Chronicle: In Good Faith

One Saturday last winter, Jill and Richard Wagner traveled from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to visit the newly opened National Museum of American Jewish History. But when the couple entered the lobby, a staff member informed them that they couldn’t buy an admission ticket, at least not in the museum. She directed them instead to get their tickets at a kiosk in the Independence Visitor Center, one block away. The couple resignedly made the round-trip in the cold, frustrated by the museum’s effort to accommodate Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, which falls on Saturdays.

Only in its second week in a new, five-story building on Independence Mall—home to the Liberty Bell, the National Constitution Center, Independence Hall and other landmarks honoring the American experience—this museum had established a policy that was still news to a slow but steady stream of visitors who discovered that the ticket counter in the lobby would not be furnishing them tickets on Shabbat.

Housed since 1976 in a Philadelphia synagogue and confined to that congregation’s guidelines, the museum had previously been closed on Saturdays. But when plans to move to its own building came to fruition last November as the result of major expansion and fundraising, the board was faced with a question: Could the museum be open on Shabbat, a day traditionally devoted to rest and prayer, the cessation of business transactions and a ban on electricity?

“There was a tension between the desire to embrace a policy that would maintain the tradition in a serious way, versus remaining open on Saturday and thereby helping fulfill our mission of educating as many people as possible about the American Jewish experience,” says the museum’s director, Michael Rosenzweig. “It’s an interesting tension because it mirrors the tension American Jews face living in this country. We live with a kind of virtually unlimited freedom, including the freedom to abandon our heritage. It’s a little bit difficult to navigate.”

Only 13 percent of American Jews identify as Orthodox, the most observant denomination, and 26 percent as part of the somewhat less observant Conservative branch of Judaism, according to the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America. With far more potential Jewish visitors who identify as even less observant—Reform, Reconstructionist or unaffiliated—and with no singular governing body over American Jewish practices, non-religious Jewish institutions are wrestling with the issue of whether they have an obligation to follow religious law.

“It’s a financial-slash-community relations issue,” says historian Jack Wertheimer, author of A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America. “Many of these institutions depend upon a base of support and they’ve got to attend to the sensibilities of the subgroups within. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the different players within a Jewish community would wish to have a say.”

A museum’s affiliation with a religious organization, or lack thereof, is what usually determines the Shabbat policy. “It’s very much a community decision. Sometimes it depends on what the institutional base for the museum is,” says Joanne Kauvar, the executive director of the Council of American Jewish Museums. “And it’s quite possible that in the same community with a large enough Jewish population, you may have a variety of Jewish cultural institutions, which have a variety of policies.”

In New York City, for instance, the Jewish Museum is open on Shabbat while the Museum of Jewish Heritage is closed. The Center for Jewish History is also closed. That West Village hub houses galleries and libraries belonging to five partner institutions, one of which is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, an organization representing Yiddishkeit—the secular world of Jewish culture. But the center’s largest gallery belongs to another partner institution, the Yeshiva University Museum. Because the university observes the Sabbath, the entire center including YIVO is closed on Saturdays. “We are as observant as our most observant partner,” explains Ben Cutter, the center’s senior manager for special projects.

In Chicago, where there is only one Jewish museum, the Sabbath brings closed doors. Exhibitions are housed in the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, an observant college that is shuttered on Saturdays.

Like the museum in Philadelphia, the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art in Tulsa, Okla., had been based in a synagogue since its founding in 1966, and was therefore closed on Saturdays. When it moved in 2004, it had a chance to change the policy. But without donations covering an extra day of operation, museum officials haven’t yet found a way to bear the cost. And there was another concern. The museum is one of only a few Jewish institutions in a largely evangelical Christian area. “My view is people might consider us desecrating our own Sabbath,” says Arthur Feldman, the museum’s director. “We would have to begin a marketing campaign on how this could be done, explaining, without proselytizing, what rules within Judaism would allow us to be open on Saturdays.”

Offering free admission is one of many contortions that Jewish museums around the country undertake in order to open on the day of rest. The Jewish Museum of Florida was one of the first Jewish museums to open on Saturdays when Marcia Jo Zerivitz founded it in 1995. A member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, Zerivitz asked her colleagues what they thought about having Saturday hours. “They said, ‘Oh no, you can’t be open on Saturday,’” she recalls. But as a new museum independent of religious affiliation, “I didn’t see any logic to not be open.” She consulted the local rabbinic association in Miami, made up of rabbis from both Orthodox and non-Orthodox denominations, which gave her the green light to open on Saturdays as long as admission was free.

With the help of donations underwriting that purpose, New York’s Jewish Museum opened on Saturdays in 2006. The museum, which is affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, follows Jewish law strictly; no money is exchanged on the premises, no electronic exhibits operate and a “Shabbat elevator” stops automatically on every floor. The seminary approved every concession, and Saturdays are now the museum’s most popular day.

For the board of Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, which is unaffiliated with any religious institution, there was concern that following Orthodox guidelines could alienate the 60 percent of American Jews who are less observant, as well as non-Jewish visitors. And closing a national museum for half of the weekend, when it was expected to draw a quarter of its visitors, could be financially crippling. After consulting with rabbis and Jewish leaders, the board chose to symbolically honor the Sabbath by opening on Saturdays, barring the exchange of cash in the building. Tickets could be purchased online or at the kiosk, and only credit cards could be used in the gift shop. Interactive electronic exhibits and films, however, could operate as if it were any other day.

“We don’t pretend that this complies with religious law at all,” says Rosenzweig, the museum’s director. “If we were strictly observing the restrictions of Shabbat, we just wouldn’t be open.”

“Of course I’m disappointed. I think any Orthodox Jew is disappointed,” says Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, the executive vice president, emeritus, of the Orthodox Union. “The Orthodox perspective is that we prefer that all Jewish institutions, especially ones that are transdenominational like museums, be closed on Shabbat. But if they are open, we hope they’d be user-friendly and cooperate with Sabbath-observant Jews, Orthodox or otherwise, so that they can attend. Walking around, looking at exhibits, listening to lectures are not forbidden on the Sabbath.”

Indeed, many Jews find museum-going to be an appropriate Shabbat activity. Cultural critic Judith Shulvetiz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, takes her children to museums on Saturdays as long as she can get in without handling money by flashing a membership card. “I don’t have time in my daily life to consume culture, so that’s something I think of that I’m very happy to do on Shabbat,” says Shulevitz, who identifies as Conservative. “In my vision of the Sabbath, going to a museum is just fabulous.”

Rabbi Jacob Staub, director of the Jewish Spiritual Direction Program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pa., was pleased with the Philadelphia museum’s decision to open on Saturdays. Staub is at work on a forthcoming book, The Reconstructionist Guide to Shabbat, which has a section on nontraditional Shabbat observance. (Disclosure: Staub is my family’s rabbi.) “I’m heartened that the policy acknowledges and implicitly endorses the reality that Jews observe Shabbat in a multiplicity of ways,” he says.

At the museum, one exhibit discusses conflicting opinions on religious observance from within the Reform movement. A low-tech plastic wheel spins to show quotes from three 19th-century theologians from the movement: Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise and David Einhorn. Reading the quotes on a recent Saturday, one visitor jumped when a European-sounding voice suddenly came from a speaker above her head. It was an actor playing Wise. “The Sabbath is the sign of the covenant between God and Israel made at Mt. Sinai,” boomed the voice. “There is danger of the Sabbath being forgotten.”