From the Curator: Jacqueline Goldstein

This past year the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU held exhibitions from diverse topics, ranging from architecture, environmental art, the stories of the Venezuelan Jewish community, a travelogue from Professor Tudor Parfitt, distinguished scholar, artist Bonnie Lautenberg and the Jewish community in Columbia.

Beginning in May 2022, we presented Giller + Giller: Adventures in Architecture which illustrated the story of Norman Giller, who is considered the founder of Miami Modern (MiMo), a regionalized style of Modernist architecture. Two of his projects, The Carillon Hotel and The Diplomat Hotel, are iconic symbols of the glitz and glamour that transformed Miami into an urban playground. Giller’s work demands attention and recognition and there was no one better than his son, architect Ira Giller, to guide us through this retrospective of Norman’s work. With Ira’s invaluable insight and extensive commentary from Norman himself, the projects shown were more than just brick and mortar, they were windows into a man’s creativity. Ira’s own style builds upon Norman’s legacy with his own renowned work and creative ingenuity adding to the narrative.

On view in the Bess Myerson Gallery was LA ALEGRÍA DE VIVIR: A Moment in Venezuelan Jewish Life Through the Eyes of Silvia Cohen Silvia chose unique moments from her own family and friends’ stories to illustrate Venezuela’s vibrant Jewish community.

Tudor Parfitt’s Remarkable Jewish Journeys explored the travels of Professor Tudor Parfitt. Featuring fieldwork journals, rare photographs, cultural artifacts, and more, this exhibition documented Professor Parfitt's extensive travels over 40 years to some of the most remote Jewish communities on earth. Parfitt is a Distinguished University Professor, the President Navon Professor of Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, and Founding Director of the Program for Global Jewish Studies at FIU.

Also on view in the Myerson Gallery was the exhibition honoring the life and career of Marcia Jo Zerivitz. (see page 6).

This past year also saw the implementation of The Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) Internship in Community Data Curation here at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, funded by the Mellon Foundation. This internship is an ongoing initiative titled “Community Data Curation: Preserving, Creating, and Narrating Everyday Stories.” The project works in close partnership and collaboration with eight community partners, including the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, where we have been conducting oral histories from local members of the Jewish community, including Bob Hauser, nephew of famed architect Henry Hohauser.

In November of 2022, we opened Environmental Art: Fragile Beauty which explored the powerful allure of nature alongside its fragile state today.

The installations by Beatriz Chachamovitz (seen here), Lauren Shapiro, and the late Myra Lehr utilized different media to convey the elegance of our aquatic ecosystems as well as to cultivate a broad awareness of their delicacy. The artists sought to bring awareness to the beauty of nature in a tangible way, taking art one step further than simply illustrating landscapes.

Through the fall 2023, a retrospective of the work of internationally renowned photographer Arnold Newman is on display along with antique cameras from the 1930s – 1970s, followed by Raymond Elman: The Portraits, on view in October for the Art Basel season. The exhibition features 20 large-scale, mixedmedia portraits accompanied with videos from the people in the portraits, including Jane Leavy, Michelle Oka Doner, Khalila Ali and Sebastian Junger.

From The Registrar: Todd Bothel

It has been a productive year in the registration department. As part of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) Mellon Foundation Grant, six oral histories have been conducted and videoed. Four have been edited and uploaded to the dPanther (FIU) online digital platform. Seven additional oral histories recounting the Surfside building collapse were also recorded, two of which have been uploaded to FIU’s dPanther site. In addition, digitized audio of 15 previous oral histories from the museum's collection and their transcripts have been saved. Seven hundred MP3 files of older oral histories from the collection were transferred, digitized, and uploaded to the Registrar’s computer. Over twelve hundred images from the Jewish Floridian photograph collection have been digitally scanned and added to the Master Image Files. All of this work was completed by Alejandro Gonzalez, our Mellon Grant intern.

Additionally, 136 ephemera, photographs and artifacts were cataloged, photographed/scanned, and added to the museum's computerized database. This included a collection of materials from the Eagle ArmyNavy Stores owned by the William Weintraub family (collected during the History Harvest event in March), a Golda Meir sculpture, material from the Etz Chaim Synagogue in Jacksonville, a menu in Hebrew from the Sun City Motel in Miami Beach, a set of Tropic Topics newsletters from the 1969 class from John F. Kennedy Junior High School in North Miami Beach, set of sermon booklets by Rabbi Joseph R. Narot, and a set of commemorative medals (Bess Myerson, Isaac B. Singer, Dara Torres) from the Jewish American Hall of Fame. Last fall, the museum purchased a new computerized collections database system (Re:Discovery) to enhance our collection management. To date, 2,216 records from the old Filemaker Pro system have been converted into Re:Discovery. There are approximately 38,000 records that need to be converted. The to-date completed database will be available online in the coming months. Also, last August, the museum purchased four wireless digital temperature/relative humidity sensors and tracking software from Conserv. The real-time tracked data (updates every 15 minutes) is accessible from the Cloud and helps us better monitor the museum's environment and make adjustments as needed.

History Harvest Continues

We invite you to help us fill gaps in the JMOF collection so that we can better represent our community’s past and present. Bring your old photographs, artifacts, objects, memorabilia, and stories to share with us or use the QR Code to submit photos of items for consideration.

Examples of what we are looking for include: historic ritual objects, artifacts or ephemera related to Sephardic/Mizrahi communities, LGBTQ+ experience among other topics. We will also be collecting oral histories that connect to Florida For additional information contact the JMOF

Marcia Jo Koenigsberg Kerstein Zerivitz, LHD: A Lifelong Passion for Jewish Life & Continuity

This past Spring, JMOF-FIU presented an exhibition honoring the life and career of Marcia Jo Zerivitz. The exhibition documented Marcia Jo’s journey from a small town in West Virginia to established expert on Florida’s Jewish history through many artifacts, documents and photographs.

Public historian Marcia Jo Zerivitz, L.H.D., Founding Executive Director, Jewish Museum of Florida–FIU, is a native West Virginian who has lived in Florida for more than half a century. A leader for Jewish causes since the fifth grade, she has been a trailblazer in the American and Floridian Jewish communities serving national, state, and local organizations and has broken the “glass ceiling woman in many positions.

In 2016, Florida International University awarded her a Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa for her vision and leadership throughout her life to expand knowledge, enrich collective historic memory and cultivate diversity.

The museum hosted a VIP opening reception in honor of Marcia Jo. Guests included Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, Former Florida State Representative Elaine Bloom, JMOF-FIU Board Chairman Ira Giller and family and friends of Marcia Jo and Elliott Zerivitz.

Following the exhibition opening, Marcia Jo was presented with a proclamation from Mayor Dan Gelber.

We invite you to honor Marcia Jo by making a contribution to JMOF FIU in her honor at jmof.fiu.edu/support. These donations will benefit the Marcia Jo Zerivitz Endowment Fund for Collections and Research.