The Jewish Museum in London Returns With Two Rooms and a New Timeline
The Jewish Museum in London will reopen on June 17 in a temporary exhibition space at JW3, marking a cautious but significant return after its 2023 closure. The new venue, called Two Rooms, occupies a pair of gallery spaces inside the Jewish community center and cultural venue in Hampstead, North London. The museum, nearly a century old, closed amid financial and organizational challenges, but it now says it is working toward a permanent new home by 2030.
The reopening arrives under Charles Ross, who became chief executive last fall after serving as managing director of ART SG, the Singapore fair launched in 2023. In the museum’s Annual Report, Ross was praised for his “expertise in sales, sponsorship, marketing, team leadership and budgetary management.” He told Ocula that “never has there been, probably, a more important moment for a Jewish museum.”
Two inaugural exhibitions will anchor the relaunch. One will focus on the Jewish family behind J. Lyons & Co, the London tea shop and bakery chain founded by Joseph Lyons and his brothers-in-law, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein. At its height, the company operated about 200 cafes and expanded into other food service businesses, making it a familiar part of British urban life for generations. The exhibition is the first in a planned series examining the German-Jewish Lyons family’s influence on food and manufacturing in Britain.
The second exhibition, “Tree of Life: Stories from Jewish Museum London’s Collection,” turns to the museum’s own holdings. Drawing from a collection of 35,000 objects, it traces Jewish life in Britain through Judaica, photographs, artifacts, and related material. The earliest object on view dates to the 1650s; the most recent is from 2023, the year the museum closed.
Both exhibitions remain on view through October 18. For a museum in transition, the choice is telling: rather than wait for a future building, it is using the present to reassert the depth of Jewish history in Britain and the urgency of preserving it.
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