looking at human rights violations in this country and around the world. We’re looking at genocide around the world. We’re also looking at hope and activism. She thought it was really important to bring the communities that we’re actually talking about in the exhibition into the fold.
Henk Pander's "Intersection In Amsterdam East" from The Jews of Amsterdam, Rembrandt and Pander collection on display at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education
Henk Pander Collection (Courtesy of OJMCHE)
Marshall: One of your current exhibits features the work of Oregon painter Henk Pander. He passed away this April at the age of 85. Can you introduce listeners who are unfamiliar with him to Pander’s work?
Margles: Henk Pender was born outside of Amsterdam in 1937. His father was a painter so not surprising that he also became a painter. He studied in Amsterdam and lived through the Second World War.
Henk was not Jewish. His father was not part of the resistance but was very troubled by what he observed once the Nazis occupied Holland and as much as he could, he was very concerned about protecting his family.
He had nine children. He was fiercely Catholic, but he was doing work to help the Jewish community. Henk witnessed all this as a young child and had this steel trap memory. He moved to Portland in 1965 and established himself as a painter here.
He never forgot and held these memories of war-torn Europe in his mind. About 20 years ago, he just started painting and drawing out these very clear memories of what happened during the war. As recently as 2019, he went back to Amsterdam and started painting the streets of the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam.
As you’ll see in the exhibition, he chose to paint these streets devoid of people. So what you’re seeing are just the buildings and he uses lots and lots of color and oranges, fire and red to create this scene of very stark empty, but very very vivid streets.
He was trying to help visitors to understand that at one time there was a very vibrant world that lived on in this neighborhood but no longer exists.
Marshall: What do you hope people take away and learn from the museum?
Margles: The author Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about Hope (“Hope In The Dark”) We have a quote in the exhibition from her. It says “Hope calls for action, action is impossible without hope.”
I think that is the message we want to instill in our visitors that we all have to get out there and work harder or do something.
The question we are asking is how do you turn hope into action. We hope that we want people to leave this exhibition inspired. Maybe it’s inspired to walk out of our doors on Davis Street and see someone unsheltered on the street having a manic moment and not looking at that person and feeling indignant. Like “Why is that person there now? Why is that person on the street? I don’t want to have to look at that person.”
What if they go out on the street and say: “There is someone on the street in need. I can’t at this moment help them, but maybe there is something I can do that’s going to make a difference.”
What we want from this exhibit is to create empathy. Maybe it’s as simple as that.