Why You Need To Experience This Seriously Moving Exhibition At The Sydney Jewish Museum

While we’re spoiled with incredible exhibitions in Sydney, every now and then one comes along that hits straight to the heart and ensures you’ll talk about it—and the effect it had on you—for years to come. Yep, we've found an exhibition that does just that, and it hopes to evoke the desire to talk about it for generations to come, not just years. 

Enter: Reverberations, A Future For Memory. 

This is the Sydney Jewish Museum’s incredibly moving Holocaust survivor testimony exhibition, housed in its brand-new, technology-rich gallery space in Darlinghurst. 

Having actively worked with Holocaust survivors for the last 30 years, the museum is committed to keeping the stories of this remarkable group of people alive, so that future generations can experience and learn from them. 

Reverberations is the culmination of this work, and it’s set to be the museum’s biggest and most emotive exhibition yet.

The exhibition is experienced in two parts. To use the analogy we heard while we were there: there’s a set menu portion and an à la carte portion. The immersive testimony gallery is sort of like a set menu. You sit down and experience a cinematic screening of Holocaust survivors talking about their lives, experiences and perspectives on important philosophical questions. These powerful stories are designed to be consumed slowly and intently and to provide important insights that we can apply to our contemporary world. You won’t know what incredible stories you’ll be served up until you hear them, but you’ll be very glad that you did. 

The second part of the exhibition—the “à la carte” portion—is the bit that makes Reverberations like no other exhibit you’ve ever seen before. Here, you get to pick the topic, and immerse yourself in a meaningful yarn with a digitised version of three Sydney-based survivors, including the late Eddie Jaku, the author of The Happiest Man on Earth. 

You can ask these three digital Holocaust survivors a question about virtually anything: whether that’s their experiences before, during or after the Holocaust, their likes, dislikes, perspectives, or what their messages are to future generations. Watch as this life-like technology responds to your question in real-time, as though you’re talking to the real person.

The answers you hear back are the real survivor’s actual words, taken from many hours of interview footage recorded by the museum and its partners at the USC Shoah Foundation. It’s made possible using a combination of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and language processing technologies, which work behind the scenes to find the parts of the interview where the survivor has answered your question.

This is the clip you’ll watch back, in real-time. 

Pretty amazing, right?

When it comes to learning about history, nothing compares to having an intimate conversation with and learning from the people who were there to experience it.  Reverberations is not trying to recreate or replace the experience of hearing testimony directly from survivors. It’s about creating new ways to continue offering this experience in the future, so these incredible stories can live on. Trust us, you don’t want to miss out on Reverberations. 

Keen to check it out? Sydney Jewish Museum is open Monday to Friday and Sundays from 10am. Tickets start at $18 for adults. Book here and immerse yourself in an important part of history. 

Editor’s note: this article was produced in partnership with Sydney Jewish Museum. Thank you for supporting the partners who make Urban List possible. To read our editorial policy, click here.

Images: Sydney Jewish Museum Collection.