Das Israelitische Krankenhaus - The Jewish Hospital | Merav Shinn Ben-Alon

The Jewish Hospital in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland), was inaugurated in 1903. It was a modernist project aimed to facilitate public access to the most advanced medical care of its time for Jews and Gentiles alike. Treatment was gratis, in brightly lit spaces with shiny stainless steel equipment, expenses borne by the Breslau Jewish community, the third largest in Germany.

The Hospital’s “Golden Age” ended abruptly when the Nazis requisitioned it. The exterior sustained damage during World War II, but the interior remained nearly intact. In 1970, it reopened as the Polish Railways Workers’ Hospital - an historical irony. It ceased to operate in 2015, and is currently under construction as a luxury condominium.

The term “modernism” refers to a mode of thinking, an historical era and cultural movement encompassing contradictions, high hopes, and bitter disappointments. Progressive movements employed modernism to propose alternatives to hierarchical systems of the past, while totalitarian regimes used the term to erase histories and establish repressive mechanisms. The discourse is especially complex in the context of twentieth century German history.

“The Jewish Hospital” is a site-specific installation relating trauma, based on visual research of two photographic corpora documenting the site: the first, from the inauguration, the second documenting the closure. Shinn Ben-Alon deconstructs and reassembles the images through cutting and rephotographing. The interventions of varied collage techniques illuminate the fault lines.

The exhibition spaces in Liebling Haus – the beautiful home built for Toni and Max Liebling who fled the Nazis – are transformed into a site of discourse on disruption – the “caesura.” Freud (a refugee in his old age) made the term pivotal to his theory on transition from the prenatal state - the “pleasure principle” - to infancy. He determined that the continuity is greater than one may expect from the drama of the caesura. In his 1975 lecture, British psychologist Wilfrid Bion revisited Freud’s hypothesis. Bion considered the caesura as that which simultaneously separates and connects states of being.

“The Jewish Hospital” is infused with the grief of the past, but the hopes that it embodied are illuminated anew. This art exhibition expresses continuity.

Curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
Art direction: Shira Levy Benyemini, CEO, Liebling Haus-The White City Center
Production: Avigail Paytan
Mounting: Gili Natan, Tom Love, Liav Levi
Design: Michal Shapira