To Celebrate Its Jewish History, Poland Presents ‘a Museum of Life’

[Martinus]

To Celebrate Its Jewish History, Poland Presents 'a Museum of Life'
Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to Unveil Core Exhibition
By RICK LYMANOCT. 21, 2014

WARSAW — With anti-Semitism having become more prominent again across Europe, something quite different is growing in a huge, translucent building at the center of a vanished neighborhood in Warsaw.

After several days of concerts, seminars, festivals and hoopla, the core exhibition of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews — the most ambitious cultural institution to rise in Poland since the fall of Communism — will be unveiled on Tuesday. Poland's top political leaders will be there, as will the president of Israel and other international dignitaries. The institution has been embraced across the political spectrum and has drawn only scattered, mild protest.

In eight sprawling galleries, packed with multimedia exhibitions and artifacts, the museum traces the history of Jews from their first appearance in Poland in the Middle Ages to the present day. The Holocaust, the part of the story that is most often remembered, fills only one of the eight galleries.

"I would see these young people from America and Israel making their visits to Poland," said Sigmund A. Rolat, a labor camp survivor who grew rich in New York and became one of three American entrepreneurs to finance the project in its early years. "And what would they see? Death camps and cemeteries and empty places where synagogues used to be. Ours is not another museum of the Holocaust. We are more than victims. Ours is a museum of life."

To a large extent, it is mere coincidence that the exhibition is gaining prominence at the same time anti-Jewish sentiment is rising in other parts of Europe. The museum has been in the works for more than two decades and is already opening later than its founders originally hoped. But some experts say there is more at work, something revealing about the different path Poland has taken since the fall of Communism, and a kind of national yearning to reclaim a half-forgotten past when Jews and Jewish culture were a dominant part of Polish life.

"The Poland you see today is a complete anomaly," said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for many years a professor of Eastern European Jewish culture at New York University, who has become the director of the museum's core exhibition. "Never was Poland as homogeneous, linguistically and ethnically, as it is today."

For most of its history, Poland was the most diverse country in Europe. In 1939, there were 3.5 million Jews here. In many towns, they were a majority. In Warsaw, they accounted for more than 30 percent of the population.

About 300,000 Polish Jews survived the war, but more than 90 percent of those emigrated, largely to America and Israel. Now, the number of Jews living in Poland, with a population of 38 million, is believed to be around 25,000.

At the same time, young people in Poland have been actively reclaiming the nation's Jewish past. Annual festivals in Krakow and Warsaw regularly draw tens of thousands of people dancing to klezmer bands and eating kugel and gefilte fish, almost all of them Polish Catholics.

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"Young Poles want to have a very strong identity," said Dariusz Stola, a historian who was named director of the new museum. "Being Jewish, being interested in things Jewish, is something special, a little different."

Perhaps because the remaining Jews in Poland are so few and so assimilated, Jewishness is not a factor in most Poles' daily lives, said Piotr Wislicki, a 62-year-old atheist and entrepreneur who embraced his Jewish ethnicity only after the fall of Communism in 1989. As president of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, he has overseen the completion of the museum's programs and exhibitions.

"There is anti-Semitism in Poland, of course," Mr. Wislicki said. "But it is like all over the world, no more, no less."

Michael Schudrich, a New Yorker who moved to Poland in 1990, has become the country's chief rabbi, operating from one of the last remaining prewar synagogues, tucked behind blocks of apartments near the center of Warsaw.

"There have always been two streams of thought in Poland," he said. "A xenophobic stream, in which Poland is for the Poles and that is that, and a more multicultural stream that argues that Poland becomes stronger when it embraces pluralism. After 1989, it was not clear which way Poland would go. But multiculturalism has maintained its dominance, and the museum is a result of that."

Warsaw's lost Jewish community sprawled across most of the northern and western parts of the city. During World War II, Germans reduced the city to rubble, and nothing remains of the old Jewish neighborhood, once the largest in the world. The museum rests in the center of a large rectangular park at the heart of that neighborhood, overlooked by stern apartment blocks with few, if any, Jewish residents.

It is made of gleaming, greenish glass, reflecting the surrounding trees and the nearby Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. A new monument, to honor Poles who helped save Jews during the war, will also be built on the grounds.

The idea for such a museum was first proposed in the early 1990s, but it was no more than an idea. Not until three wealthy Americans — Victor Markowicz, a software entrepreneur in New York; Tad Taube, a real estate and sportswear executive in the Bay Area; and Mr. Rolat — came aboard more than a decade ago was there enough seed money to move the project forward.

The biggest breakthrough came in 2005, when the mayor of Warsaw — Lech Kaczynski, who later became president of Poland — and the minister of culture, Waldemar Dabrowski, agreed to provide the museum's site and pay for its construction. The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland would oversee the design of the building and both the design of and the fund-raising for its core exhibition.

The building was originally estimated to cost $27 million. It ended up costing $67 million. The core exhibition, initially budgeted at $7 million, ultimately cost about $55 million.

But slowly, the money came together, sometimes from non-Jews who believed it was important for Poles to learn about their country's Jewish heritage. Jan Kulczyk, for instance, a well-known beer magnate with multiple business interests who is often referred to as the richest man in Poland, gave $6.5 million, making him the largest individual donor.

The building opened in April of last year and has been the site of temporary exhibitions, concerts, seminars and theatrical events. It is the 43,000-square-foot core exhibition, the heart of the museum, that will be unveiled on Tuesday.

Highlights include early Jewish manuscripts, re-creations of Jewish town life (including a scale replica of an actual synagogue with its colorful painted interior), vintage photographs and films, histories of Polish-born movements from Hasidism to Zionism, and a vast multimedia network encompassing more than 250 computer terminals powered by two servers in a backstage control room.

The museum attracted about 300,000 visitors in its first year, and museum officials said they expected that number to swell to at least 500,000. Most will come from Poland, but a sizable chunk, it is hoped, will come from abroad. Many of the Jews living in America, for instance, can trace ancestors back to Poland.

"There is no history of Jews without Poland," Mr. Wislicki said. "And there is no history of Poland without Jews."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/world/europe/warsaw-museum-of-the-history-of-polish-jews.html?_r=0



A bit of positive news from Poland.

Surprised they would refer to Kulczyk as a "beer magnate", though. He owns several power plants, a lucrative energy transmission business, several oilfields in Africa, a couple of motorways in Poland a chemical weapons factory among his "other interests". 

[Maladict]

I walked by it a few days ago but unfortunately it was closed. 

[The Brain]

How well is the chemical weapons factory doing?

[Martinus]

How well is the chemical weapons factory doing?

Pretty good I'm told.

[The Brain]

Good. Good.

[Valmy]

How well is the chemical weapons factory doing?

Pretty good I'm told.

With all those extreme right wing parties on the rise I can see this would be a lucrative industry to get involved in.