For future generations

The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland,
which initiated the creation of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews,
was responsible for preparing the Core Exhibition
and raising the funds for its production.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the
William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation and the
Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture.

When the messiah comes, the righteous will feast on the flesh
of the Leviathan at a banquet in paradise. The Leviathan’s skin “will be spread by the Holy One, blessed be He, upon the walls
of Jerusalem, and its splendor will shine from one end
of the world to the other.”

Talmud: Baba Bathra 75

Fragment

Introductions

Theater of History
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Forest

First Encounters, 960–1500
Hanna Zaremska

Paradisus Iudaeorum, 1569-1648
Adam Teller and Igor Kąkolewski

The Jewish Town, 1648–1772
Adam Teller

Encounters with Modernity, 1772–1914
Antony Polonsky

Oyf der yidisher gas | On the Jewish Street, 1918–1939
Samuel D. Kassow

Holocaust, 1939–1944
Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak

Postwar Years, from 1944 to the Present
Stanisław Krajewski

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Pozostałe rozdziały dostępne w pełnej wersji e-booka.

Finis coronat opus

It was a true pleasure for me to follow the process of bringing us ever closer to opening POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews to the public. I was particularly delighted to witness the preparation of the permanent exhibition – the heart of every museum. The complexity of the subject matter – the history of the Jewish nation inscribed in the history of Poland – was a real challenge for the preeminent scholars who have for years conducted research in this area. Translating a thousand years of Jewish presence on Polish soil into the universal language of images required not only enormous historical knowledge, but also coming to terms with the imponderables that have arisen in the course of the many centuries of Polish-Jewish coexistence in this land.

Finis coronat opus – all who visit POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews will discover an exhibition whose content and imagery are of the highest quality, employing state-of-the-art solutions. This publication, an authorial supplement to the core exhibition, is a priceless addition to the story of Polish Jews.

Professor Małgorzata Omilanowska
Minister of Culture and National Heritage

“The eternity of the dead lasts only as long as they are remembered”
– Wisława Szymborska

For the almost 14 million Jews living in the world today Poland is a special place. It is to Poland that most of them trace their roots. Before the Second World War, Warsaw had a population of nearly 400,000 Jews. Polin, the Hebrew name for Poland, has been interpreted as Po-lin, “Here you shall rest.” To a weary traveler whose road has been hard and tortuous these are words of comfort. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a singular monument to a thousand years of shared history in a hospitable land that embraced those unwanted elsewhere. It is in Poland that a unique Jewish culture emerged and flourished, and distinctive customs and traditions developed. It is here that important Jewish religious and social movements were born.

The histories of the Polish and Jewish nations intertwined over the centuries to form a single story, whose plot includes both dramatic elements – disagreements and conflicts – as well as years of peaceful coexistence and cooperation, bearing fruit in many important areas such as science, culture, and entrepreneurship. The museum’s highly interesting, informative, and thought-provoking interactive exhibition presents this common history and highlights the Jewish community’s contribution to all areas of our forefathers’ lives. It demonstrates how difficult it is to separate what is Jewish from what is Polish, and vice versa – so deeply have our fates intersected.

The Second World War and later events marked a cruel break in our shared history. As Antoni Słonimski wrote: “Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined / Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue.” But one can’t allow those irrevocably bygone – better and worse – years to be erased from memory. If not for them, we would be impoverished today, both in spirit and body. The exhibition makes this very clear, and warns, as if echoing Santayana, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. . . . And that is not the path we want to tread. That is what makes this exhibition worth visiting.

Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz
Mayor of Warsaw

Honoring those who died by remembering how they lived

We continually repeat that POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a museum of life and not of death. Most Jews in Poland and Europe were murdered, but our history remains, and continues. After the war, attempts were made to erase that history. The museum’s mission is to tell that story anew, to fill the void. This is something we all need because there is no history of Jews without Poland, and no history of Poland without Jews.

We realize that it is impossible to rebuild what was here before the war. But we can still recall the richness of that life as well as the Polish Jews who created that richness. The museum is a monument to them. It presents the flowering of the civilization they created in the course of a millennium. The astonishing diversity of that civilization has influenced not only Poland and Europe, but also the whole world.

The idea for the museum emerged at the beginning of the 1990s in the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. In 2005, the Association, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the City of Warsaw formed a unique public-private partnership to establish POLIN museum of the History of Polish Jews as a cultural institution. Each of the three partners played a different role. The ministry and the city funded and oversaw construction of the building, while the association collected money from donors all over the world to produce the core exhibition – over 145 million PLN – while also supporting the museum’s programs in the amount of 20 million PLN over several years.

On behalf of the Board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, we would like to thank everyone who played a role in creating POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews: the public partners, the authors of the exhibition, the designers, the entire staff, and the many others. Thanks to your work, we can today celebrate the opening of the exhibition and the museum’s success.

