News Brief

Barbara Streisand paid a private visit to the Jewish Museum Berlin. Accompanied by her husband, James Brolin, and two friends, Streisand visited the museum Sunday after it was closed for the night, according to a museum spokeswoman. She spent two hours in the permanent exhibit in a private tour given by program director Cilly Kugelmann. At one point Streisand played a tune she had composed on a grand piano that had been shipped to South Africa when its owner fled Nazi Germany in 1936. In addition to the permanent exhibit, which tells the story of nearly 2,000 years of Jewish life in Germany, Streisand visited the Garden of Exile. She tested several interactive exhibits, including one that asks what objects an 18th century religious woman would have taken on a journey. “She did that game and got quite a lot of them right,” museum spokeswoman Eva Soderman said. The Bluthner piano Streisand played had belonged to a German Jew, Helga Bassel, whose daughter, Tessa Uys, donated the piano to the museum after learning its history. Bassel took her own life in 1969.