In this photo, the Belaciano family, originally from Lebanon, captures their arrival at the port quay of Rio de Janeiro in 1957 on camera
Jews in Brazil: immigration and diversity
Given the importance of expanding museum collections that represent the different facettes of the Brazilian historical experience, the project “Jews in Brazil: immigration and diversity” aims to develop a critical look at the collection of the National Historical Museum (MHN, Museu Histórico Nacional) from the point of view of the history of Jews in Brazil and build a collection of three-dimensional objects, valuing the material culture of the immigration experience and construction processes of Jewish communities in Brazil. These communities, due to their ethnic diversity and origin, mark culturally and historically the Brazilian society, being an important element of “brasilinidade” (Brazilianness) little represented in the current MHN collection.
The National Historical Museum was created in 1922 as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Brazilian Independence. Its first collections indicated a way of reading history that praised military, religious, and national state achievements and those of its government agents. In the 1980s, with transformations in the museum and historiographical fields, collection selection criteria were rethought. In this sense, an acquisition policy was formalized in 1992, enabling the expansion and diversification of the collection with everyday items, such as: household appliances, toys, clothing, among others.
Recently, the institution has been seeking to emphasize the processes and practices of building collections, mobilizing different sectors of the organized civil community and providing greater representation of some social segments in the MHN collection. Among these actions, we highlight the practice of conversation circles with social movements in order to learn about the memories they value and encourage the donation of objects that correspond to them.
Social mobilization initiatives are characterized as processes of musealization of objects, which can be defined as the creation of the “museum object”, “extraction operation, physical and conceptual, of a thing from its natural or cultural environment, granting it a museum status – that is, transforming it into a piece in the museum”. In the case of a history museum, such as the MHN, musealizing an object consists of adding to it the status of a historical object, a source of information and evidence of a certain cultural and historical situation.