In
Poland, a Museum to Show Poland's Jewish
History
by
Vanessa Gera,
AP Writer
June
24, 2007.
WARSAW -- An
empty lawn in the heart of what was once the Warsaw
Ghetto will soon become a place not only of mourning, but
of celebrating the Jewish life that flourished in Poland
before it was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Jewish
leaders and President Lech Kaczynski will break ground
Tuesday for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It
sits on a highly charged site --next to the city's
monument to the Jews who resisted the Nazis during the
1943 ghetto uprising, and just down the street from the
rail siding where many were deported to their
deaths.
The
multimedia museum will have exhibits on the Holocaust,
but organizers say its primary purpose is to remember the
vibrant Jewish community that flourished in Poland for a
thousand years despite varying degrees of anti-Semitism
and discrimination.
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A
computer generated image of an exhibition
showing a typical 19th century Jewish street in
a Polish town, to be shown inside the planned
Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The
groundbreaking ceremony for the multimedia
museum will take place in Warsaw on June 26,
2007 by Jewish leaders and President Lech
Kaczynski and when it opens in two years, Polish
and Jewish leaders hope the museum will become a
cultural landmark. (AP Photo/HO/Museum of
the History of Polish Jews)
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"This will
not be another Holocaust museum," said Marian Turski, one
of the originators of the idea for the museum, and
president of the Association of the Jewish Historical
Institute in Poland. "It will be a museum of
life."
The
building, an austere glass and limestone structure
designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaki and
Ilmari Lahdelma, will feature a jagged chasm that cuts
through the entire museum, and an interior of undulating
forms that alludes to Moses' parting of the Red Sea while
fleeing slavery in Egypt &emdash; symbolic of Jewish
survival in the face of catastrophe.
When it
opens in two years, Polish and Jewish leaders hope it
will become a cultural landmark in a league with
Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, the United States' Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington and Berlin's Jewish Museum
and Holocaust Memorial.
To many,
such a center is long overdue in a country that had
Europe's largest Jewish community until World War II,
numbering about 3.3 million, or 10 percent of the total
population. The society produced a vibrant
Yiddish-speaking culture and a string of great
scientists, writers and thinkers.
Poland is
also where Nazi Germany built Auschwitz, Treblinka and
the other extermination camps where 6 million Jews --half
of them Polish-- were killed.
Yet Jewish
history and suffering were taboo themes for decades under
communist rule, which collapsed in 1989. Only about
30,000 Jews live in Poland today.
Museum
creators say the $65 million-project will chronicle the
fate of Jews in their Eastern European homeland with
interactive and multimedia displays and video --not just
traditional artifacts and exhibits-- in order to give
visitors a deeper sense of what was lost.
In one
room, a typical bustling Jewish street of the 1920s will
be conjured with images projected onto white building
facades typical of the era.
"It's
closer in many ways to theater than it is to a didactic
display based on a collection," said Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an American specialist in East
European Jewish culture and museum development with New
York University and leader of the team developing the
exhibition.
Eight
galleries will narrate a story starting in the 10th
century when Ibrahim ibn Jakub, a Jewish merchant from
Arab Spain, first arrived in the Polish
kingdom.
It then
moves on to a section called "Paradisus Judaeorum," the
"paradise" Jews said they found in Poland in the 16th and
17th centuries after they were expelled from other
European lands, and on through the centuries that saw
Jewish society grow and flourish.
The
experts working on the displays say they are struggling
with the sensitive question of how to depict
Polish-Jewish relations in a land that was at different
times a place of tolerance for Jews, and of painful
anti-Semitism, discrimination and segregation.
The goal,
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, said is to show the complex
spectrum of relations. For instance, the museum will show
how Jews were granted a degree of autonomy to practice
their religion, do business and run their own
courts.
"Polish-Jewish
relations is usually understood as anti-Semitism, but the
subject is much broader and we want our visitors to
understand that range of interactions," she
said.
The final
rooms are devoted to the Holocaust, with a focus on the
suffering of the Warsaw ghetto. It finishes on a hopeful
note by showing a revival of Jewish life and new
tolerance of the young Polish democracy.
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