Out and proud: inside Sydney Jewish Museum’s planned redevelopment

“Right now, you could walk straight past the Sydney Jewish Museum on Darlinghurst Road and not know it’s there,” says Kevin Sumption, the museum’s chief executive.

No-one will be able to make that mistake when the SJM’s redevelopment is complete in two years’ time. The frontage will be doubled, with a completely redesigned facade to herald a new Centre of Contemporary Jewish Life as the centrepiece of the project.

 “The museum will be out and proud,” Sumption observes with characteristic understatement.

Over the next two years the SJM will be reimagined and enlarged from a modest Holocaust-based institution into a multi-focussed centre for Jewish life and culture. The Centre of Contemporary Jewish Life will be built in the adjacent Maccabean Hall building, whose current occupants - including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Communal Appeal and the Australian Jewish Historical Society – will move out and find new premises.

The new centre will shine a spotlight on Jewish contributions to art, commerce, culture, food and film in an Australian context. It will feature a permanent exhibition, Jewish Contributions: Standing on the shoulders of giants, and a dynamic schedule of exhibitions from other leading Jewish museums around the world, which is a feature of how other prominent museums and galleries operate.

The educational resources and scope of the existing Holocaust museum will be strengthened, with expanded research facilities and increased access to archives in the US and Israel, and new family research services. This will be in addition to its use of interactive technology – Hologram interviews with six survivors – a program designed to address the passing of living witnesses, who have formed the bulk of the museum’s volunteers since it opened in 1992.