The Vicious Circle

The exhibition showcases five stories in a striking circular installation, featuring original artefacts, texts and five large video screens. Step inside the circle to explore:

• 5 Jewish communities (Berlin, Baghdad, Kielce in Poland, Aden in Yemen, and Southern Israel).
• 5 beautiful artefacts illustrating the love, creativity and peaceful coexistence of these communities.
• 5 pogroms that led to the ethnic cleansing of these communities (in 1938, 1941, 1946, 1947, and 2023).
• 5 false prophets whose false promise of liberation incited these pogroms. 

Five stunning original objects tell the story of harmonious co-existence between Jewish communities and their Christian or Muslim co-citizens across Europe and the Middle East. They celebrate the cross-cultural creativity that can only come from mutual acceptance - from klezmer music to religious objects depicting shared values. 

Five large screens feature video collages about everyday life and love in each community, underscored by an instrumental musical version of ‘Oseh Shalom’, a universal Jewish prayer for peace. 

All five stories come together in one violent punctuation moment, illustrating the brutal fate each community suffered and the catastrophic drop in population which ensued — in most cases to (near) zero. 

The accompanying wall panels invite the visitor to study the chief inciter of each pogrom. Displaying original quotations from key texts and speeches, visitor will spot recurrent motifs that feed anti-Jewish killing sprees. All inciters deploy conspiracy theories to convince people that they are victims of Jewish ‘power’. And all call for performative violence as an act of liberation and spiritual redemption, to be celebrated with joy.

The exhibition ends with a video call to action:

This exhibition invites critical thinking. It asks: can we break this Vicious Circle? It urges visitors to go beyond the usual call for empathy by considering the Jewish victims — but to examine the perpetrators, their false prophecies, and the doom-loop they create for their own societies. Maybe what it takes, is for us to realise what we ALL have to lose… or perhaps what we all have to gain? History shows that a philosophy of ‘live, let live and co-create’ has produced enormously successful communities — from Berlin to Baghdad; from Aden to Aleppo — which have arguably never recovered from the pogroms that killed and expelled their Jewish populations. 80 years after the single worst anti-Jewish atrocity the world has ever seen, the conspiracy theories which caused it are back with a vengeance. This time, they have circulated at internet speeds which Goebbels could only have dreamt of. It is surely an insult to the memory of the 6 million, and to the survivors who have educated and inspired us, if we fail to break the vicious circle of anti-Jewish racism in its 21st Century form. Are these new perpetrators, or simply old ideas viciously recycled?