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June 3, 2005
Herzl is brought to life at museum
An interactive exhibit gives visitors to new Jerusalem venue a
taste of the early European Zionist movement.
WENDY ELLIMAN ISRAEL PRESS SERVICE
A wall slides noiselessly open and you step through it onto the
cobbled streets of 19th-century Paris. Vendors sell their wares,
horses whinny and carriages rumble. On three of the walls are scenes
of the city a century ago; on the fourth, two life-size French soldiers
suddenly appear walking down a colonnade, muttering angrily about
the promotion of the Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, and plotting his downfall.
This starting point of the newly opened Herzl Museum in Jerusalem
introduces us to Theodor Herzl's early days as an Austrian Jewish
journalist who covered the notorious 1894 Dreyfus trial for Vienna's
Neue Freie Presse. The virulent anti-Semitism he witnessed
in Paris during those weeks convinced Herzl that a Jewish homeland
was the only viable answer for the Jewish people, and turned him
into the prophet of the Jewish state and the founder of modern Zionism.
In our age of MTV, video and DVD bonus scenes, museums face forceful
competition, but the new interactive, high-tech Herzl Museum meets
the challenge.
"On one level, it's simply great fun, a wonderful experience,"
said Danny Mimran, executive vice-president of the Jerusalem Foundation
which, together with the World Zionist Organization and Israel's
Education Ministry, built the $3 million museum. "But at the
same time, it's an encounter with the real Zionism, the whole process,
from the dream through the achievements and the reality."
As visitors watch the public humiliation of Dreyfus (portrayed in
a 1940s movie), a wall panel slides back behind them and the museum's
videoed play-within-a-play begins. In an empty, modern-day theatre,
prominent Israeli director Micha Levinson (competently acting himself)
is persuading a jeans-clad actor named Lior Michaeli (played by
the popular young Israeli actor Zak Berkman) to play Herzl.
"Herzl the fisherman?" asks Michaeli.
"No, Herzl the Zionist visionary!" replies Levinson.
"What's to play?" retorts Michaeli. "All you need
is a beard and a balcony!"
The museum is themed on teaching the young Michaeli about Herzl.
"You can't play the role if you don't understand the vision,"
Levinson tells him.
Michaeli's instruction begins onscreen in the crumbling glory of
19th- century Vienna, where the assimilated Herzl lived, with its
intellectuals, its cafés and its barely concealed anti-Semitism.
Ernestine Loeffler (played by Sandra Sadeh), heroine of Herzl's
book Altneuland, is co-opted to teach the young Israeli to
behave as a Viennese gentleman – to bow, to waltz and to turn
a deaf ear to anti-Jewish sentiment.
Another screen opens on a shtetl Jew, who talks about Herzl realizing
a dream, and a coiffed, bejewelled, assimilated Jewish matron who
condemns him for sabotaging the efforts of the Jews to fit in. "What?"
says Michaeli. "There were Jews who opposed a state?"
From this first of the museum's four rooms, visitors, who have essentially
become part of the exhibition, are urged into the next room –
a recreation of the Basel auditorium where the First Zionist Congress
was held in 1897. Taking seats alongside delegates (life-sized fibreglass
figures lit from within), they experience the excitement and, later,
the angry and raucous debates of early Zionism.
Actor Michaeli is still being schooled in his role. He appears onscreen
behind the dais. Levinson and Loeffler, on a separate screen, continually
correct his delivery of Herzl's famous speeches. Before our eyes,
Michaeli is gaining stature, growing more "Herzlian,"
turning into the symbol of a people. Herzl's relentless journeying
to garner international support for a Jewish state is traced on
screen, both on maps and in recreated meetings between Michaeli
and actors representing Germany's kaiser, Turkey's sultan and Britain's
Lord Chamberlain, interspersed with original footage.
The display's third room recreates Herzl's study and contains the
museum's only genuine museum pieces – Herzl's desk, chairs,
papers, coffee cups and paintings. It shows an ill and exhausted
Herzl, whose efforts appear to have failed – and who dies broken
in spirit at age 44. Archival footage shows his burial in Vienna
100 years ago and his re-interment in Jerusalem in 1949, a short
distance from the museum building.
As Herzl fades, Michaeli comes into his own. He puts on a beard
for the first time, emulates Herzl's dress, mannerisms and speech
and expresses awe at stepping into Herzl's shoes. He leads us to
the museum's fourth and final room – an auditorium. An old-fashioned
theatre curtain rises and the play for which Michaeli has been preparing
is finally screened.
"Am I in my dream or someone else's?" questions Michaeli/Herzl.
"I built the foundations, but you have built on top of them."
He compares Herzl's utopian vision with today's reality. Behind
him onscreen flash Israel's many achievements – its culture
and art, high-tech, agricultural and medical technology, education
and industry, tourism and sport, democratic government and international
standing. But then come visuals of Israel's social strife, poverty,
warfare and terror.
"In his lifetime, Herzl failed in almost all he set out to
do," said Orit Shaham-Gover, designer and chief curator of
the museum, who scripted its story with film producer Udi Armoni.
"After his death, however, much of his vision was realized.
In this section, visitors see what he accurately anticipated (Israel's
economic and agricultural success, for example – and the gathering
of exiles) and what he failed to foresee (the Holocaust and 100
years of violent Arab opposition to a Jewish state)."
"The emphasis is on the fact that Israel is a work in progress,"
said David Breakstone, head of the Department for Zionist Activities
of the World Zionist Organization. "While the museum is about
the historical Herzl, it also brings him into the present and future,
showing his ambition to build not only a Jewish refuge but also
an exemplary society. This final room is designed to make visitors
think where Israel meets Herzl's vision, where it supersedes it
and where it falls short. The message is that Israel can be proud
of its achievements but is committed to doing far more."
While Herzl's story is told in 60 minutes, there are questions deliberately
planted throughout the exhibit for later consideration. An education
centre, located beneath the museum's four display rooms, will run
programs for adults and children, from Israel and abroad, that examine
issues such as the contemporary challenges of Zionism, anti-Semitism,
the meaning of a Jewish state and the relationship between Israel
and the Jewish people.
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