Jewish museum director sacked for Derry speech

The Director of Berlin's Jewish Museum has been sacked for criticising the Berlin city government at a conference in Derry earlier this month. Mr Amnon Barzel told a meeting of the International Association of Art Critics that the official attitude towards the Jewish Museum was so bad that the leader of Berlin's Jewish community compared it to Hitler's museum policy in the 1930s.

Mr Barzel was already given notice to quit as director of the museum in June following a dispute over the future of the museum. The latest letter of dismissal accuses him of defaming Berlin's politicians in Derry and bringing the museum into disrepute before an international audience.

"In Germany, you can sack people a number of times. It's a bit like a fairground lottery - you keep trying in the hope that you get lucky once," Mr Barzel's lawyer, Mr Wolfgang Lueder, told The Irish Times yesterday.

The row centres on conflicting concepts for the use of a new building near the former Berlin Wall which will house the Jewish Museum from 1999. Designed by the US architect, Mr Daniel Libeskind, the DM120 million building is in the shape of a bolt of lightning.

Mr Barzel, with the support of the Jewish community, wants the museum to be an independent institution reflecting the Jewish view of the world and of the history of Berlin. But the city government insists that the museum should be a department of the larger Berlin Museum devoted to the history of the city.

The leader of Berlin's Jewish community, Mr Andreas Nachama, sent a letter of protest to the prime minister of the eastern state of Brandenburg at the weekend after a village refused to accept 60 Jewish immigrants from the former soviet union.

"Anti-Semitism, which we thought had been defeated in 1945, has now reached a new high point. After 12 years of Nazi terror and decades of tyranny by the East German communists, it appears that the rebirth of Jewish life in Brandenburg is not possible," Mr Nachama said.

The villagers, who want to convert the mansion into an old people's home, deny that they are motivated by anti-Semitism. But their mayor claimed that such an influx of foreigners into the 400strong community would be too much to bear.