Instytut Historii Sztuki <Posen> [Hrsg.]: Artium Quaestiones (18.2007)

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ARTUR KAMCZYCKI

of Israel meant also the exile of shekinah, sińce it shares the fate of the Jewish
community even in its impurity. Shekinah clothes the whole people of Israel and
inspires individuals..." The letter s/un, marked high on the blank wali, means also
sAma (Hebr. Astea). This is the title of a short, three-line, but most important He-
brew prayer - a confession of monotheism.
On the outer walls of the museum, in the maże of marks and cuts, one can also
find other Hebrew and Aramaic letters. The letter lines on the building are also
Windows which, as "windowdetters," can be read both from the inside and the out-
side. Some of them, reversed from the outside, can be read properly from the inside,
and the other way round (e.g., sAm). The way in which the letters have been placed
on the building's walls - as marks and cuts — refers to the method of writing the
Decalogue on the tables. Moses received the Torah on Sinai by cutting the text on
the tables by the divine tire from heaven, which madę transparent signs on stone,
and when he broke the tables, on seeing the golden całf, the letters flew up to heaven
(Detd 9, 17). The disordered letters on the walls of the Berlin museum bring to mind
that scattered alphabet. Both the "disorder" of the letter marks on the smooth walls
of the tin structure and the combination of Hebrew and Aramaic letters (the latter
derived from the former) refer to the creation of the alphabet. The creation of a new
alphabet must be understood in the context of the tragedy of Jews as creation of a
new language, new post-Holocaust speech. A symbolic creation of the world anew
means a return to the times after the Flood, when the world had to come back to life
from its remains: once again, it had to learn to speak, write, and communicate.
Another inspiration in that respect was an unfinished opera by Arnold Schbnberg,
Afoses and Aaron. It closes with the words of Moses, "O word, you word," which,
according to Libeskind, "can be understood as a text, sińce the missing word comes
elear to the listeners - it is Moses cali for the word, pronounced without singing.
I tried to hnish that opera by architecture."
The zigzag, elongated form of the museum has been cut through by a straight
linę, thirteen feet wide and interrupted along the main axis of the building. It
creates an empty space running from the ground level up to the roof and carefully
separated from the other parts of the structure. The exposition has been organized
around that empty space. Also many exhibition halls and corridors have been delibe-
rately left empty. The idea of the museum's architecture symbolically corresponds in
this respect to the space of the tempie and the cabbalistic vision of the world. Since
the destruction of the Tempie in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., i.e. at the beginning of the
Diaspora, in a sense it has been substituted for by the synagogue, but its architectur-
al and symbolic structure persists in the Jewish tradition until today, revealed in
many aspects of the synagogue architecture. Since the times of the second tempie,
the deepest and the highest, as well as central, place in the tempie has been an
empty space. Joseph Flavius wrote about the "multitude of courts" as empty, closed
spaces around the tempie. Also Maimonides describes the spaces around the tempie
as four parallel walls among which three empty spaces have been demarcated. The
eopAy space of the Holocaust Museum. understood as a parallel of the mystic, trans-
cendent axis of sanctaa?, saaHoram (AodesA Aa-AodesArm) refers to the substantial
meaning of the Jerusalem Tempie built for Jehovah. However, it should be noted