Marian Turski
President of the Museum Council
Deputy President of the Board
Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland

Piotr Wiślicki
President of the Board
Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland

Bringing the past to life

The core exhibition, which we present today, is truly the core of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum’s beautiful building has now at its heart a unique presentation of the thousand-year history of Polish Jews. I have the honor to stand at the head of the museum at this important time – the completion of a project, to which my predecessors contributed much more than myself.

The creation of the museum is part of a wider and extraordinary process of restoring the memory of Polish Jews. This process involves hundreds if not thousands of initiatives in the fields of science, culture, heritage, and commemoration: from nationwide discussions of the Polish-Jewish past and festivals of Jewish culture with tens of thousands of participants to scholarly research and publications, local initiatives to clean Jewish cemeteries, the construction of memorials and education of young people. All of these initiatives express the conviction that is the basis for this museum: that the history of Polish Jews is an inseparable and magnificent part of Poland’s history. This catalogue and the core exhibition itself convey this truth in a beautiful way.

Prof. Dr. hab. Dariusz Stola
Director, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Scale model, On the Jewish Street gallery, prepared by Arnaud Dechelle, Event Communications, 2010

Theater of History

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was created from the inside out. Before there was a museum, before there was a building, before there was a collection, there was a plan for the exhibition. The story – the thousand-year history of Polish Jews – came first. All else followed. The museum and the story it tells in the core exhibition will be an agent of transformation. Polish visitors will encounter a history of Poland that is not a national history, not a history of the nation, as Dariusz Stola, the museum’s director, has observed. Jewish visitors will discover a history of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world – an estimated 70 percent of Jews today, more than 9 million people, are thought to descend from this territory. All visitors will encounter a Poland about which little is known and much misunderstood, a place that was one of the most diverse and tolerant in early modern Europe, a place where a Jewish minority was able to create a distinctive civilization while being part of the larger society.

As a result of the Holocaust, 90 percent of Poland’s prewar Jewish population of 3.3 million Jews was murdered, and the world they created in Poland was destroyed with them. Those who survived, whether in hiding, concentration camps, or the Soviet Union, returned to a Poland that lay in ruins. What had been the largest Jewish community in the world was now one of the smallest, and a country that had been one of the most diverse, was now one of the most homogeneous. The hundreds of thousands of tombstones in more than one thousand Jewish cemeteries, the many empty synagogues and other Jewish communal property testified not only to Jewish absence but also to a vibrant Jewish presence that had been a defining feature of Poland itself. That history – a thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this part of the world – faded from view, largely overshadowed, understandably, by the Holocaust.

All the more reason that it was important to bring the history of Polish Jews, all thousand years of it, to life in Poland, the place where the story took place. In 1994, the City of Warsaw designated the location for the future museum – it would face the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes – in Muranów, Warsaw’s prewar Jewish neighborhood and the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. Until POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened its doors to the public in 2013, one honored those who perished by remembering how they died – at the monument. Today, we can honor them, and those who came before and after, by remembering how they lived – at the museum.

While the chasm created by the Holocaust can never be repaired, the exhibition and the programs it inspires can build bridges across the rupture. Those bridges could reconnect Jews abroad to their own histories in Europe. They could reconnect people living in Poland today to the Jewish past of their own towns and cities – and to those who descend from the Jews who once lived there.

Beginnings

In 1993, Grażyna Pawlak, development director of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland at the time, visited the newly opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Encouraged by Jeshajahu Weinberg, director of that museum and person responsible for its permanent exhibition, she envisioned an exhibition and then a “museum of life” that would present the thousand-year history of Polish Jews. If there was a Holocaust museum in Washington, there should be a museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The last thing Poland needed was a Holocaust museum – the whole country was already a Holocaust museum. As the epicenter of the genocide, Poland’s landscape has been forever scarred by the machinery of death, first and foremost the death camps created by the Germans in this place.

The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland inaugurated the museum project in 1994. It was not until 2005 that the agreement to establish the museum was signed by the Association, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the City of Warsaw. This was a unique public-private partnership for a cultural enterprise in Poland. According to the agreement, the public partners were to pay for the building and oversee its construction, while the private partner, the association, would produce the exhibition and raise the money for it – this too was unprecedented in Poland.

In the intervening years, plans for the exhibition moved forward under the inspired leadership of Jerzy Halbersztadt, who directed the project from 1996 and who was director of the museum from 2005 until 2011. Event Communications, a design firm in London specializing in multimedia narrative exhibitions, worked with a team of historians in Poland between 2000 and 2004 on a master plan for the exhibition. They based the master plan on the Outline of the Historical Program and the vast database of objects, images, and documents that the Polish team had developed specifically for the exhibition. Event’s lead designers were Steve Simons and Steve Lumby, later joined by Arnaud Dechelle. Kathy Jones was Event’s head of interpretation. The master plan for the exhibition was given to the architects who participated in a competition for the building.

