Poland’s Jewish museum marks its first decade, made tumultuous by politics

(JTA) — WARSAW, Poland — In the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were killed and their neighborhood razed during World War II, a Jewish community has never recovered — but a museum has for a decade drawn visitors to learn about their history.

The Polin Museum is marking 10 years since opening its exhibition about the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews. In that lifespan, it rose to fame as one of the world’s leading Jewish museums and a symbol of Poland’s long-deferred recognition of its extinguished Jewish past.

But it also faced down challenges from a government ruled by Poland’s right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party, which sought to remove museum leaders seen as too critical of government policies or unwilling to conform with nationalist versions of history. Law and Justice was overturned by a centrist coalition last year.

During a weekend of anniversary programming in late September, which included a gala, a symphony orchestra concert and curatorial tours, nearly 10,000 people passed through the museum, a modernist building designed by the Finnish firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki.

Special guests ranged from government officials and museum founders and donors to influential members of Poland’s small Jewish community, including Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Marian Turski, a 98-year-old historian and Holocaust survivor who presides over the museum council.

The hoopla surrounding Polin’s 10-year anniversary reflects its impact on Poland, a society that only in recent decades has confronted the history of its Jewish community and the 3 million Polish Jews who were killed there under the NAzis. The museum’s name draws from a story about Jews who fled persecution in Western Europe and arrived in Poland during the Middle Ages. According to legend, they heard birds singing “Po-lin,” a transliteration of the Hebrew words for both “rest here” and “Poland.”

Before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was one of the most diverse countries in Europe. Jews made up 10% of the total population and a majority in many towns. Warsaw was home to more than 350,000 Jews — about 30% of the city.

After the Nazis killed most of Poland’s Jews, the country came under decades of communist rule. Soviet authorities suppressed Jewish religious and cultural life and folded the Holocaust into an ideological narrative about the Soviets’ total victory over the Nazis — relegating Polish-Jewish history to what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Only in the early 1990s, after the fall of communism, did the idea of the Polin Museum first come into being.

Over 20 years and more than $100 million later, with the help of wealthy American donors and the Polish government, the Polin Museum opened its core exhibit in October 2014.

“For 50 years, people didn’t learn anything about what Polish Jews were about — including Polish Jews,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “What’s really happened since 1989 is people beginning to learn, and the key pivotal place for that education to take place is here.”

The ambition of Polin was distinct from the memorials at Poland’s slew of concentration camps and Nazi killing centers: This place called itself a “museum of life.”

Only one of the eight multimedia galleries is dedicated to the Holocaust. The rest follow a millennium of Jewish life in Poland, from the first appearance of Jews in the 10th century to the development of Jewish towns; life under Poland’s partition between Russia, Prussia and Austria; waves of pogroms; the birth of modern Jewish social, political and religious movements; and a period of newfound freedoms after World War I, in the Second Polish Republic, all before the devastation wrought by the Holocaust.

A final gallery also traces the post-war years, when a small number of Jews remained in Poland. After a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign in 1968 purged thousands of Jews from the country, only about 10,000 remained. This gallery also looks at a renewed curiosity about Jewish history since the 1990s, which has given rise to festivals of Jewish culture across Poland, many of them organized by non-Jews.

Dariusz Stola, a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the museum’s first director, said that Polin arrived at the perfect time — when interest in the Jewish heritage of Poland was surging at home and interest in the Polish heritage of Jews was surging abroad. (About 70% of the world’s Jews have roots in Poland, according to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor emerita of New York University and chief curator of Polin’s core exhibit.)

Today the museum has been visited more than 5 million times, with about half of its visitors from Poland and half from other countries. Its collection of accolades includes the European Museum Academy Award and the European Union’s Europa Nostra Award.

“The Polin Museum was an outcome of the opening of Polish society after 1989, of democracy, of certain liberal principles — such as the idea that people are different and we should live together — but it also contributed to these developments,” Stola told JTA.

But the past 10 years have also brought challenges for people who work in education about Poland’s Jewish history. Between 2015 and 2023, a nationalist-conservative government made controlling history a central part of its platform, promising to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate a so-called “pedagogy of shame” — which meant stifling discussions about Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime.

In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in the Holocaust. Although its penalty has changed — lawmakers downgraded it from a crime punishable with three years in prison to a civil offense — the law remains in effect today.

Stola was among the casualties of the eight-year government, which accused him of “politicizing” the Polin Museum after an exhibition that documented Poland’s antisemitic campaign of 1968. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019, despite winning a competition to extend his tenure.

Still, Stola believes that Polin has triumphed in educating the Polish public about the Jewish history in their midst. He pointed out that even those who oppose the museum’s contents have been forced to contend with them.

“There was a moment a couple of years ago, when a group of antisemites made a little campaign online: ‘This is Poland, not Polin,’” Stola said in his remarks at the 10-year anniversary gala. “I’m pretty sure they had never heard the name ‘Polin’ before we opened this museum, so they also learned something.”

For Jews in Poland and abroad, Polin presented an opportunity to learn about Polish-Jewish heritage beyond the most-remembered story of death and destruction. At the Auschwitz memorial in Oświęcim, a regular parade of Jewish students, tourists and officials leaves dizzy with despair — but Polin sought to inspire other feelings, too.

“Many of our Jews in Poland today didn’t even grow up knowing they were Jewish, so one of the challenges is for people to learn about their history — and also have a great sense of being proud,” said Schudrich. “This is a place where someone who has Jewish roots can come and learn, wow, look what my ancestors have created.”

That offering has made the museum some high-profile friends in the United States. The actor Jesse Eisenberg spoke remotely at the gala about visiting Poland to shoot his new film “A Real Pain,” about two cousins who travel there to learn about their grandmother’s Holocaust story, based on his own roots in the country.

Eisenberg joked that when he arrived for filming last year, he was annoyed to see the Polin Museum built on a site he remembered being empty during his first trip to uncover his family history.

“I was initially frustrated because it conflicted with my image of that set from 2008, but when I went in the museum, I was just overwhelmed,” said Eisenberg, who has applied for Polish citizenship. “I cannot wait to go back.”

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the chief curator, said Polin rose from a demand to understand what vanished from Poland together with most of its Jews. Unlike many other Holocaust museums in Europe, Polin’s founding was not based on a collection of Jewish relics and remains — but on their absence.

“This museum is built on the rubble of the ghetto, on the rubble of the pre-war Jewish neighborhood,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor emerita at New York University,  said at the gala. “That is for me a very powerful symbol, because we began without a collection. We’ve now formed a collection — we have over 19,000 objects — but our greatest asset wasn’t a collection. Our greatest asset was the powerful story of the largest Jewish community in the world.”

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