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“The idea of Tibet Museum is influenced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC,” Thubten Samphel told me. Samphel is the secretary of the Department of Information and International Relations of the Tibetan government-in-exile. “In 1984 the Tibetan government-in-exile conducted a survey,” he continued: “The survey estimated that 1.2 million Tibetans had died since 1959 through direct and indirect consequences of Chinese Occupation.” But a new generation of Tibetan exiles was growing up in India with no knowledge of their homeland, and no understanding of the perils and misery that the previous generation had faced. The Tibet Museum, then, was “our attempt to pass on to the new generation of Tibetans the suffering of their parents and grandparents” (interview with Thubten Samphel, 2007).

Though the Tibet Museum may claim as its model the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the impulse to make a Tibetan museum of trauma came when the Dalai Lama visited Yad Vashem in 1994. On seeing its displays, he too expressed the desire to have a similar museum that would relate the tragedy of Tibet. But, as the coordinator of the museum project recalls, the Tibetan leaders who hired him had said, “We want a Holocaust Museum. Not a Yad Vashem.” T. C. Tethong, the DIIR minister who initiated the project, felt that Yad Vashem was too strident in its message leaving the viewer with feelings of anger and despair. Instead, Tethong asked for a museum that would communicate the Tibetan tragedy, but “since the Tibetan story did not yet have an ending, he also wanted room for hope” (interview with Michael Ginguld, 2007).

On traveling to see a number of such trauma museums, Tethong and his small committee found a suitable model in the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. And despite the great disparities in the scale of the two museums, one is able to see how the Tibet Museum echoes the narrative form of the American institution, since both museums lead viewers through tales of terrible trauma but end on a note of hope. In fact, in the brief developed for the Tibet Museum, the affective spectrum was even calibrated by its planners, with 20 percent of the narrative set aside for joy, 60 percent for pain and angst, and 20 percent for hope for the future.

Although the DIIR may have chosen the Holocaust museum in Washington as its model, the highly skilled individuals who brought new curatorial models and a refined sense of design to this museum mostly came not from the United States but from Israel, and they impressed on it the lessons they had learned from the making of Yad Vashem. The key figure connecting these two circles was Michael Ginguld, an Israeli agronomist now resident in Dharamsala. As a student, Ginguld had been backpacking through Tibet when he witnessed the 1989 Lhasa Uprising and the harsh Chinese reprisals that followed. He was invited to Dharamsala to brief the Dalai Lama on what he had seen. This encounter led to a sustained involvement with the Tibetan exile community and, for much of the time since then, Ginguld has made Dharamsala his home and has led several development projects in the area.¹⁷

In about 1998 Ginguld was asked by the DIIR to help it set up a museum about the traumas faced by Tibet in the recent past. He plunged into the project, and was its coordinator over the next two years. Growing up in Israel, Ginguld was conversant with Israel’s many public memory projects, and had even worked in Yad Vashem as a volunteer. But now he prepared himself for this task by consulting “a stack of recent publications sent by a friend at the Smithsonian Institution … and became well-versed in issues of cultural property, access, accountability, and giving a voice to those who had been excluded in the past” (Harris 2012, 170). Ginguld set about identifying the site and the architect and developing a storyline and an aesthetic vision for the project.

As it was to be a museum dealing with somber memories, Ginguld felt it needed to be sparse and uncluttered with a limited chromatic range – so different from the vivid colors usually seen in Tibetan-themed interiors. To develop an appropriate form for the museum, he pulled together an international team of museum consultants and designers. Among them were Debby Hershman, a curator from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; Galit Gaon, a celebrated Israeli exhibition designer and now director of the Design Museum in Holon, Israel; Yael Amit, a young Israeli curator; Markus Strumpel, a German graphic designer; and Jordhen Chazotsang, a Tibetan-origin graphic designer from Toronto. The Israeli specialists in this group had all, in one way or another, been involved with the central memorial project in Israel, Yad Vashem, and they brought with them a deeply ingrained understanding of the methods and modes of Holocaust memorialization. Drawing on their prior experience and responding to the DIIR’s needs, this group should be credited with the sophisticated display that we see in the Tibet Museum. However, Ginguld and the team of experts saw themselves only as facilitators, and the voices leading the exhibit had to come from the within the Tibetan community. Thus the 11 “speakers” of the exhibition’s sections were also asked to shape its visual narrative and become its curators (interview with Ginguld, 2007).

The prominent role played by Israeli volunteers in the setting up of the Tibet Museum is not a coincidence. Although the two communities seem to be far removed from each other, there is a special connection between Tibetan and Jewish peoples on several levels. Indeed, of Tibetan Buddhism’s many Western adherents, a disproportionately large number are Jews, both inside and outside Israel. This phenomenon is large enough to constitute a community within a community, who have been dubbed JuBus or Jewish Buddhists by those in the know. To many intellectually curious and spiritually restless young Jews – most particularly Israeli Jews who live in a tense and aggressive environment – Buddhism offers an alternative to a Judaism that seems to them too conservative, too combative, or too spiritually depleted today. But to some Tibetans in exile, it is Judaism that holds an important key. In our conversation, Thubten Samphel had remarked: “The people we identify ourselves most closely with is the Jews – and this is regardless of the tragedy in the Middle East.” The long history of Jewish exile has obvious parallels for Tibetans, and the eventual establishment of Israel is an inspiration for their future. In the 1980s, after the breakdown of negotiations with the Chinese government, as the Dalai Lama confronted the likelihood of a very long exile for his community, he initiated a dialogue with Jewish religious authorities. One of the questions he asked them was: How do you keep your culture, your tradition, and your sense of self, alive in exile? How do you sustain a memory for 2000 years of diaspora?