The architectural competition for the museum’s building, which was held in 2005, was the first successful international competition for a public building in Poland. The winner, Rainer Mahlamäki, delivered a building that effectively accommodates the core exhibition and communicates the mission of the museum. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is one of the largest museums dedicated to Jewish history in Europe – its interior is 16,000 square meters, with about 12,000 square meters of usable space, of which 4,217 square meters are dedicated to the core exhibition.

The minimalist exterior, its geometric form clad with glass fins on which is written the word Polin in Hebrew and Latin letters, echoes the shape of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and stands in a respectful relationship to it. The architectural drama is on the inside. Organic forms undulate from the lowest to the highest reaches of the building, and light streams through the massive glass windows. The result is a house of light, reflection, transparency, and openness, with vistas right through the building to the monument on one side and the memorial park on the other. With its soaring volumes and warm sandy surface, the interior is ruptured – there is a chasm across which there is a bridge, a fitting metaphor for the history of Polish Jews, whose history was fractured by the Holocaust. The bridge serves also as a metaphor for the museum, whose mission is to create bridges across time, continents, and people. To set a glass building on a site of genocide is a strong statement; indeed, it is an expression of hope in the face of tragedy.

Once the museum was founded and the architect selected, it was possible to move from the exhibition’s master plan to the next stage. Halbersztadt intended from the outset that the academic team responsible for shaping the exhibition’s content would be international and multidisciplinary. In 2006, we created an academic team of scholars from Poland, Israel, and the United States whose fields included history, sociology, social psychology, literature, and anthropology, among others. A curatorial team of art historians and other scholars supported them. This team worked on the exhibition from beginning to end. The intellectual coherence of the result is to their credit. In 2011, when the time came to produce the exhibition, responsibility shifted from Event Communications to Nizio Design International, directed by Mirosław Nizio, with creative director for the project, Piotr Antonów.

Floor plan of the exhibition, 2012

1. Forest

2. First Encounters, 960–1500

3. Paradisus Iudaeorum, 1569–1648

4. The Jewish Town, 1648–1772

5. Encounters with Modernity, 1772–1914

6. On the Jewish Street, 1918–1939

7. Holocaust, 1939–1944

8. Postwar Years, 1944–to the present

Journey of a Thousand Years

The core exhibition is divided into seven historical periods beginning in the tenth century, coming forward to the present, and opening out to the future. As originally planned, the exhibition begins with a poetic forest. Visitors descend a grand staircase and enter a space of historical imagination, of time before time, inspired by legends that Jews told themselves about how they came to Poland and why they stayed. According to legend, Jews fleeing persecution in German lands came east. A slip of paper, according to one version, pointed to “Polaniya,” a Hebrew name for Poland, which they interpreted as meaning “Here God dwells.” They arrived in a forest where they heard the word “Polin”, another Hebrew name for Poland, which they interpreted as “Po-lin,” “Rest here.” In some versions, a cloud broke and an angel’s hand pointed the way and a voice said “Po-lin.” According to the version retold by Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon, Jews entering the forest discovered tractates of the Talmud carved on the trees; in other versions pages of the sacred texts floated down. According to this legend, it was divinely ordained that Jews should come to Poland and stay here until the Messiah arrives.

As visitors step into the medieval gallery, First Encounters, they cross the threshold between legend and history. The earliest mention of Poland appears in the travel account of Ibrahim ibn Yakub, a Jew from Cordoba sent by the Caliph as part of a diplomatic mission across Europe in the tenth century. The privilege confirmed by Bolesław the Pious in 1264, also known as the Statute of Kalisz, established the fundamental conditions for Jewish settlement – religious freedom, communal autonomy, protection from harm, and the right to engage in certain occupations, even granting some of them a role in the minting of coins. One of the most precious objects in the entire exhibition is just such a coin, a one-sided bracteate, with Hebrew letters. Many towns established in Poland according to German town law, most famously on the model of Magdeburg, made a place for their Jewish residents – a “Jewish street” and locations for a synagogue and cemetery. The template for Jewish life was established in this period and lasted for centuries.

By around 1500, Jews were living in more than one hundred places with Jewish communities in more than half of them. Estimates of the Jewish population at the end of the period vary from a low of 5,000 to a high of 30,000. They brought with them their Ashkenazi culture, whose center was in the Rhineland. By the end of the medieval period, the center of the Ashkenazi world had begun to shift from German lands to Poland. How did this happen? This is the story told in the medieval gallery, which encompasses the first six centuries of our story, more than half of the thousand-year history of Polish Jews.

The gallery that follows, Paradisus Iudaeorum, is set in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Established in 1569, the Commonwealth became the largest, most diverse, and most tolerant country in Europe – it encompassed not only today’s Poland and Lithuania, but also Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and parts of Russia. What made this age “golden” for Jews were the rise of rabbinical authority and learning and the high degree of Jewish communal autonomy. Jews also played a vital role in the agricultural economy of the Commonwealth, especially as managers of assets on noble estates.

