Check out the latest Jewish Heritage Europe Newsletter

Painted ceiling, replica of Gwozdziec wooden synagogue, in the POLIN museum.

The Jewish Heritage Europe newsletter this month has links to posts and pictures from Poland, Italy, Germany, Romania, Serbia -- and more!

This month's theme is "Dedication! Celebration!"

Links include links to photo galleries on the new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the Old and New Jewish cemeteries in Venice, Italy.

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My article on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews - cover story in Hadassah Magazine

The "Three Hares" motif in the painted ceiling of the Gwozdziec synagogue repica. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This post also appears on my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal

I’m delighted to have the cover story in the current Hadassah Magazine — an article about the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

I’ve followed the development of this museum, which opened its doors in April but minus its core exhibition, since the mid-1990s, when the idea of such a museum was first broached, and I’ve written about it on various occasions — including a JTA piece when the building opened.

Since the core exhibition won’t be open to the public until probably next fall, I focused my Hadassah piece on the broader context of the museum: how it fits into Poland's developing museum landscape; how it fits within the context of the search for national and individual identity.

The museum is not an isolated institution, nor is its mission totally unique. Though its scope and prominence far surpass other initiatives, it is representative of a new crop of Jewish exhibits and venues that focus not on static displays of Judaica and not on the Shoah but on the living Jewish world that was destroyed. 

This trend has been exemplified most recently by the new permanent installation “Shoah,” curated by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and opened in the Block 27 barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. This, like “Letters to Afar,” employs a variety of prewar film clips showing Jews carrying out all sorts of activities. Its soundtrack merges spritely music with sounds of celebrations, street life and snippets of conversation. 

Nearby, in Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz camp was built, a small museum at the Auschwitz Jewish Center, located in the town’s one surviving synagogue, presents prewar Jewish life in a town that before the Holocaust had a predominantly Jewish population. “No one knows that there were Jews here before the war—they only know the death camp,” noted Shlomi Shaked, a volunteer at the center. His mother, born in Oswiecim in 1949 and a resident there until her family immigrated to Israel in 1962, is featured in the exhibit. “I think people who visit Auschwitz should come here first to see the life before they visit the camp,” he said. 

A new Jewish museum housed in a restored synagogue in the small town of Chmielnik, north of Krakow, also showcases prewar Jewish life: After all, noted local historian Piotr Krawczyk, before the Holocaust, 80 percent of Chmielnik’s population was Jewish. That means, “local history is Jewish history,” he said.
One of the key roles of the Warsaw museum will be to support local initiatives. “Until our museum was established there were no proper models in Poland for what to do,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. “We can open a new perspective on how Jewish history and heritage can be presented to the public.”

Read the full article here

Museum of the History of Polish Jews dedicated at last

I view the spectacular painted Gwozdziec ceiling

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This post also appears in my En Route blog for the LA Jewish Journal.

I've been in Warsaw for events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- and  filed a story for JTA on the "soft" opening of the long-awaited, long-delayed Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Though I am not in love with the exterior of the buildng -- except for its location opposite the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Memorial -- I was very impressed with the interior. In particular the way the big glass gash of an entrance frames the memorial when you look out from inside.

For me, who has followed the development of the museum for nearly 20 years, it was a rather emotional (and emotionally satisfying) moment to finally be inside -- and to connect and reconnect with so many people I've encountered here in Poland since the 1980s.

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) -- Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city's Museum of the History of Polish Jews. 

Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opens to the public this week amid a month of high-profile, state-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 

“It’s incredible, incredible, incredible how things have changed,” Sliwinski told JTA. “I remember commemorations of the ghetto uprising under communism when only a few people showed up. How good it was that we were optimistic.”

Sliwinski organized Jewish cemetery cleanups and other pro-Jewish initiatives under communism, when Jewish practice and culture were suppressed by the regime. 

In 1995, then-Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor, appointed him post-Communist Poland’s first official ambassador to the Jewish Diaspora, part of the state’s unprecedented outreach policy. 

On Sunday, both Sliwinski, now 73, and Bartoszewski, 91, joined hundreds of local Jews and other VIPs as Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, unveiled a mezuzah at the museum’s main entrance.

Read the full story

In writing this piece, it was fascinating to go back and see what I -- and others -- had written back in the 1990s.

New York Times 1996 piece on opposition/ambivalence regarding the museum project
My 1996 story on Sliwinski as Poland's ambassador to the Jewish Diaspora

Poland - art and memory. Page of History Foundation

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have to admit that I had never heard of the Page of History Foundation and its interesting project linking art and commemoration  until I read a recent  article in the Jewish Chronicle about an art work it just unveiled in the town of Gora Kalwaria (Yiddish Ger) south of Warsaw -- a sculpture depicting Adam and Eve by the Polish artist Bronislaw Krzysztof.

The year was 1990, Communism had just collapsed in Poland and John Pomian, a Pole living in the UK, was on a return visit to his country of origin with a Jewish friend, Casimir Stamirski.

As the pair passed through the town of Mogielnica, Mr Pomian, who served in the RAF during the war, was invited by Mr Stamirski to stop off in the town to see they could find any traces of the Jewish community that once thrived there.

There was nothing to be found. As they returned to their car, they spotted a large boulder bearing the names of locals who died during the Second World War. There were no Jewish names among them.

On his return to London, Mr Pomian decided something had to be done to commemorate the presence of Jews in Poland, who, he says, "have shared our history for centuries". In 1991, Mr Pomian set up the Page of History Foundation, which aimed to install works of art in towns where Jews once lived as gestures of remembrance "from Poles towards Polish Jews".

 Read full article HERE

The foundation's web site describes its purpose as commemorating the Jewish presence in Poland "through funding works of art authored by recognized artists and making these available to a wider public."

It states that the Foundation's four basic principles are:

--  this is to be a Polish gesture towards the Jews, who shared our history for centuries and made their contribution to the development of Polish culture and commercial life.

--  this is to be a completely private undertaking and we will not be seeking any money from public funds.

--  we will commemorate Polish Jews through works of art of the highest and lasting aesthetic merit.

-- the inspiration for these works will be the Old Testament, which is the sacred scripture of both Christians and Jews.

Besides in Gora Kalwaria, works of art have been put up since 1995 in Warsaw, Szydlow, Lodz and Zamosc.