history, memory, and yet another museum

I spent my second to last day in Moscow at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, in an outlying district right next door to the building where the Passover Seder was held.   The museum is very impressive and up-to-date--I noticed that one Vladimir Putin was among the contributors--and it certainly has a story to tell.   By and large it's honest, mentioning pogroms and Soviet antisemitism alongside the happier aspects of the Russian Jewish story.   It's a shorter story than you might think, since there weren't many Jews on Russian territory until the Polish Partitions, although they certainly made up for it afterwards.    And it isn't over yet: notwithstanding a vast emigration, there are still perhaps a million Jews in Russia, about half of them in Moscow, and others in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and so on.  It's even possible that they'll outlast the American Jewish community, although that may overstate things.  

It was interesting how the museum integrated Russian and Jewish life (the audience is mostly Russian and the English translations are somewhat incomplete).   There are predictable things like
shtetl life, the Holocaust, and so forth.   But there's also a whole section on Soviet Jewish war correspondents, like Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, who are largely unknown in the west, and recorded statements from war veterans, complete with a T-34 tank.   I suppose this is no different from the American Museum of Jewish History, which includes some unhappy themes but tries to make the case that "we're Americans too."   Another example, I suppose, that after a time there's no history but only memory, which is inevitably what you make of it.

The "tolerance" part was rather limited--mostly a film and some interactive iPad material--and seemed more or less modeled on the MOT (Museum of Tolerance) in Los Angeles, which has essentially the same goal.

Across the street from the museum was a Jewish grocery which, this being Passover, was selling primarily matza and a few related items.   Like everything else in Russia, the matza was big, coming in boxes twice the American size.   I bought one box, why I don't know, mostly for the cover with Cyrillic writing I suppose.   If I'm lucky I'll eat half of it before I go home.   At least it stopped snowing, a nice metaphor for a population that has seen tough times but somehow keeps on going.