The Commonwealth became home to the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world. By 1765, according to the poll tax census and other sources, Jews were living in more than 1,100 locations, and the Jewish population had expanded to an estimated 750,000. But, was this country the “Paradisus Iudaeorum” that critics of the Commonwealth claimed? Did Jews have it “too good,” as one of many complaints about the social order claimed? A “Wall of Words” stages the debates around this question. Through quotations – in their original language and also in Polish and English translation, and in fonts from the period – visitors can experience firsthand the many voices in the story. This principle animates the entire exhibition.

Scale model, Postwar Years gallery, prepared by Arnaud Dechelle, Event Communications, 2009

Visitors next pass through a dramatic “corridor of fire,” which is dedicated to the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648–1649, during which the Cossacks massacred Polish nobility, Catholic clergy and Jews, holding them responsible for the misery of the peasants. A period of recovery concluded a century marked by war.

Visitors then enter the Jewish Town, a gallery whose setting is inspired by the small private towns where Jews formed a large percentage of the population and created a distinctive way of life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two centers of this gallery are the marketplace, set against large projections of the Commonwealth’s rural landscape, and the synagogue. A truly unique feature of this gallery – indeed, of the exhibition as a whole – is the 85-percent scale reconstruction of the exquisite painted ceiling and timber-framed roof of the synagogue that once stood in Gwoździec, near Lviv. It was specially created for this exhibition using traditional tools, materials, and techniques, as was the bimah, the platform for the reader’s desk. Around the synagogue are presentations of new spiritual trends and leaders that arose in response to crises of religious and communal leadership – Hasidism and the Ba’al Shem Tov, modern Torah study and the Vilna Gaon, and the Jewish Enlightenment, represented here by Mendel Lefin.

With the partitioning of the Commonwealth by the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian and Russian Empires, a process that began in 1772 and ended in 1795, the story of Jewish encounters with modernity begins. Organized responses to the challenges of modernity are presented in displays dedicated to the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the modern yeshiva, and Hasidism, which expanded rapidly in this period thanks to its wide appeal and the charisma of its leaders. A multimedia railway station, the setting for presenting the onset of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and migration, is followed by displays dedicated to the role of such textile magnates as Israel Poznański, whose meteoric rise in Łódź stands in stark contrast to the desperate situation of Jewish workers in nearby Bałuty. A presentation of the small but important group of Jews who identified themselves as “Poles of the Mosaic faith” introduces visitors to those who believed in the promise of integration. Pogroms in the 1880s and rise of modern forms of antisemitism, shown in a dramatic multimedia presentation, came as a shock. Many Jews emigrated, largely for economic reasons. Others were caught up in new movements, among them Zionism and the Bund, the Jewish labor movement. Modern Yiddish and Hebrew culture reached ever wider audiences through the mass press.

With the collapse of the Russian and Austrian empires during the First World War and the creation of the Second Polish Republic in its aftermath, there began what some historians consider a second “golden age,” despite economic hardship and rising antisemitism. Visitors will enter a multimedia interwar years street. Behind the street façades at street level, visitors can explore political and cultural life. On the upper level of this gallery, visitors can embark on a journey around Poland, from Gdynia to Drohobycz, as if with map and guidebook in hand, to explore daily life in 13 localities, large and small. The second part of the upper level is dedicated to the experience of growing up and the creation of a new generation unique to the Second Polish Republic. Returning to the street level, visitors learn of events during the late 1930s outside of Poland, as well as about rising antisemitism in Poland, especially after the death of Jósef Piłsudski in 1935.

Turning the corner at the end of the street, visitors see how civilians experienced the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Soviet invasion 17 days later. The story of the Holocaust unfolds within the borders of occupied Poland and from the perspective of those living in Poland. Diaries and documents preserved in the secret archive created by Emanuel Ringelblum and his team provide a unique perspective on the Warsaw ghetto, a story told in the voices of those who recorded their experiences in the moment on the spot. A space outside the ghetto, the so-called Aryan street, presents the harsh reality of German terror against Poles, how the Polish Underground State resisted the occupation, and how ordinary people responded to the Jewish fate, on a spectrum from help to indifference and even betrayal. The German invasion of Soviet-occupied Poland marks the onset of mass murder, first by death squads and then in death camps, all of which were built by the Germans on Polish soil.

By the war’s end, 90 percent of Poland’s Jews had perished. Of the almost 3.3 million Jews living in Poland in 1939, about 300,000 survived, most of them in the Soviet Union. But this is not the end of the story. The main question for those who survived and were in Poland after the war was whether to stay or to leave. The two options confront each other on opposing walls that line the Postwar Years gallery. Most Jews in Poland eventually left. Visitors will follow the various waves of emigration, legal and illegal but tolerated, from the very beginning of the postwar period. However, the biggest surprise for many visitors may well be the story of those who stayed, not only those who identified themselves as Jews, but also those who did not, during the 70 years of Poland’s tumultuous postwar history. As visitors enter the last moment in the narration, which is not the end of the story, they find themselves in the breathtaking space of the building itself. It is filled with natural light and soars from the gallery floor to the building’s roof. They will hear Jews living in Poland today respond to key questions. Did you always know you were Jewish? Is there a future for Jews in Poland today? What does Israel mean to you? Is there antisemitism in Poland today? Who can make Jewish culture? The story is still not over, neither in Poland, nor in all the places in the world where Polish Jews live today. There is a renewal of Jewish life in Poland, though small in scale, and enormous Jewish presence in Polish consciousness, as seen in festivals of Jewish culture, Christian–Jewish dialogue, films and books on Jewish subjects, Jewish studies, and artistic projects – and not least POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is itself part of the post-1989 story.

