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The Holocaust and Human Rights: An inclusive critical field for museums
Expanding concerns with human rights across the horizon of museums
The Holocaust and Human Rights: An inclusive critical field for museums
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The Holocaust and Human Rights, Sydney Jewish Museum.
Avril Alba, Jennifer Barrett and A. Dirk Moses
The 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 approaches in this area. Similarly, we examined the exhibitions on view in these institutions, with a critical eye and a desire to develop a distinctive Australian intervention within the field. As we assessed and documented potential connections and intersections between Holocaust history, memory and human rights, we reached the following conclusions:
1. The Holocaust can provide an effective framing device to explore human rights challenges if accurately historicised in terms of the language used in international society in the 1940s. Nazi targeting of Jews was recognised but was also contextualised as part of the regime’s general criminality. Shock at the extent of this criminality motivated United Nations delegates to pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in November 1948.
2. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights can also be fruitfully utilised as a framing device – but again, it must be adequately historicised to understand its limitations and omissions.
3. A focus on local and/or regional human rights issues would provide an effective and authentic entry point to contemporary international human rights agendas. Engagement with pressing local and national issues would allow the researched exhibition to address the changing nature of human rights broadly, while also serving to enrich ongoing connections between communities of interest in an Australian context.
4. Consultation with local communities, and in particular with local Indigenous communities in Australia, has been imperative to ensure that the definition and content of human rights in the exhibition accounts appropriately for Indigenous knowledge, experience and struggles for human rights.
5. While not a vehicle for political advocacy, the exhibition as finally presented should challenge visitors to conclude their visit to SJM on a note of reflection, acknowledging the complexity of the issues that have been raised. If its intents are realised, the exhibition experience might also stimulate visitors to apply what they have learned in a variety of life situations, or further investigate contemporary issues raised.
Proceeding from this basis, we created a new conceptual paradigm through which the connection between the Holocaust and human rights could be deployed in an Australian setting by articulating the following key objectives for the exhibition.
The Holocaust and Human Rights will:
1. Connect the historic and thematic content in The Holocaust exhibition to contemporary human rights issues, debates and concerns, with an emphasis on current issues most pertinent to Australia.
2. Offer, as the first permanent human rights exhibition in an Australian museum, a distinctly Australian contribution to the growing international interest in and proliferation of museums focused on human rights.
3. Function as a self-directed learning space for all visitors, and be a place for questioning and inquiry.
4. Provide space for reflection and contemplation by encouraging visitors to connect the historical materials to contemporary human rights debates and violations.
With the conceptual boundaries firmly established, the detailed work of interpretation and information delivery began. To provide historical context and encourage affective as well as intellectual engagement with human rights issues, the exhibition is structured around four main components:
Historical introduction
Human Rights timeline
Coming to the Table multimedia installation
Reflective space
The Introduction sets the historical and thematic boundaries of the exhibition, connecting it to The Holocaust exhibition while also ensuring its own internal logic and consistency. The focus is on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, adopted by the United Nations in successive days in December 1948. At the adoption of the Declaration, Eleanor Roosevelt, who led its development stated:
While both the UN Convention and Declaration marked positive declarations of principle, the former excluded population expulsions, cultural genocide and political groups, while the latter omitted economic, social, minority, and indigenous rights. Meanwhile, neither seriously inhibited state sovereignty. Since their passing, human rights violations and genocide have continued to mark global society. In the SJM exhibition, reflection on these statements, their achievements and limitations, readies the visitor to contemplate the challenges that have faced the human rights movement since their adoption at the end of the 1940s.
Since the UN Declaration, human rights consciousness has grown alongside further mass atrocities and other human rights violations. Nevertheless, the events included in the Sydney exhibition timeline were recognised as having a major impact on the development of human rights and human rights consciousness in Australia and internationally. They provide a local and global overview of the gains and losses of rights and freedom, and show that significant challenges remain to ensuring that the human rights of all are respected and upheld.
