Los Corassones Avlan

Centro Primo Levi and the Rhodes Jewish Historical Foundation in partnership with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Kehila Kedosha Janina and the American Sephardi Federation present:

Los Corassones Avlan. Conversations on Jewish Life on the Island of Rhodes. A multimedia pop-up installation in the West Village.

Visiting hours: Monday through Thursday: 12 noon to 1:30 and 5 pm to 9 pm. Sunday: 1 pm to 5 pm. Saturday night open when events take place. Check our calendar!

Los Corassones Avlan is dedicated to centuries of Jewish life in Rhodes. It expands the ideas of the Rome Lab, a 2017 installation created by Centro Primo Levi and the Jewish Museum of Rome, which challenged traditional museum narratives by playing on the tension between personal memory, official history and ongoing research debates.

Conceived as an old funhouse, made up of objects, projection and rotating soundscapes, the new installation will juxtapose ambiguities, uncertainties and discontinuities onto linear representations of the past. It will invite the public to imagine a world that was profoundly different from ours and to question stereotypes and prepackaged depictions of other cultures that increasingly restrict the way in which we experience the present.

The project will be installed in a 19th century carriage house on West 4th street that shares the courtyard with the historic night bar named after Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s novel Vol de Nuit. The bar was once a popular eatery and cabaret called The Samovar, which the photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals seized in one of her legendary images of lower Manhattan and where Al Jolson is believed to have performed in his early career.

During the month of November, the carriage house, which is usually closed, will become home to the exhibition and to roundtables, readings, talks, film and music presentations, where the public will experience the little-known story and traditions of the “Rodeslis,” the Jewish community living on the island of Rhodes for an unknown number of centuries until its destruction in 1944.

Opening hours: Sunday through Thursday from 12 noon to 1:30 pm and from 5 pm to 9 pm. Friday from 1 pm to 4 pm and Saturday from 5 pm to 10:00 pm. Bourekas, sweets, coffee & tea will be served.

Centro Primo Levi’s public program is made possible in part through the generous support of the Viterbi family. The Rhodes installation was made possible through the generous support of Peter and Mary Kalikow and Bruce Slovin.