Bloomberg News - Warsaw's Jewish Museum Opens Exhibit Evoking Vanished Millennium

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By Dorota Bartyzel

The Warsaw-based Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened its core exhibition today, marking the start of an institution seeking to "celebrate life" in a place seen mainly as a symbol of tragedy.

The exhibits, a journey through 1,000 years of history, are housed in eight galleries spread over 43,000 square feet. According to the curators, they portray how Jews came to settle in Poland and how their culture developed, showing the social, religious and political diversity of the Jewish community and its coexistence with Poles. The Holocaust is only a portion of this story.

"This museum has an opportunity to restore a sense of proportion, to revive memories of the rich Jewish life in Poland alongside those of death and suffering," Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said at the opening ceremony. "It's also a chance for wiser, deeper reflection on the pain that shadows Polish-Jewish relations."

The facility's proper name is Museum Polin, referring to a legend about the arrival of the first Jewish settlers in the 13th century fleeing persecutions in western Europe. The fugitives supposedly heard a voice in the wilderness calling "Po-lin," which in Hebrew means "you should rest here."

The award-winning building, designed by the Lahdelma & Mahlamaki Oy architectural studio in Helsinki, Finland, stands on the site of Warsaw's World War II-era Jewish ghetto. It was first opened to the public on April 19, 2013 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Since then, the museum has attracted more than 250,000 visitors to its temporary displays, film screenings and educational workshops.

Israeli President

Poland's Jewish population grew to 3.3 million on the eve of World War II, of whom about 90 percent perished in the Holocaust. Many of the survivors emigrated after the war, in part to escape communist-era persecution.

"Poland is a place where the Jewish soul was born; unfortunately, it also became the largest Jewish cemetery," Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said at the ceremony, according to a Polish translation of his speech. "Here, the Jewish settlement, the Shtetl, was born. And here it died. It was already dying in the ghettos, but fought on until it was annihilated by the German Nazis."

About six million Jews were killed during World War II as Nazi Germany waged a pan-European campaign of extermination that included random executions, forced labor and death camps, many of them in occupied Poland. Polish officials have complained that the country's role in the Holocaust has been miscast because the persecutors sited mass-killing facilities near their intended victims.

"Many Jews came here because they were expelled from other countries, so Poland was a wonderful country for them," Representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who led the U.S. delegation at the opening, said today in Warsaw. "Now the only reason people come here is Auschwitz. It's important to see the whole picture."

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