Once the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in the world, the Jewish community of Poland has now its Museum in Warsaw on the site of the former Jewish ghetto.
“We are reconstructing something that was completely destroyed,” says Dariusz Stola, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose core exhibition will be inaugurated Tuesday in the presence of Polish and Israeli presidents, Bronislaw Komorowski and Reuven Rivlin.
The name POLIN is a word play in that Poland in Hebrew is Polin, and the two syllables that make up the word are also the Hebrew for here to lodge. The logo which is a large capital P has been designed to look like the Hebrew letter Kuf which can stand for Kehilla (community in Hebrew) or Kedoshim (holy ones in Hebrew) to signify a community sacrificed on the altar of Nazi brutality.
The museum opened to the public in April 2013 and since then it welcomed around 400,000 visitors. It stands in what was the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII and faces the famed Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument sculpted by Natan Rapoport.
For many centuries, 80 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland.Up to 3.3 million Jews lived in the country in 1939, or around 10 percent of the entire Polish population. Only between 200,000 and 300,000 survived the Holocaust. Most emigrated, with the last wave taking place after the communist regime orchestrated an anti-Semitic campaign in 1968.
“The void is the biggest monument of Jewish Warsaw — empty places — and this museum will compensate for it. It will show the story,” says Stola.
While all the main Jewish museums in the world are centered around the Holocaust, the idea in Warsaw was to create a museum of life and to show .
The serenity of the glass facade of the building, which has already become an icon of modern architecture, is broken only by a wide, irregular opening that serves as the entrance and main hall.
According to its architects, Rainer Mahlamaeki and Ilmar Lahdelma, from Finland, the fracture symbolizes the Red Sea crossing of Jews fleeing Egypt.
The museum is considered as the most technologically advanced in Europe.
The core exhibition, featuring the 1,000 year history of Polish Jews, begins with a legend about the arrival of the first Jews in Poland in the Middle Ages.
The museum currently functions as a cultural and educational center with a rich cultural program, including temporary exhibitions, films, debates, workshops, performances, concerts, lectures and much more.
Formally founded in 2005 by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, the City of Warsaw and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Museum is an unique and unprecedented initiative, spanning many fields of research and drawing on the expertise of scholars and museum professionals from around the world.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is the first institution in Poland to be formed as a public-private partnership. Under its founding act, the City of Warsaw and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage jointly financed the construction of the building and the cost of its equipment, totaling over $60 million.
They also currently cover the majority of the Museum’s operating budget. The Museum’s third founder, the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, is responsible for the production of the Museum’s Core Exhibition, for which it has raised over $40 million from private and institutional donors from around the world.
There are no official estimates of today’s Jewish population in Poland. Pawel Spiewak, director of the Jewish Historical Institute, puts it at about 20,000.
Some in the Jewish community say Poland -- site during the Nazi occupation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor camps where millions of Jews were killed -- is now more welcoming than many western European countries.
"When you take into account that Jews are being beaten up in the streets in Germany or France or Scandinavia, you even have synagogues being burned down, murders -- we don't have any of that," said Piotr Kadlcik, vice-president of the Jewish community of Warsaw.
"I think that right now it's safer to walk around Warsaw in a yarmulke than it is in certain neighborhoods in Paris."
On Tuesday, the presidents of Israel and Poland will lead the dignitaries at a ceremony to open the core exhibition at the Museum.
It will be Israeli President Rivlin’s first visit abroad. He will fly late Monday to Poland at the invitation of President Bronislaw Komorowski who has asked Rivlin to join him.
Rivlin will be given an official pomp and ceremony welcome at the Presidential Palace on Tuesday morning, after which he will have a working meeting with Komorowski, during which they will sign a research and development agreement. Rivlin will later place a wreath at the monument to the unknown soldier, after which he will attend the opening ceremony of the museum where he will deliver an address. In the evening he will be the guest of honor at a State Dinner, hosted by Komorowski.
On Wednesday morning he will meet with the new Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, and with Radoslaw Sikorski, Speaker of the Sejm, the Polish parliament.

by Maud Swinnen