Aneesa Riffat was a rarity amongst curators – equally at home with experts and visitors, with primary school children and Holocaust survivors, with teachers and conservationists.
I first met Aneesa in 2007 when she was newly appointed to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Laxton. While I was nominally her diploma mentor, it was she who taught me so much about the Holocaust and the extraordinary work the centre was doing to interpret and witness the appalling Nazi impact on the 20th century.
She is probably the only curator in the last hundred years to have created a museum, in 2010, from a special memorial centre, and then to have turned that into a nationally styled museum in 2015.
The force of her personality was evident in the way she engaged the world in her work. While enabling survivors to tell their stories and to bear witness to the most appalling events in living history, she combined an ultimate respect for their testimony with a warmth and humility that carried all before her.
She knew the survivor stories intimately, collected their artefacts where offered to the museum and enabled thousands of learners of all ages to engage with this grim but essential history.
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She had no illusions as to how challenging this engagement might prove, yet through her 16 years in Laxton, she retained a clarity about the museum's purpose in her own words: "To end oppression and genocide".
She was a practising Muslim and regarded faith as essential to compassion and to the understanding of people and peoples. She was co-chair of the board of trustees of the Open Centre in Derby, which promotes understanding between different communities by celebrating and raising awareness of their faith and cultural heritage.
On one occasion she was challenged about the appropriateness of being a Muslim in a Holocaust Museum. Her response was direct: "It is because I am a Muslim that I work here. What kind of a world will we create and will we have learned to be if any race or creed is excluded from understanding and learning about genocide?"
Starting her professional life as a teaching assistant in Derby, Aneesa soon moved to managing museum collections in the East Midlands, while delivering learning sessions to schools and adults.
She was entirely persuasive in her passion for emancipation, learning and transformation in Laxton. I became a trustee of the new museum, and many others came to support its activities in ways that few of us could have envisaged before we met her.
She learned Arabic and Hebrew and travelled to Israel, Palestine and Rwanda – the last as collections manager when the Kigali Genocide Memorial was set up in 2011.
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I have no doubt that she applied the same dedication and energy when she moved to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley two years ago.
She was a powerful asset to our sector and a huge achiever in the drive and ingenuity she brought to her work. Many struggle to believe that her life and contribution has now ended as she did so much to make others' lives, survival and testimony meaningful.
It is a tragedy that her own life was cut short in her mid-forties when she had so much still to offer the world in learning, compassion and energy while transforming communities and their stories.
Nick Winterbotham is a heritage, arts and learning consultant
Tribute from the National Museum of Computing
Aneesa was our first professional curator at the National Museum of Computing, joining us in the leadership role of senior curator and collections manager two years ago. In her sadly short time with the museum, she professionalised our collections management policies, procedures and documentation, and trained our volunteer curators in implementing professional curatorial practices.
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Working closely with the trustees and museum director, Aneesa made a major contribution to our recently submitted application for Arts Council England Accreditation, taking responsibility for the curatorial aspects of the application.
We are immensely grateful for all she achieved for our museum, and all of us miss her as a valued friend and colleague.
Andrew Herbert is the chairman of trustees at the National Museum of Computing
Though we never met in person we wrote to each other over the years and via the museum detox network forums and I felt her comradeship and her deep commitment to ethical work and solidarity. Aneesa did important work with care and grace and we appreciate her and thank her.
Deeply saddened to learn of Aneesa’s passing. A friend and mentor, Aneesa provided me with so many opportunities when I was entering the museum sector, including inviting me to join her on a once in a lifetime trip to Rwanda. Aneesa was kind, passionate about her work, cared deeply about so many things and inspired me in many ways. I will forever be grateful for the time I shared with her, and she will be greatly be missed. Rest in peace, Aneesa.
Thanks for writing such an excellent post. I am deeply saddened to hear. I knew her from the start when she joined the Beth Shalom Holocaust Museum. She was a friend and a colleague. I have many wonderful and enriching memories of Anessa. She was everything that a person could hope to be. May she rest in peace and her memory live on and inspire many more besides. Life has many privileges – knowing Aneesa was one of the very best.
This obituary is a important reminder that, for many, the muslim and jewish communities are not in opposition.
Though I write this as someone from neither religious background, my family heritage takes me to a place where Muslims, Hindus and Christians live peacefully side by side, despite what we hear about nationalist politics, division and the ultimate risk of oppressing ‘the other’. At heart, deep down, we all know that understanding is the answer. Understanding what we might label as ‘other’, and recognising that our similarities and our humanity are greater than our differences. We all want our future generations to be safe and have even more than basic needs met.
Surely as we approach the milestone that marks the first quarter of the 21 century this should be one of our greatest priorities. The museum community does much promote equality and share knowledge. I feel this obituary has a place outside this forum though. Was there a tribute to this pioneering woman in The Guardian or on Radio 4? If not, there should have been.
I met Aneesa at the National Holocaust Centre some 10 years or so ago when she invited my elderly mother to the centre as an honoured guest. In March 1939, at 10 years of age, my mum was on the Kindertransport from Berlin to England. She had never been to the centre before, but after a little persuasion, she agreed. Aneesa made my Mum, Dad and me very welcome. She showed us around the centre and developed a wonderful rapport with my mum, who had never before shared her experiences of life in Berlin as a Jewish child in the 1930’s. Over the next few months and years, Aneesa visited my mum many times to chat and to interview her about her recollections. With Aneesa’s help and encouragement my mum loaned, to the Museum, several of her treasured personal items that she carried on her Kindertransport journey. Her Star of David pendant has become quite an iconic artefact, amongst the many others from other survivors. None of that would have happened were it not for Aneesa’s very particular approach, and her clear passionate interest in people. My mum and I were so shocked to hear of Aneesa’s untimely passing; she had so much yet to achieve. A large part of her legacy to the world are the testimonies that she helped holocaust survivors produce, for the education and benefit of future generations.