42 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 27(1) – Summer 2018
Expanding concerns with human rights across the horizon of museums
The Holocaust and Human Rights: An inclusive critical field for museums
top:
Avril Alba.
middle:
Jennifer Barrett.
bottom: right:
A. Dirk Moses.
The Holocaust and Human Rights, Sydney Jewish Museum.
Avril Alba, Jennifer Barrett and A. Dirk Moses
T
he Holocaust and Human Rights, the newest permanent exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum (2018), outlines the achievements and failures of the human rights movement. It focuses on historic and contemporary human rights struggles in Australia and the region, exploring and questioning our individual, communal and national responsibilities in upholding human rights today. Holocaust museums and their museological practices (including the architecture, affective spaces and exhibition design) have become highly influential forms of memorialisation, as is evident in many new human rights museums that often have a Holocaust ‘core’ or basis. Yet issues of comparison, and in particular whether utilising the Holocaust as an analogical resource can serve to highlight or obscure other atrocities, remain contentious. Linking or comparing the Holocaust to other atrocities has been perceived as diminishing this specific event or, conversely, as canonising the Holocaust over other genocides. Contending with these methodological issues and international debates was pivotal in the development of the Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition at the SJM. In the intensive
research undertaken to create the exhibition, we harnessed the public forum of the museum to explore the nexus between the Holocaust and human rights and to see how this connection could be most fruitfully deployed in an Australian context. The diverse museological and site research we undertook with the SJM generated valuable information and primary source material that formed the basis of the exhibition development. We analysed the historical and museological frameworks of often-controversial Holocaust museums that have explicitly linked Holocaust history to human rights paradigms such as at the Kazerne Dossin (in Mechelen, Belgium) and the Anne Frank House (in Amsterdam). Our research also took us to museums in South Africa, where the history of the Jewish diaspora, genocide and colonialism intersected; and to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (Winnipeg), a fellow-Commonwealth country with a similarly distinctive record of First Nations and colonial history interactions raising human rights issues, as well as both having experienced significant post-war immigration. At these institutions, we undertook extensive interviews with museum directors, curators, educators and board members, to ensure that we were able to explore and critique the most current
