The Special Exhibition "Jewish - Now" Extended

The Jewish Museum Berlin is extending the special exhibition "Jewish - now. Photographs and Interviews" for almost 4 weeks until 25 February 2007. In various series of photographs, students intensively explored a theme with which they were unfamiliar at the outset: Jewish life in Germany today.

The exhibition, which presents two projects completed by students from the University of Applied Sciences in Konstanz (communication design) and the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld (photography and media studies), shows work which reflects considerable openness and curiosity, but also sensitivity.

The project entitled "Jewish" by the students from Bielefeld shows individual aspects of the multi-facetted panorama of Jewish life in Germany. The photo series range from the wedding couple at a traditional marriage ceremony through frisky scenes at a party arranged by a Jewish student organization under the heading "Party like a Jew" to visits to the former concentration camp in Auschwitz and the concentration camp memorial sites in Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora.

In their project "Young Jews in Germany Today," the students from Konstanz ask interviewees about their identity, their history, how they feel about Judaism, and their relationship to Germany and to the term "home." The answers reflect not only the diversity of Jewish life but also the desire for a normal relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany.

Without losing sight of history, the focus of both the projects is on the present and ordinary day-to-day life in Germany. -- www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de