New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature Story
Wife and business partner describes architect’s rise to height of fame
The stress of overseeing the most important architectural challenge of our time — properly and respectfully filling the physical and psychic hole left by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center — could not keep Daniel Libeskind from planning to speak at the JCC in West Orange on March 1.
What did keep him from speaking was a case of the
chicken pox, which put him in quarantine and his firm’s CEO and managing partner — and wife — Nina Libeskind, in front of a group of 150 fans of the architect and his work. In her talk — part of the Esther and Paul Rosenberg Insights Speaker Series at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus — Nina Libeskind was more than able to convey the thrill of their accomplishments and the despair born of the political pressures in the laborious process. She also imparted the highs of their separate Jewish journeys that brought them to the helm of one of the world’s most influential architectural firms.
Threads of those journeys came together in September 2001, she explained. Their daughter, Rachel, celebrated becoming a bat mitzva on Sept. 9. (The couple also has two grown sons, Lev and Noam.) Meanwhile, the Jewish Museum in Berlin — Daniel Libeskind’s most ambitious project to that point — held a private opening ceremony for dignitaries on Sept. 10. “It was a state occasion,” Nina Libeskind said, capping the 12-year struggle to build the museum. “[Daniel] felt that the burden of having seen the museum through was finally done. He was thrilled” and looking forward to the opening of its exhibits to the public the next day.
When the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center reached Germany, the museum was closed immediately. And from tragedy came the Libeskinds’ next major opportunity: After more than a year of tense competition, revisions, and decisions, Studio Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the site was chosen in what The New York Times called “the most extraordinary commission that any city has ever offered.”
Nina Libeskind spoke of the string of circumstances in September 2001 that made the WTC project so important to her husband.
Daniel’s parents, Dora and Nachman, survived the Holocaust, but 85 members of his immediate family did not. Born in Poland in 1946, he immigrated to Israel in 1957 and came to the United States in 1959. His parents, by then in their 50s, had a difficult time adjusting to their new life. The experience, said Nina Libeskind, “meant he got the values of never giving up…. He doesn’t walk away from anything.”
As a boy, Libeskind studied music in Israel on an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship but abandoned a possible virtuoso career as an accordionist to study architecture. He received his degree in 1970 from the Cooper Union in New York City and a postgraduate degree in history and theory of architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in England in 1972.
“I thought about my first sighting of the city skyline, as the boat I was on steamed into New York Harbor in 1959,” Daniel writes in his recent memoir, Breaking Ground. “I could see myself as a thirteen-year-old, in a crush of immigrants, staring up slack-jawed at the Statue of Liberty.”
The statue and what it represented would eventually inspire his Lower Manhattan “master plan,” including the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower that echoes the shape of Liberty’s torch. Nina explained how the plans reflect the myriad emotions of the 9/11 attack survivors as well as the hopes for the future.
She also spoke of the intense competition between various architectural firms vying for the opportunity to put their imprint on the emotional as well as physical landscape of New York City, and the politicians and developers whose short-sightedness, rivalries, and conflicting priorities have slowed and sometimes compromised implementation of the plan.
While she acknowledged the importance of including the families of the victims in the decision-making process, she said it was time to stop the arguing and begin rebuilding. “Give it up,” she said to those who are seeking to further stall the process. “These things are going up; it’s going to be built.”
Several of Daniel Libeskind’s designs reflect “the Jewish values we both hold so dear,” she said. Among his more than 25 international projects either completed or under construction are the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabruck, Germany; the Maurice Wohl Convention Centre at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. He also designed Memoria e Luce, a memorial for the victims of the 9/11 attack, in Padua, Italy; the forthcoming Jewish War Veterans Memorial in Toronto; and the soon-to-be-built Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
In response to an audience question, Nina Libeskind defended the effort being put into Holocaust and Jewish museums versus memorials that can make their statements without ongoing operational funding and upkeep.
“A memorial can do only one thing,” she said. “It’s a one-liner. A museum can do much more; it can teach.” She said the Jewish Museum in Berlin was built not just for Jews and survivors but for the education of the general public.
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