Michaela Hajkova can't stop thinking about how to "wake people up, wake them from the illusion that Jewish means past tense."
In her mid-30s with huge blue eyes, long black hair and a model-like physique, the Czech curator's outer beauty complements a steely determination to attract Jewish artists to Prague. In 2002, she founded Jewish Presence in Contemporary Art, a series at the Prague Jewish Museum.
"People were used to something different from the museum, something traditional. But why shouldn't we also let the Jewish present and all the questioning that goes with it have a voice in Prague?" she asks.
The projects Hajkova has promoted over the years - like Czech artist Michael Bielicky's virtual portal allowing computer-generated interaction with museum-goers in Jerusalem - are a far cry from the traditional Judaica of the museum's core collection.
Andy Markowitz, an American living in Prague, finds such projects refreshing.
He was particularly inspired by "Layered Histories," created by Cynthia Beth-Rubin and Robert Gluck, which tells the story of a 13th-century illuminated Torah through mood music and shifting images. Viewers control the images and sound through touch.
"I'm generally not the type to get excited by the phrase 'interactive multimedia installation,' but the Marseilles Bible piece moved me in ways I absolutely did not expect," says Markowitz. "It was like being immersed, sound and vision, in a forgotten byway of the Jewish narrative; this is using contemporary media to illuminate the past in the best possible way."
Travis Jeppesen, a Prague-based art critic, has attended every exhibition curated by Hajkova over the last three years. "She is light-years ahead of everyone else in the Czech art scene," he says. "Her thinking is rooted in an international rather than a local approach, which is extremely important for the Jewish Museum if it" does not want "to be a relic of a supposedly dead European culture," he says.
Most of the contemporary art Hajkova brings to Prague is displayed in the museum's Robert Guttman Gallery. In contrast to the museum's traditional visitors, who are in large part foreign, the gallery draws a hip Czech crowd with an interest in Jewish themes, modern art or both.
The gallery contrasts with the ancient synagogues and twisting gravestones that have long been the museum's selling point.
"The museum is now 100 years old and has to move on with the times," says Petr Brod, a veteran Czech broadcaster, historian and Jewish culture buff.
