We must find a cure for our awful ‘edifice complex’

Recently, David Herman weighed in with an excellent piece entitled What's wrong with our museums and how to fix it, (JC, Feb 5). He made the point that the success of Jewish museums around the world depends largely upon their location. They need to be at the centre of great cities where they can attract sufficient visitor footfall.

A new 'map'

Instead of spreading Jewish centres of culturual interest throughout London, Dr Kadish suggest a new strategy that capitalises on the strong bonds the community has in the East End. Both Sandys Row and Bevis Marks synagogues carry great historical importance (the latter even used to have a fine restaurant). By moving the Jewish Museum and Ben Uri closer to that East/Central London location, Dr Kadish believes there will be greater desire from tourists and British Jews to pay a visit.

Back in 1996, I wrote the same thing: you only have to think of Amsterdam, Venice and Prague. But I took my argument beyond Herman's and stand by it today: the key to a successful Jewish museum is not only its situation in a central location but also its location inside or besides a building of outstanding architectural and historical interest: in short, a landmark, historic synagogue. Moreover, I agree with him that tourists need a cluster of historic sites in order to be lured into a ''must-see'' neighbourhood.

Conceptually, Manchester got it right way ahead of the capital. Over 100 years after its opening in 1874, in 1984 the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue became the home of the Manchester Jewish Museum (MJM). MJM is situated in the middle of the Mancunian equivalent of the Jewish East End: Cheetham. Every summer, the museum runs regular heritage trails around the other surviving sites of Jewish interest in the neighbourhood, all of which, it must be said, are now Sites At Risk.

Manchester's Jewish Museum is a model conservation project. After three attempts, last year it finally landed a big HLF capital development grant potentially worth over £3 million. This is well deserved. MJM has attracted 20,000 visitors annually, the majority being young people on school trips. The restored synagogue itself has been and will remain its chief exhibit.

It was not as if the opportunity did not exist back in the 1990s to move London's Jewish museum to a historic synagogue. On the contrary, at that time, several large Victorian synagogues, including the likes of New West End (now Grade I) and Hampstead (now Grade II*), were facing closure due to perceived ''redundancy'', while East London Synagogue (Grade II) in Stepney Green had already been sold off. That building was shockingly vandalised, arsoned and flooded before finally turning in a profit for the lucky developers who eventually acquired it and converted it into flats in 1997. Indeed, each of the 25 flats carved out of the main building was marketed for over £260,000 - roughly the same sum for which the United Synagogue had sold the whole site 10 years earlier, in 1987.

East London was the reason that I first became engaged in Jewish heritage conservation all those years ago. My first letter to the JC on the subject of heritage (Dec 18, 1987) was headed: Time for some imagination in the East End. When I suggested the Jewish Museum could easily relocate to East London Synagogue, so convenient for the then developing ''Old Jewish East End'' heritage trails that now dominate the cultural tourism market, the response was: How could we move to such an insalubrious, dangerous and drug-infested neighbourhood as the East End. The museum moved to Camden instead!

It has taken more than a generation for the tide of opinion to come around to my way of thinking. Camden did not develop into the Jewish ''hub'' that some had predicted in the 1990s. On the contrary, since then, JFS has suburbanised further out to Kenton. Moreover, an extravagant (£50 million) new-build Jewish community centre has gone up in the Finchley Road.

This is essentially an expression of the ''edifice complex'' prevalent in Anglo-Jewry. JW3 has yet to prove its long-term worth, even as a facility for the privileged residents of London NW3. At least there are a lot more Jews populating Hampstead, Golders Green, St John's Wood and Swiss Cottage than are to be found in Camden. Camden has a meaningful connection with Anglo-Irish but not with Anglo-Jewish history.

Let's think strategically before we embark on any more ill-considered colossally expensive building projects. So what should we do about the Jewish Museum? Forget Marble Arch or Great Portland Street, both of which, I understand, have been mooted as possible venues for a relocation. Western Marble Arch is actually a Grade II Listed Building and is an interesting example of 1960s synagogue architecture, adorned with stained glass by David Hillman and Nehemiah Azaz. But it is not going to be a major tourist attraction in any of our lifetimes. Apart from the fact that its president has set on record in this newspaper that he ''sees no reason'' why we ''should close our doors, merge with another synagogue or sell our building''.

He mistakenly assumes, of course, that a Jewish museum is incompatible with a thriving synagogue. In fact, there need not be any conflict between functioning as a ''working'' synagogue and hosting a museum on site. A number of precedents abroad may be cited, including Venice (again) and Florence.

The unhealthy obsession with dead Jews has run its course. Prime Minister David Cameron's pledge of £50 million last year to build a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in central London is generous but misdirected. Britain already has an excellent National Holocaust Centre and Museum. It was built from scratch by dedicated ''righteous gentiles'' James and Stephen Smith in the village of Laxton outside Nottingham in 1995. Holocaust Memorial Day, as even one of its ''architects'', the late Professor David Cesarani, conceded, has become a focus for ethnicities competing for public space to out-do one another in genocides.