There are millions of Jews across the globe whose families once lived in the historical territory of Poland. Where did they go and what did they take with them? The geography of the history of Polish Jews expands and reconnects those who left with those living in Poland today. While the exhibition must come to an end, the story continues, a message that all visitors will take with them.

Telling the Story

How did the exhibition as realized today evolve from the master plan? From the outset, the core exhibition was to be a multimedia narrative exhibition that would start from the story, rather than from a collection of objects. Though objects play an important role, the exhibition was not to be limited to what could be shown through objects alone. Rather, the exhibition would be a theater of history. It would draw visitors into the world of Polish Jews. Event Communications had delivered a blueprint for the exhibition that proved both workable and inspiring. That said, the academic team introduced fundamental changes, consistent with a set of principles that would define the historical narrative and way to tell the story.

The original master plan organized the exhibition along four lines. First, a Polish and European historical timeline would run throughout the exhibition as “context.” Second, “schisms,” or “turning points,” would break the continuity of history into periods, a gallery for each. Third, chronothematic displays would feature selected aspects of the history of Polish Jews in a given period. Fourth, “Jewish culture galleries” would offer transhistorical presentations on such topics as antisemitism, Judaism, the Jewish life cycle and religious holidays, Hasidism, and Yiddish language and culture. When beginning work in April 2006, the academic team looked long and hard at this concept and modified it according to a set of “metahistorical principles,” in Moshe Rosman’s words, that is, concepts that would underpin the story and the way we would tell it.

The first principle in our historical approach is that the most important period in the history of Polish Jews is one thousand years – a millennium of continuous presence on Polish soil. This is not the story of Jews in Spain, England, France, Germany, or Austria, among other countries in Europe. The message of a thousand years is especially important not only because this long history has been so overshadowed by the Holocaust, but also because of the place of this cataclysmic event in the exhibition’s historical narrative. The story neither begins nor ends with the Holocaust, nor does it drive inexorably to that end. We are often asked, “Which is the most important period?” This is a rhetorical question because the person who asks usually has an answer in mind. For some it is the Holocaust. For others it is the postwar years, the period of most recent memory through which they themselves lived, or the interwar years. Some insist that the entire exhibition, or most of it, should focus only on the modern period. No one cites the almost six hundred years of the medieval period, which will surely surprise and intrigue visitors. Our answer is always the same: the most important period is the one thousand years.

General Diagram, drawn by Steve Lumby for the Exhibition Masterplan Document for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, prepared by Event Communications, circa 2003

The division into periods and galleries differs from the master plan in several ways. We reduced the number of periods from nine to eight by treating the long nineteenth century, from 1772 to the First World War, as one gallery, rather than dividing the period into two galleries. We also decided against schisms and turning points as an organizing principle. While useful in establishing clear breaks in a long story, schisms and turning points are artificial when considering historical processes that extend over long periods of time. We also wanted to move the story of the Polish Jewish diaspora from the Postwar Years gallery into a space of its own in a circulation area that leads into and out of the various galleries.

The second principle follows from the idea that the history of Polish Jews is an integral part of the history of Poland, and that the history of Poland is not complete without a history of Polish Jews. We therefore decided not to treat the Polish and European historical timeline as a “context” for a separate Jewish story and chose instead to construct an integral rather than contextual history of Polish Jews. Jews would not be a footnote to Polish history.

A third principle is to treat the history of Polish Jews as a relational history. This is not the same as a history of Polish–Jewish relations, which more often than not is treated as a history of antisemitism. A relational history starts from a different premise, namely, that Polish Jews were not only in Poland, but also of Poland. They were subjects and agents of history, and not only objects onto which others projected their fantasies and fears. The result is a history “in common,” a story of coexistence, competition, conflict, and cooperation, which is not the same as a “common history.” Indeed, multiple perspectives on “events” (are they the same events if experienced so differently?) become central to the historical narration. The exhibition presents a broad spectrum of relations, from the best to the worst.

A fourth principle arises from the interplay of separation and integration that made possible the creation of a civilization that was “categorically Jewish, distinctly Polish,” in the words of Moshe Rosman. It is here, in the sixteenth century, that Rabbi Moses Isserles, known by his Hebrew acronym as the Remu, wrote notes to Yosef Karo’s concise code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh. Karo’s code was based on Sephardi custom. The Remu’s notes reflected Ashkenazi custom as followed by Polish Jews. This book, with the Remu’s notes, continues to guide Jewish religious life to this day for many Jews, and not only Ashkenazim. Similarly, the beautiful painted wooden synagogue that once stood in Gwoździec, today in Ukraine, and that inspires the painted ceiling and timber-framed roof that stands today in the exhibition, is itself an expression of the symbiosis of regional forms and building techniques and uniquely Jewish meaning.

