One rarely celebrates a divorce, but the impending separation of Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum and the former Jewish Museum San Francisco seems to be an exception.
Amid growing rancor between the two Magnes branches, and crippling budget cuts, the merger makes less and less sense every day.
If the specter of separate capital campaigns drove the museums together, that is no longer a pressing issue. Outgoing Magnes Chairman Warren Hellman candidly told the Bulletin that a West Bay structure is a decade away — at best.
Meanwhile, the mortgage of the Berkeley museum’s probable future home has already been paid off by generous philanthropists — but the big question is, what kind of Judah L. Magnes museum will it be?
Personnel cuts — justified or not — left the museum so woefully understaffed that archivist Aaron Kornblum has been working shifts on the front desk. In protest of the cuts, 17 docents resigned.
Comments from Magnes CEO Connie Wolf that the docents’ exodus was unimportant because no one really goes to the museum anyway did not inspire great confidence in her or in the museum.
At this point, however, it is time for the warring parties to sheathe their swords. The separation must be handled in a civil manner. The museums cooperated in the days before the merger, and the Jewish community would be ill-served if they ceased to do so in the future.
It is also time for the (mostly) East Bay critics who clamored so arduously to sever the merger to put their time and money where their mouths are. The Berkeley museum’s proponents must convince the community at large that the museum is the treasure they claim it to be, ill-deserving of a fate collecting dust along with its untended, prized collection.