Thus, a modest Holocaust gallery that tells the stories of refugees and survivors who made it to London or Manchester, a display that sets their experiences within the local context, is all that is needed inside well-funded Jewish museums housed in historic synagogues.

An outstanding historic synagogue is enough to get the punters in. There is no need to ''rebrand'' our Jewish museums, certainly not as Holocaust memorials, nor as ''Centres of Tolerance'', ''Museums of Immigration'' or ''Museums of Identity''. Jews should be proud of their identity and Jewish museums should exude self-confidence. They should be staffed both by Jewishly educated Jews and informed gentiles.

If not, we will end up with watered-down Jewish museums stuffed with Chanucah bushes, pitted in competition against other institutions that do it so much better, like the Imperial War Museum. Britain's senior ethnic minority will lose out to newer-comers on the block, especially to the Muslims. After all, their numbers are at least 10 times greater than ours.

Just how many Jewish museums do we actually need? I will answer my own rhetorical question in a moment. Remember that setting up a museum is one thing; capital development is another. Since the 1990s, public funding has been generous in large part thanks to the National Lottery. However, the economic climate is now very bleak. The heritage sector has suffered 40 per cent cuts over the past couple of years. We Jews have always prided ourselves on our self-help philanthropy. So the demeaning urge to ''get as much as we can'' out of the state needs to be resisted more than ever before.

In any case, once government or the lottery have made the capital outlay, the perpetual challenge of finding revenue funding for the boring stuff like staff salaries and paying the bills remains. Public funders, private foundations and individual high-worth philanthropists usually want to fund a ''Project'', not the people (myself included) who have to do the donkey-work.

So back to the question of how many Jewish museums do we actually need? How many are viable and financially sustainable? My answer is: three fully fledged national Jewish museums, combined with smaller ''Heritage Centre'' type interpretative displays in historic synagogues around the country.

Manchester provides the model. Glasgow has the potential to create The Jewish Museum of Scotland centred on the historic Garnethill Synagogue (1879). The core already exists in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre that has occupied the basement since 1987. Rising Scottish nationalism provides the climate, while the synagogue enjoys an excellent location around the corner from Charles Rennie Mackintosh's world famous Glasgow School of Art.

It is London that needs the biggest rethink. Here is the essence of my proposal, an amalgam in a new permutation of ideas that have been floated over the years but have come to nothing.

The Jewish Museum should move to where it belongs: to the edge of the City of London, the historic heartland of modern Anglo-Jewry. When tourists in search of Jewish heritage visit the capital, they make for two destinations: Britain's oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks, and the Jewish Museum. But these two sites are at opposite ends of town.

I propose the Jewish Museum split its site between Bevis Marks and Sandys Row Synagogue, five minutes' walk away in Bishopsgate. Bevis Marks has a capacious attic that could be used to display the Jewish Museum's high art Judaica. Sandys Row has a large, empty basement, perfect for social history displays about life in the East End.

In this way, both ''ends'' of British Jewry, the East End and the West End, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, would be represented, physically embodied in these two contrasting historic synagogues.

Moreover, the Dutch Synagogue at Sandys Row started life in the 18th century as a French Protestant church and thus speaks of the migration and refugee experience within its very fabric. Visitors would easily be able to walk from one building to the other and, if they have the time, take in a heritage trail of the East End. They could stop for a meal in the Bevis Marks Restaurant (if it could be got going again). They could even catch a minyan if they were so inclined.

Adaptation of under-used or disused historic buildings to house museums is the best option to keep them alive. Using two historic synagogues as the core of the new Jewish Museum wouldn't cost ''the tens of millions'' Herman fears.

Maybe there is a creative Jewish developer out there in the City who gets it: that heritage can make a profit, if it is tied to tourism and regeneration. And while he is about it (and he probably is a he), he may like to buy or donate an extra property or two in the vicinity to provide the museum "campus" with some extra space. Room could be found for a Ben Uri gallery of Jewish and contemporary art. Embedding Ben Uri within the new Jewish Museum while retaining its separate identity would be most appropriate, given the Zionist aspirations of the founders of the original Art Society 100 years ago.

Badly needed storage space for artefacts could be provided. So, too, could a subsidised office hub (there seems to be an over-supply of these in anonymous office blocks in North West London) specifically for Jewish cultural institutions (including ourselves) that have much to gain materially and psychologically by sharing facilities with other like-minded people in these difficult times.

At Jewish Heritage we await your call, to commission the feasibility study for the new, improved Jewish Museum of London fit for the rest of the 21st century and beyond.

Dr Sharman Kadish is Founder-Director of Jewish Heritage UK. The new edition of her guidebook 'Jewish Heritage in Britain and Ireland' was published by Historic England last year. www.jewish-heritage-uk.org