A fifth principle is to tell the story from the perspectives of those whose story is being told and to do so in the historical present – without foreshadowing. We ask visitors to bracket what they know about what happened later. The horizon in front of them should remain short, just as it was for those in the period, while the past behind them gets ever longer. While we follow this principle throughout the exhibition, it is especially important for the place of the Holocaust in the thousand-year story. The narrative of most if not all Holocaust exhibitions starts with hate; the logical endpoint – the telos of hate – is genocide. The history of Polish Jews does not start with hate and does not end with genocide. The telling of the story in the exhibition does not drive to the Holocaust as the inevitable endpoint of this thousand-year history. From this perspective, Jews in the Second Polish Republic were not “on the brink of destruction.” Whatever the “lessons” of the Holocaust, the thousand-year history of Polish Jews offers more than a case study in (in)tolerance. It would be a disservice to previous generations to reduce their lives to a prefiguration of genocide.

We are therefore careful to be historically precise in presenting conflict, right down to the words that we use and even how we spell them. For the medieval and early modern periods, we speak of anti-Jewish violence, attack, riot, tumult, or massacre, but not antisemitism and not pogrom. Anti-Jewish, anti-Judaism, and antisemitic are not the same thing. We reserve the term antisemitism for the modern period and modern forms of xenophobia, in particular racial hatred. This is also the reason we are particular about how we spell antisemitism, a term coined by the German polemicist Wilhelm Marr in the 1870s to distinguish a modern conceptual foundation for hatred of Jews, namely race, from older conceptual foundations, based largely on religion, but also on antipathy to difference more generally. The hyphen in “anti-Semitism” lends credibility to the word “Semites” as a racial category and to the false idea that Jews are a race. Similarly, pogrom is a term that arises in connection with antisemitic violence during the second half of the nineteenth century, and that is where visitors will first encounter it. We are equally precise in our use of the term “żydokomuna”, which refers to “Commie Jews” or “Bolshevik Jews,” unfortunate shorthand for all aspects of the historical phenomenon of Jews and communism. We are reserving this term for the stereotype – the view that communism was a Jewish phenomenon – which is worthy of study in its own right, and clearly distinguish the stereotype from the broader topic of why some Jews were attracted to communism, why many more were not, as well as the nature of Jewish life under communism.

A sixth principle is to avoid taking as our starting point misperceptions – whether antisemitic and philosemitic stereotypes or the stereotype of “Polish antisemitism” – and on that basis creating a narrative that will defend the history of Polish Jews and the history of Poland against such mistaken ideas. A proper historical account should correct the record, but not defensively – in other words, misconceptions should not set the agenda for what would become a defensive historical narration. Rather, our approach might be termed “constructive engagement,” the intention being to create a “trusted zone” or zone of trust for engaging difficult subjects. The goal of the exhibition is not to create consensus, which is not possible in any case. Our goal is, rather, to create an exhibition worthy of debates worth having.

A seventh principle is to treat the history of Polish Jews as the history of all Polish Jews, not just its heroes and elites. The exhibition does not take as its starting point or leading idea the demonstration of Jewish worthiness, whether in collective or individual terms. An apologetic history would organize the exhibition around important people because they are important and showcase Jewish achievement – the contribution of Jews to the fields of politics, medicine, the arts, science, mathematics, and philosophy – for its own sake. That said, the leading role of key individuals finds its proper place in the exhibition’s historical narrative, but that history should not be reduced to the stories of great individuals as such and their contributions to the world per se. Apologetic histories, which were popular in the nineteenth century, have their roots in debates dating from the seventeenth century on the prospect of Jewish integration and emancipation and in the fight against anti-Jewish attitudes.

An eighth principle is to keep open questions that seem to beg for definition. Some colleagues said the exhibition should begin with two text panels answering two questions – Who are the Jews? What is Judaism? – even before visitors enter the poetic forest at the beginning of their journey. There are many ways to be Jewish, and Polish Jews continue to be a work in progress. Answers, provisional at best, are to be found in historically specific moments of the story, in actual situations. There is no normative presentation of Jews or Judaism, the Jewish life cycle or Jewish calendar year. There are no trans-historical thematic galleries, as proposed in the master plan.