Split into three distinct sections, the exhibition timeline’s blue line charts the development of key United Nations instruments of protection. The black line charts Australia’s human rights achievements and shortcomings; and the red line charts some of the major genocides and human rights violations of the last century that have occurred despite developments in human rights protections. The two AV screens present in the exhibition meanwhile explore the history and content of the 1948 UN Declaration and Genocide Convention, and the further genocides and major HR violations that have occurred since 1948.
The Holocaust and Human Rights, Sydney Jewish Museum.
Coming to the Table
Coming to the Table is the centrepiece of The Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition. It embodies the complex and ongoing process of negotiating and upholding human rights, in both its content and design, by inviting visitors to both intellectually and physically ‘come to the table’ and think deeply about the human rights issues we face today. The development of robust mechanisms to protect human rights is a complex and dynamic process requiring the input of individuals, communities, and legal experts. In the debate and political struggle to safeguard human rights, opinions about the urgency of human rights issues and the best means to address them vary and, at times, clash. Using a montage of historical sources and multimedia, Coming to the Table invites the visitor to join these debates and to learn about and reflect upon key human rights issues facing Australia and Australians today.
Coming to the Table explores four human rights themes:
• Indigenous Rights
• Disability Rights
• Asylum Seekers and Refugees Rights
• LGBTQI Rights
Four multimedia tabletop projections explore these human rights issues. Each topic is introduced through a series of short video clips framed with 3–4 questions, for example: In what ways have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sought change? How have perceptions of disability changed over time? What responsibilities does Australia have with regard to the international refugee crisis? What factors shape Australian policies and attitudes towards members of the LGBTQI+ communities?
The space was designed to facilitate and reflect the process of communication, with video installations and seating that allows visitors to talk and interact about the issues they are encountering. Group visitors and students are able to explore content around each of these questions either on their own or facilitated by an educator. There is potential to engage more deeply in the debates that surround these complex issues. The installations are programmed in such a way that they can either have all four human rights issues running at once or have the four stations focus on a single issue to suit a range of education programs and approaches.
The exhibition also takes seriously its mandate of human rights, and hence both accessibility and diversity were paramount concerns. For example, Coming to the Table explicitly addresses the struggles of often marginalised groups but presents the information in such a way that individuals from these groups speak for themselves rather than being ‘spoken about’.
The Holocaust and Human Rights ends with a space specifically designed for visitors to reflect and respond to the materials they have viewed. They are challenged to think about their own responsibilities in upholding human rights and the possible ways they can contribute to the development of more robust human rights mechanisms. In this space, visitors can leave short messages and impressions, express their opinions on the matters raised and their hopes for the future of human rights cultures in Australia and internationally. These responses are collected by the museum and will be used to inform education programs and to promote further engagement with the exhibition issues and themes. []
Research and institutional support: Research and development for The Holocaust and Human Rights was undertaken as a collaborative project between the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM) and the University of Sydney. The exhibition is an official non-traditional research output of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP140100795: Australian Holocaust Memory, Human Rights and the Australian Museum. The project is funded by an ARC Linkage Grant jointly held by the University of Sydney and the SJM.
The project team: University of Sydney: Chief Investigators — Dr Avril Alba, A/Professor Jennifer Barrett, Professor A. Dirk Moses; Research Assistant: Sarah Haid, Sydney Jewish Museum; Creative Director: Jisuk Han; Curator: Roslyn Sugarman; Redevelopment Education Officer: Marie Bonardelli.
Avril Alba is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney. Her monograph The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space was published in 2015. She is also co-editor, with Shirli Gilbert, of the forthcoming Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World (Wayne State University Press, 2019), and has curated several major exhibitions.
Jennifer Barrett is an Associate Professor of Museum and Heritage Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. She is currently Director of the University’s Culture Strategy. Her monographs include: Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (with Jacqueline Millner, Ashgate, 2014) and Museums and the Public Sphere (Blackwell, 2012). Since 2014 Jennifer has been Chair of the Board for Museums and Galleries NSW.
Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. His coedited anthologies, The Holocaust in Greece and Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970 appeared in 2018.
Text citation: Avril Alba, Jennifer Barrett and Dirk Moses, ‘The Holocaust and Human Rights: An inclusive critical field for museums’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 27(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Summer 2018, pp. 42-45.
