Mamaloshn – How Yiddish Made a Home in Melbourne
The Jewish Museum of Australia presents new major exhibition Mameloshn – How Yiddish Made a home in Melbourne – opening Thursday April 3 2011
This April, the Jewish Museum of Australia will tell one of the most significant stories of the Melbourne Jewish Community through its new major temporary exhibition, Mameloshn – How Yiddish Made a Home in Melbourne.
Curated by Anna Epstein in direct consultation with a dynamic Yiddish advisory committee including renowned Melbourne writer Arnold Zable, historian and academic Andrew Markus and Klezmer musician Freydi Mrocki, Mameloshn documents the journey of diverse Eastern European Jews who came to Melbourne, the end of the Earth, to recreate their lives in the years leading up to and immediately following World War Two. A story of migration and integration, it is at once a universal and distinct social history tale exhibited in a new and dynamic way.
With over fifty percent of the exhibition from the Museum’s Collection, most to have never been exhibited before, Mameloshn will showcase the complexities and richness, the controversy, the theatre, music and politics of the Melbourne Yiddish community, who established themselves in Carlton and St. Kilda with a language, a culture and a cuisine to be woven into the fabric of what is now multicultural Melbourne.
Rebecca Forgasz, Museum Director says “Australia has absorbed and integrated immigrant communities from all over the world. We enjoy a rich multicultural life flavoured by the customs and traditions of hundreds of nationalities and religions in Victoria alone. This is one of those stories, but it is our story. It documents the establishment of a huge proportion of the Melbourne Jewish community – How they got here, how they established themselves and how they struggled and thrived as a minority community.”