Rather, visitors are on a “need-to-know basis” and build knowledge incrementally as they move through the story. It is early in the medieval gallery that they will encounter the prohibition of work on the Sabbath through a story of Jews on the road whose wheel broke on Friday just before sundown – we know this story from a rabbinical responsum, a consideration of the question of what they should have done. Should they have repaired the wheel and continued along their way even though that meant arriving at the town after sundown and violating the prohibition of riding on the Sabbath? Or, should they have stayed on the road and waited until Saturday sundown, when the Sabbath was over, and only then repaired the wheel and traveled on? Staying on the road overnight was a dangerous proposition. Visitors will first encounter the Hebrew alphabet, also in the medieval gallery, when exploring bracteates, one-sided coins, with Hebrew letters. They will learn about the laws of ritual purity from a presentation of the Sha’arei Dura, a handbook on the laws of kashrut, printed in 1534 in Kraków – it was the first Hebrew book to be printed for Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. An interactive presentation of this book is presented in the Paradisus Iudaeorum gallery.

Similarly, there is the expectation that the exhibition will provide “explanations” in answer to the question why? Our approach is, rather, to look for explanation in how. We encourage visitors to explore primary sources – documents, objects, recordings, films, photographs – whether in their original form or copies, precisely as historians do, and to piece together an understanding of what happened – with curatorial help to connect the dots. There are no easy explanations, but there is the historical record – sometimes thin, sometimes rich – for showing how something happened. If how is presented well, possible answers to the question of why will emerge. Exhibitions are uniquely positioned to build a historical narration from the historical record, whether objects or texts or images, film, or sound. The effect is somewhat like a documentary without a voice-over.

A ninth principle is pars pro toto, telling the larger story through smaller stories, in specific places and moments – Poznań, Łódź, Kraków, Vilna, Płock, Warsaw, Zamość, Gwoździec, and many more – rather than amalgamating materials from different places and times. Those stories are told, whenever possible, by those who lived there and then. We lead the narration with quotations from original sources. Featured are the words of such individuals as Jan Zamoyski, who contracted his Jewish leaseholder Jakub Nossałowicz in 1595; Natan Hannover, who recorded the massacres during the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648–1649; Pauline Wengeroff, who recalled the transformation of Jewish life in the nineteenth century; young Jews who responded to autobiography contests organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1930s; and Sara Hurwic, who surveyed Jews in Poland right after the war. This is history in the first person, history with a face. In this way, visitors come into direct contact with voices from the period – not one voice, the voice of the historian, but many voices, a chorus that is sometimes in harmony, sometimes dissonant. Such quotations are in the original language – Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Czech, Polish, and in later periods also Yiddish, German, French, Russian, and other languages. For each gallery there is a font specific to the period, for Latin letters and for Hebrew letters.

This approach is especially powerful in the Holocaust gallery, where the narration is based on the wealth of personal documents preserved in the clandestine Oyneg shabes archive organized by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto. Through documents of many kinds created on the spot and at the moment, it is possible to bring visitors as close as possible to those who were there. In essence, this is narration in the historical present. It requires an active effort on the part of the viewer to bracket what he or she already knows about what happened and to enter into the very moment of the events as they unfold. The story unfolds a step at a time, without foreshadowing what will happen and without back shadowing from what we know today to what those in the period did not. The “veil” is only gradually lifted until, by the end of the visitor’s path, genocide is fully revealed, an approach pioneered by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, the lead scholars for this gallery.

A tenth principle is the materializing of history in the absence of original objects. Had we the objects, we would surely have used them, but for the medieval period we can point to only two objects that Jews in Poland made: tombstones and coins. Tombstones, the oldest of which dates from 1203, are immovable, and coins, no matter how informative they are with their beautiful Hebrew inscriptions, are tiny, and the story is deep and wide. What we do have are texts, the most important of which come from rabbis in the Rhineland who responded to questions addressed to them by Jews passing through or living in Poland. These questions often take the form of a story that describes the problem. Necessity is the mother of invention. The medieval gallery has become a three-dimensional illuminated manuscript, its walls almost entirely hand-painted and gilded.

Similarly, for the modern yeshiva in the nineteenth century, there is virtually no visual material, but there are vivid memoirs and autobiographies. On the basis of those texts, we created a painted animation – twenty-four hours, from dawn to dusk to dawn, in the great Volozhin yeshiva. Last but not least are architectural masterpieces, the wooden synagogues, created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, none of which exist today. While we can never recover the original synagogue, in the sense of its original material, we can do something else, something of great value – we can recover the knowledge of how to build it, by building it, and that is precisely what we did in Poland in collaboration with Handshouse Studio, an educational nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts. The result is a new kind of object, one whose value is exponentially greater because of how it was created and the knowledge we recovered and discovered.

Lastly, there is the principle of narrative space. While the Museum of the History of Polish Jews does have a collection and continues to build it, the institution is defined first and foremost by the story it tells. It is no less a museum for telling that story in a multimedia narrative exhibition rather than primarily through objects. In contrast with museums that typically trace their history back to cabinets of curiosity, an early form of collecting and display, the historical origins of the multimedia narrative exhibition are in world fairs, or Great Exhibitions, as they are known in the United Kingdom. From their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, Expos were laboratories of innovation. They not only showcased new ideas, but also experimented with display – and that is precisely what the exhibition at the heart of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews does.

