Under pressure from the cost of living crisis, the Jewish Museum London will close on July 30 and sell the building to fund its planned move to a new, larger home. In a press release announcing the news earlier on June 1, the Museum of British Jewish History and Culture said it was facing “an unforeseen increase in costs” and ultimately needed to become “more sustainable at the ‘coming”.
The cost of living crisis was the “immediate trigger” that made the current building in Camden, north London, “untenable”, said museum chairman Nick Viner. The arts journal. Since 2010, the museum has been housed in a Georgian townhouse attached to a former piano factory, which “was already relatively difficult to heat and cool and expensive to maintain”, he says. A sharp 70% increase in energy bills and the impact of inflation on construction costs required “significant capital” just to perform “basic building maintenance”.
These challenges follow a “much more difficult business environment” created by the Covid-19 pandemic, Viner says. Visitor numbers have been ‘slow to recover’ and emergency grants from government and major funding bodies have ceased. The Jewish Museum London had also experienced an earlier period of “financial crisis” in 2019, prompting a review of its donor-dependent business model.
“Financial considerations became so overwhelming that they drove us to make the decision [to sell the building]Viner says, but the board also felt that the Camden site “had a number of constraints that didn’t fit with our long-term vision.” The venue was “quite hidden” and had limited space to display the collection, hold temporary exhibitions and accommodate visiting school groups. Past exhibitions include an exhibition of Life? Or theatre?the extraordinary series of 200 gouaches produced by the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon before her deportation to Auschwitz in 1943.
A school group visiting the museum © Jewish Museum of London
London has “the smallest Jewish museum among major European cities,” the museum says, “although it is home to the second-largest Jewish community and has the second-largest collection.” According to 2021 census data, around 145,000 people who identify as Jews live in Greater London, representing more than half of the total British Jewish population of 270,000 in England and Wales. The museum’s collection has more than 40,000 objects of Jewish and social history.
Museum trustees hope the sale of the Camden building will kick off a major fundraising campaign for a future “bigger” venue with space for more ambitious exhibitions, educational programs and revenue-generating activities. very significant income. Unlike state-funded Jewish museums elsewhere in Europe, the project “will depend on private funders” from the British Jewish community, Viner says. The goal is to open in time for the museum’s centenary in 2032.
While the search for a new permanent home is ongoing, the museum plans to reopen in a “pop-up” location in central London as early as next year, Viner said. Even without a physical space, outreach work with schools is expected to continue and the museum is in talks to loan pieces from the collection to institutions across the UK from the autumn.
