Exhibition Program 2018 EXHIBITIONS AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM VIENNA PALAIS ESKELES/ DOROTHEERGASSE 11

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1 Exhibition Program 2018 EXHIBITIONS AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM VIENNA PALAIS ESKELES/ DOROTHEERGASSE 11 Comrade. Jew - We only wanted Paradise on Earth. December 6, 2017, to May 1, 2018 All power to the Soviets: peace, land, and bread. This revolutionary slogan from 1917 also attracted many Jews seeking a radical break after centuries of anti-semitism in the Czarist empire. The utopian idea of an egalitarian society prompted them to support the new state. In Austria, the antisemitism in the bourgeois parties in particular made the workers movement into a political option for Jews, and there were close links between Russian and Austrian Marxists. The exhibition focuses on the failed dream of a better world. We look at the idea of an egalitarian society from an Austrian Jewish perspective and trace diplomatic, political, social, and cultural connections. The different life stories reflecting the diversity of approaches, with examples from art, literature, film, theater, and music, as well as contemporary and personal documents, combine to produce a discerning view of a complex topic. Curators: Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, Sabine Bergler The Place to Be. Salons - Spaces of Emancipation May 30, 2018 to October 14, 2018 What made the Vienna salons the places to be between 1780 and 1930 would be described today as networking in the best sense. Mostly shaped by their Jewish hostesses, these communication spaces were also spaces of emancipation and empowerment in two respects: for women who were still excluded from public life, and for the development of a critical, middle-class civic society. The exhibition introduces the salons of Fanny Arnstein and Josephine Wertheimstein, right up to the reform salons of Berta Zuckerkandl and Eugenie Schwarzwald, as cultured spaces of politics and political spaces of culture. It makes the accomplishments of salonnières for the Viennese cultural, economic and political scene tangible. And it ultimately shows what importance Viennese salon culture gained for the expelled Viennese Jewish women and men in exile, and that is wasn t coincidentally Hilde 1

2 Spiel, returning home from English exile, who made this culture salonfähig (socially acceptable) once again in the post-war years in Vienna. Curated by the team of the Jewish Museum Vienna EXHIBITIONS IN THE ANNEX AT DOROTHEERGASSE 11 Israel Before Israel Photographs by Ze ev Aleksandrowicz November 22, 2017 to April 1, 2018 In 2003 the Aleksandrowicz family discovered a suitcase in the attic of their house in Tel Aviv containing 15,000 negatives belonging to the late Ze ev Aleksandrowicz, born in 1905 as Wilhelm Aleksandrowicz into a prosperous family of paper merchants in Krakow. The unexpected treasure brings to life the world of the 1920s and 1930s with pictures of his Polish origins, his student days in Vienna, and his travels to Palestine between 1932 and 1935.The exhibition in the Annex of the Jewish Museum is devoted in particular to Aleksandrowicz s travels to Palestine. They show how the ardent Zionist s enthusiasm for the country and all of its inhabitants were the inspiration for a fascinating photographic journey. In 1936 he married a women from an established Jewish family in Jaffa, after which he abandoned photography altogether. Curator: Andrea Winklbauer Teddy Kollek. Vienna - Jerusalem Vienna April 11, 2018 to September 2, 2018 The legendary Jerusalem mayor grew up in Vienna and got involved in Zionist youth organizations here. And he already left Austria as a 24-year-old, heading towards Palestine in At the time of the Anschluss, he was just building the Ein Gev kibbutz on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Kollek s life journey tells of constantly worsening conditions in Vienna before the Anschluss, of his work to rescue refugees from the Nazi regime, and his efforts to enable a peaceful co-existence between Jews and Palestinians, especially in Jerusalem. Kollek s late return to Vienna, where he opened the Jewish Museum together with his Viennese colleague Helmut Zilk fifty-five years after the Anschluss and the November Pogrom in 1938, ultimately leads into the middle of the history of that very place where the exhibition is to be seen and whose predecessor institution, the world s oldest Jewish museum, was closed in March 1938 by the National Socialists. Curator: Marcus Patka 2

3 EXHIBITIONS AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM VIENNA MUSEUM JUDENPLATZ Helena Rubinstein. Pioneer of beauty October 18, 2017 to May 6, 2018 Helena Rubinstein was a pioneer in female entrepreneurship. It did not come easily to her. She was born in the 1870s in Kraków as the oldest of eight daughters and grew up in modest circumstances in an orthodox Jewish family. After a stopover in Vienna, where she worked in her aunt s fur store and collected the first ideas for her later career, she emigrated to Australia and worked initially as a children s nanny. She began to sell creams imported from Poland and founded her first beauty salon. In order to develop her own products, she handed over the business to two of her sisters and left for Paris. In 1912 she invented the first system for identifying skin types. She founded beauty salons in Paris and London. In 1914, by now married, she emigrated with her two children and husband to the USA, where she continued to develop her own cosmetic line, which from the 1920s also bore her name. Her business grew rapidly. By the time of her death in 1965 it had 100 branches in fourteen countries and around 30,000 employees. Her private assets amounted to over 100 million US dollars. She was a patron of the arts and sciences, setting up a fund to support art students and financing the Helena Rubenstein Pavilion, a museum for modern art, in Tel Aviv. She established a faculty of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts and in 1953 founded the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, which continues to support women scientists today. The exhibition will look at her life, particularly the years in Vienna. Curator: Iris Meder Coordination: Danielle Spera and Werner Hanak-Lettner Assistance: Denise Landau and Dominik Cobanoglu Persecuted engaged married. Marriages of convenience in exile May 16, 2018 to October 7, 2018 Women persecuted during the Nazi era were able to escape into exile by means of marriages of convenience with a foreigner. These marriages were contracted pro forma for money or out of solidarity. Most of the time the spouses were found in one s own surroundings, sometimes it was also the cousin. Through the disparate marriage and citizenship law, women had the possibility to obtain a different citizenship through marriage. Some succeeded in utilizing this in a subversive way for their flight or their stay in exile. While some women still found their fake spouses and their future lives from Vienna, others already were arranged while in emigration. In order to be able to remain and/or work in the respective country of exile or to have a secured livelihood, they entered into marriages of convenience. This, however, also carried risks such as the dependence on the formal spouse and fear of sexual exploitation, as well as extortion and denunciation. Many women 3

4 concealed their sham marriages as a detail of their flight history. Yet in many cases they proved to be a successful survival strategy and therefore existential for the lives of these women and their offspring. Irene Messinger was able to investigate 120 cases through her research. The exhibition shows the selected destinies of Viennese Jewish women and documents how the women s lives took a decisive turn. Artists, dancers, scientists, students and political activists who married to England, France and Palestine or to Switzerland, the USA or Egypt are portrayed. The exhibition wants to make women visible as active protagonists who knew how to use their social and political networks to organize marriages of convenience and attempted to survive in this manner. Stories from descendants or from the personal sphere are of particularly major importance to the research. In case you know of a story of a marriage of convenience, we would be happy if you could tell us about it. If requested, the information will naturally be handled confidentially. Curators: Sabine Bergler, Irene Messinger Opening hours and tickets The Jewish Museum Vienna, Dorotheergasse 11, 1010 Vienna, is open Sunday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The second location, the Museum Judenplatz, Judenplatz 8, 1010 Vienna, is open Sunday to Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (wintertime), respectively 5 p.m. (summertime). Further information at or info@jmw.at. Queries Mag. a Petra Fuchs, M.Litt., media officer Tel.: petra.fuchs@jmw.at Photos and press material on current exhibitions can be found under #JMW 4

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