A Museum of Life
The Jewish presence in Poland is almost 1000 years old. And at one point became home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.. It has been estimated that 50% of all Jews lived at one point in Poland. Poland or Polin in Hebrew means “here you should rest’ Before the Nazis genocide of Jews, Poland was for the most part a relatively safe heaven for the Jews.
The Museum was inspired by a great museum innovator, Jeshayahu Weinberg, a founding director among others the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. who in 1996 created a team to plan the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Many people all over the world who were very enthusiastic about this idea started founding ‘Committees to Support the Museum”. Soon after the Warsaw City Council donated 13,000 square meters of land within the former pre-war Jewish Quarter and the Museum stared to become a reality. Hundreds of researchers in several countries stared to work on documentation of the visual images illustrating the history of Polish Jews. The collection grows daily and consists tens of thousand items to date. The visual story of the life of Poland’s Jews is being prepared in cooperation with the London-based Event Communications, Europe’s leading designers of multimedia museum displays.
Rainer Mahlamaki, a Finnish author of the winning design for the Museum building submitted in March o f 2006 his final design to the city of Warsaw. The groundbreaking of the museum will take place on June 26th, 2007 and the museum is scheduled to open its doors in 2009.
Museum expects minimum quarter million visitors a year. Jews from all over the world will be able to visit the towns and shtetls of their ancestors as well as find out about their European heritage. Most of the visitors however will constitute by Polish citizens for whom museum will be a great center of tolerance and better understanding of their own culture.
The $58 million museum is financed mainly by the Polish Government, City of Warsaw and American and European private donors. Museum‘s Director is Jerzy Halbersztadt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was nominated as a Head of the Exhibition Planning Team. The Jewish Historical Institute appointed Museum’s Council under the leadership of Marian Turski. Jerzy Halbersztadt, a prominent Polish historian, believes that the museum is needed in order to ensure that the conversation and education about Polish and Jewish past will continue. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Professor of Judaic Studies at NYU, believes that the Polish history is incomplete without of its Jews. ‘Where better to tell the story of a millennium of Jewish presence in Polish land’ she says ‘then in Poland? Such museum is long overdue, but it comes at the right time.’
