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Smiling, understanding and patient, Seymour Fromer ambled through the museum he’s been building for the past four decades, explaining the remarkable touchstones to history he’s selected for the show that will mark the reopening of a treasured Berkeley institution. 

The Judah L. Magnes Museum reopens its doors to the public Sunday afternoon, celebrating its return to the city following a brief, unsuccessful and now-dissolved merger with the Jewish Museum of San Francisco. 

Free ice cream and other treats await visitors to the 2 p.m. festivities at the museum at 2911 Russell St. Mayor Tom Bates will extend an official welcome on behalf of the city.  

Now curator emeritus, Fromer praised the museum staff for “bringing together all the strands from before the merger. It was a big task.” 

As a man who has devoted his life to education, Fromer is proud of the institution he created with his wife, Rebecca.  

“A museum is different from a gallery. If we acquire a painting, an artifact, a book, we don’t simply display it, but we research it to learn its meaning and how it fits into history. It’s a big task, and we’ve tried to stick to it. . .to build a matrix for Jewish studies that will fit into the curricula of schools like the University, like Stanford, and the other colleges and universities in the region that are offering courses in Jewish traditions and Middle Eastern studies.” 

But Fromer’s connection to the museum’s remarkable collection is clearly more than mere intellectual satisfaction, revealed in the quiet passion of his voice and the gleam in his eye as he describes some of the haunting, evocative works he has chosen for this exhibit. 

One Plexiglas case houses papers of Koppel S. Pinson, the Queens College scholar chosen by the Allies at the end of World War II to catalog and attempt to restore to owners the artworks and libraries seized by the minions of Hitler and Himmler as the Holocaust rolled over the face of Europe. 

It was Pinson who suggested to the victors that the seized works should be handed over to the library of Hebrew University in Palestine—the school founded by Judah L. Magnes, the San Francisco-born, Oakland High School graduate who became the first rabbi born west of the Mississippi. 

As rabbi of New York’s Temple Emanu-El, Magnes took unpopular stands. A pacifist, he opposed America’s entry into the First World War, and as an ardent Zionist he was also a powerful proponent of Arab/Jewish reconciliation and established a Department of Arabic Studies at Hebrew University. 

One of the most haunting pieces in Fromer’s exhibit is a massive canvas by Polish painter Mauryey Minkowski, depicting the battered, bandaged victims of the 1906 pogrom in Bialystok, then a part of the Russian Empire. As police stood watching, members of the Black Hundreds—vicious anti-Semites backed by the Ohkrana, the Tsar’s secret police—beat, raped and murdered. The gaunt, stunned expressions on the faces of Minkowski’s subjects offer eloquent mute testimony of what had gone before. 

Another display case bears witness to a still-earlier and more methodical onslaught, the Spanish Inquisition. 

In elegant, formal swirls inked on creamy well-made paper, a scribe captured the words of the prosecutors and witnesses in the Majorcan trials of Alonso Lopez and Ana Ayala. A 17-year-old covert to Catholicism, Lopez was convicted as a heretic in 1672 and burned at the stake. Two decades later, the judges were kinder to Anguilo, sentencing her to 200 lashes, a fine, and exile. 

One of the museum’s most unique artifacts testifies to a compassionate response to persecution. 

When the Nazis banned Jews from fleeing the Reich aboard the ships of Germany’s main carrier, the Jews of Great Britain appealed to the British Cunard line, which was then building the Queen Mary. Cunard executives then gave orders for the liner’s designers to include a synagogue in the grand vessel, where Jews sailing to freedom could worship in glorious freedom. When the ship was decommissioned in 1976 and installed as a tourist attraction in Long Beach, the ark was acquired by a succession of small temples in Southern California before winding up in the Magnes. 

Designed by Cecil Jacob Epril, the ark is a classic example of Art Deco craftsmanship in burls and inlays with a fanciful grillwork and a crowning Star of David. 

On the secular side, Fromer selected letters and a drawing by that most famous of all modern Jews, Albert Einstein. The small sketch had posed something of a mystery until a UC physicist recognized it as an illustration of the wonderfully abstruse concept of length contraction that is a corollary of the Theory of Relativity. 

No Jewish museum could be complete without some examples of that most famous and poignantly whimsical of artists, Marc Chagall. The Magnes recently acquired a collection of rare Chagalliana from the estate of a retired San Francisco city planner, including lithographs and books. Fromer picked a few choice items for the exhibit. 

To illustrate the rich Jewish theatrical tradition, Fromer picked the colorful gouache sketches of Issachar Ryback’s costume designs for a Purim play, illustrating character from the Book of Ruth, and Sir Jacob Epstein’s magnificent, earthy color rendering of his design for the curtained backdrop of a Duke of York Theatre 1930s production of a ballet based on the life of King David. 

A wide selection of artifacts reflects another vanished era, the days when the Jews of the Mideast lived in peace dispersed throughout the Islamic nations. 

Fromer’s face lights up as he walks a reporter over to a an extravagant copper lamp, featured a three-dimensional camel mounted on an armature that rises from a rectangular base etched in Arabic calligraphy. The lampshade of beaten, pierced copper is festooned with hanging glass beadwork and surmounted by the Magen David, the six-pointed star. 

Fromer’s obvious pride and delight offer eloquent testimony to the life he spent devoted to teaching at the Jewish Education Center in Oakland. 

“We felt we needed more material to educate people, and we realized there are a lot of people who move here from the east who have inherited things they don’t know what to do with,” he explained. One thing led to another, culminating in the launching of the museum in 1962. 

“Now we have rare books and manuscripts, graphics, arts and fine arts, Judaica—ceremonial art, prayer books, and so forth. We have the Western Jewish History Center, which has the foremost collection of Jewish artifacts from the eleven western states. We have complete runs of Jewish newspapers, and so much more. 

“Take the Inquisition papers. We’ve all heard of the Inquisition, but here you can see the actual documents, the minutes they kept recording the testimony given, the property seized, the punishments given. You come in first-hand touch with living history.” 

Fromer beams, his eyes sweeping across the collection he has so lovingly assembled. 

Born in New York City 81 years ago, Fromer came West in 1953, moving to Los Angeles to work for the American Association for Jewish Education after finishing his Master’s from Columbia University’s Teaching College. He met and married Rebecca Camhi that same year. 

Four years later, the couple headed north to Oakland, where Fromer served as Director of the Jewish Education Council of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. The museum opened as a single room in 1962—the year he found a high school graduation photo of Rabbi Magnes in an Oakland book store—and it hasn’t stopped growing since. 

Among the museum’s most unusual acquisitions are seven cemeteries in the Sierra Nevada. “They’re from the days of the Gold Rush and we wanted to preserve them,” Fromer explains, pointing to a display of black and white photos of tombstones carved with Yiddish characters. “The stone carvers were brought over from Europe.”  

The Magnes moved its exhibits to 2911 Russell St. in Berkeley in 1966, its present location. In 1997, the Magnes purchased a new building on Allston Way in the downtown Arts District, where the museum eventually plans to move. 

Fromer stepped down as director in 1998, though he remains an active figure. “It’s important to keep busy,” he says, smiling. 

The 140 pieces he selected for the reopening exhibit represent only a minuscule fraction of the museum’s 30,000 paintings, drawings, photographs, letters, books, sculptures, furnishings, and other items which comprise the third largest collection of Judaica in the country.  

The reopening exhibit was designed by Ted Cohen and is curated by Sheila Braufman. 

The Judah L. Magnes Museum is opening from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays. Admission is free. For more information, call 549-6950 or see http://magnes.org.