The result is a theater of history, a story told in four dimensions – time is the fourth dimension. Only as the visitor moves does the story unfold. Perhaps the clearest example of “story space” expressed architecturally is the Warsaw ghetto section of the Holocaust gallery. “Life in the shadow of death” is set in claustrophobic spaces – the walls are slanted, the atmosphere disorienting and anxious. Visitors climb stairs and stand on a bridge like the one that joined two parts of the Warsaw ghetto. Like those in the ghetto, they look down on the “Aryan street” and see what seems like normal life. Visitors will encounter the reality of that world – occupied Poland under German terror – only when they exit the second part of the ghetto exhibit, “life in the face of death,” and enter the “Aryan street” from below. They then see what they saw from the bridge, but from a new perspective. What seemed normal from afar is revealed as a terrifying reality up close.

First and foremost, visitors should experience the story through exploration rather than guiding, learning rather than teaching, soft mastery (trial and error) rather than hard mastery (information and instruction). They will encounter an open narrative in multiple voices. Commentary written by scholars appears in its own font and panel – and is kept to a minimum. These are among the ways of empowering the visitor to add his or her voice to the chorus of voices in the exhibition. Visiting museums and exhibitions is generally a social experience. The conversations that arise during and after the visit, whether between visitors or with museum staff whose role is to engage visitors, are a critical part of the experience. Younger visitors, whose natural inclination is to learn by trial and error (rather than to read the manual), will intuitively find their way through the story. Experienced museumgoers may expect a more explicit road map as they make their way through a continuous narrative that is organized in acts and scenes, much like a play, but one in which visitors find themselves on the stage and in the scenography, not on the other side of the proscenium.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is part of the very history that it presents. It is an agent in that history and not simply a mirrored reflection of it. Our goal is to create an exhibition that is memorable. To be memorable, it must be emotional, but to be worthy of being memorable, it must be thought provoking. There is no end to the debates provoked by any history of Polish Jews, not least the one presented in the core exhibition. Our challenge is to create an exhibition worthy of debates worth having, including those that will surely arise from the exhibition itself.

Forest

We did not know, but our fathers told us how the exiles of Israel came to the land of Polin. When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppression increased, persecutions multiplied and how the evil authorities piled decree on decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, until there was no relief for Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world as to which is the correct road to traverse to find rest for their soul. Then a piece of paper fell from heaven:

Go to Polaniya!

So they came to the land of Polin, and they gave a mountain of gold to the king, and he received them with great honor. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favor from the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king protected them against every foe and enemy.

And Israel lived in Polin in tranquility for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples. And they traded with the surrounding countries and they also struck coins with inscriptions in the holy script and the language of the country. These are the coins that have on them a lion rampant from the right facing left. And on the coins are the words “Mieszko, King of Poland” or “Mieszko, Król Polski.” The Poles call their king “Król.”

When they came from the land of the Franks, they found a forest in the land and on every tree, one tractate of the Talmud was incised. This is the forest of Kawczyń, which is near Lublin. And every man said to his neighbor, “We have come to the land where our ancestors dwelt in ancient times for Torah and learning.”

And those who delve into the Scriptures say: This is why it is called Polin. For thus spoke Israel when they came to the land, “Po-lin! Here rest for the night.” And this means that we shall rest here until we shall merit going to the Land of Israel.

If this is the tradition, we accept it!

S. Y. Agnon, 1919

First Encounters, 960–1500

Hanna Zaremska

Curatorial notes: Hanna Zaremska, Magdalena Dopieralska, and Kalina Gawlas
Lead scholar for the gallery: Hanna Zaremska

The Historian in the Museum

Historians work with language. They use various methods to arrive at the truth about the past. When they write a history, they indicate how they have drawn conclusions from their sources. As a general rule, images and objects – whatever can be viewed or touched, and above all works of art, coins, and archaeological artifacts – are secondary.

Museum displays, by contrast, are made up of images and objects. Their aim is to visualize history. But displays in historical museums must be more than pictures with captions. They must also use new approaches to show the results of research in order to present not only facts about the past, but also historical processes. This is the task of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews – to communicate what is known about the history of Polish Jews and to show how Poland has shaped their history.

Historians have a responsibility to those about whom they write as well as to their readers. Creating an exhibition may seem no different from writing a book, but the difference is actually enormous – both for the historian-turned-curator and for the reader-turned-viewer. In the case of the medieval gallery, both parties face a daunting task. The historian-curator must fit almost six hundred years of complicated history into three hundred square meters, while the reader-visitor must absorb what is before him or her.

Involvement in the creation of a museum is a new experience for the historian. There is no place in the gallery for any of the qualifications found in a historical text – words like perhaps, most likely, and supposedly are generally avoided. One can sometimes squeeze in a question mark, but who will see it on a map? There is no room in a museum display for footnotes, so how can one acknowledge one’s debt to earlier scholars? The painstaking labor of generations of scholars must give way to images. Nor are images so easy to decipher without commentary. They may even be misunderstood if there is no explanation of the artist’s intentions – and visitors will remember them.