The Jewish museum was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It combined a museum with architectural art, resulting in essentially an interactive piece of art or museum, depending on who you ask. To give you an example of the artistic design of the building, I’m told it has no right angles, though I don’t have this on good authority. What I can say is that I don’t think the floors were rarely flat nor the ceilings rarely parallel to it. The walls were inconsistently slanted , and its exhibitions at odd angles. It was very effectively disorienting. The architect also built several exhibits into the museum that served mostly to set a somber mood: the Tower of Exile and the Memory void.

The Tower of exile not just an exhibit, but also a large portion of the building. The “Tower” is essentially a cement-sealed void that runs up and down the full height of the multi-tiered building. There is nothing in this enormous chamber except the museum visitors and the thick, unpainted cement walls. Thus there is no electricity in the room, and though the door into the chamber is glass, the glass is so dark as to allow no light in. The only source of light is natural, and built into the building’s basic design. That source of light is an opening in the cement to the outside world. It’s at about 10 or 11 stories up, and though you can’t get a close look at it, I suspect it’s a very small opening. The light given to the people in the chamber is what has reflected down, from wall to wall, down through the height of the building. I could not decide whether standing in that room was more depressing or relaxing, but above all it was memorable.

The Memory Void errs even stronger on an unsettling note. The architect of the building intended it to be the brother of the Tower of Exile, a cement tunnel running vertically through a section of the building. An artist has expanded upon this with his exhibit titled “Fallen Leaves”.

To understand this exhibit, imagine a thick steel disc, about the size of a soup bowl. Now imagine a smiling face welded into the disc. It resembles a two-dimensional human head. Now imagine a pile of them, a pool of them covering the ground all over. Thousands of these metal disc-faces in a variety of sizes and facial expressions covered the ground across the Memory Void. It is the artists intent that you feel free, and even encouraged to walk on them. There is no other way to traverse the room.

“Sure” you say “I could walk on a sea of metal faces. That wouldn’t be unnerving.” But what you may not have taken into account is the sounds that metal discs make scraping against each other, or the acoustics of a cement tunnel. You can hear the shrill echoes of every step you take long after you’ve taken it.

It was easily the most memorable museum I have visited thus far. It had a surprising dedication to Jewish culture and History. I’d always known somewhere in the back of my mind that the Jewish had been persecuted throughout history, but I had never actually put that into a historical context outside of the Holocaust. I could have spent far longer there than the 3 hours I did, but it was getting late in the afternoon and I wanted lunch.

So I rushed my way through the last floor and made my way to a local café. There, I was conned into a buffet which had little that I would describe as edible on it. Ah well. It was food.