Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum officially re-opens with treasures from the exquisite to the ordin

Rummage through an attic and you never know what might turn up.

In the case of Berkeley's Judah L. Magnes Museum, with its 40-year history of collecting objects from many corners of the Jewish world, you'll stumble across treasures, curiosities and even some downright ordinary objects.

And that's both the charm and unexpectedly unifying force behind "Brought to Light," the exhibit marking the museum's anniversary and its official reopening after a troubled and contentious year.

Spanning a 600-year period and representing disparate communities from around the globe, the show offers a glimpse into the immense diversity of the Jewish people and a sense of a shared, often fragile existence.

Traipse through the compact gallery rooms and you'll pass through time and space of Jewish history and the little museum's own past as well.

There's an assortment of ancient and more recent Chanukah lamps, spice containers and ketubot from India, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

You'll quickly spot an almost-kitschy lamp from Syria dating to the 1920s. Part of the household furnishings of a Jewish couple who spent a year in pre-Israel Palestine, the copper fixture is fashioned in the shape of a camel and has multicolored beads dangling overhead.

Close by, there's a rather plain Torah ark with a poignant legacy. It was once part of a synagogue built, in defiance of a growing Nazi threat, by Cunard White Line on the Queen Mary ocean liner for its Jewish passengers.

There's a story within a story for each of the 130 artifacts, ceremonial objects, paintings, photos and other items on display. First there's the history and significance of the object itself; then there's the history and significance of how the object came into the collection of the Magnes, a homey institution on a quiet residential street just east of busy College Avenue.

With this show, the Magnes is in rebuilding mode, dusting itself off and showing its stuff publicly after the failed merger with the Jewish Museum San Francisco that effectively shuttered the Berkeley site for months.

Selected by museum co-founder Seymour Fromer, the objects are reminders to the community of the Magnes' standing as the country's third-largest repository of Judaica, its mission of preserving cultural objects and its own fragility.

The Magnes' future is still being mapped. While museum directors want to eventually build a new site in downtown Berkeley, the Russell Street location is home for now. And judging from a recent visit on a weekday afternoon, museum attendance remains sparse.

But "Brought to Light" is well worth seeing.

Guest curator Sheila Braufman describes the show as "a highly personal and vibrant sampler that loosely traces the entry of objects into the museum's care from the earliest days in the 1960s and takes us into the future with promised gifts."

A dramatic example of the museum's holdings consists of its collection of 300-year-old transcripts and other records of the Spanish Inquisition. Written out in elegant penmanship, the papers give a glimpse into the savage history of tribunals and the subsequent punishment meted out to residents on the island of Majorca who were accused of the heinous crime of Judaism.

The documents were purchased in the early 1930s by Rabbi Baruch Braunstein, a historian and rabbi conducting research for a doctoral dissertation. Wanting that collection to be publicly accessible, Braunstein's heirs made the documents available for the Magnes to purchase after his death in 1991.

Other holdings came to the Magnes almost serendipitously. Take, for instance, the pair of bold Zionist posters designed in 1936 by a Berliner named Fred Fredden Goldberg and intended to celebrate Jewish culture in a time and place where such expressions were increasingly risky.

A painter and illustrator, Goldberg left Berlin for Shanghai in 1938 and eventually settled in San Francisco, where he operated an art and frame shop.

Fromer stopped by the shop one day and spotted the posters, one of which portrays two muscular workers raising a beam. Fromer realized the historical significance of the artwork and brought the posters back to Berkeley for his growing museum.

Many of the museum's thousands of artifacts were collected as a form of "rescue" directly from dwindling Jewish communities in India and North Africa. Remaining Jews were packing up and leaving for Israel and other lands; often those immigrants were forced to leave their possessions behind.

"Brought to Light" includes some elaborate painted ketubot from the Jewish community of Cochin, India. One, dating from 1915, is an exquisite example of the Jewish marriage contract. It is spectacularly decorated with peacocks and floral patterns in shades of green, burgundy and gold.

In selecting the pieces for the show, Fromer tried to avoid objects that had been previously exhibited. At the same time, he turns to a first-century talmudic sage to illustrate the value of closely examining and re-examining what's already around us.

"Turn it and turn it again and study it, for everything is in it," goes the saying, which certainly applies to the value of a return visit to the Magnes.




"Brought to Light: The Storied Collections of the Judah L. Magnes Museum" runs though Apr. 25 at the museum, 2911 Russell St., Berkeley. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m Sundays through Thursdays. Admission: free with suggested donation. Information: (510) 549-6950; http://www.judahmagnesmuseum.org.