Dark days and rich lives recalled at Jewish museum

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin on Tuesday inaugurated a Warsaw museum chronicling the 1,000-year history of Poland's Jewish community, all but wiped out during the Holocaust.

Built on the site of the former Warsaw ghetto, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews will be "a game changer" for Polish-Jewish relations, said the country's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

"That does not mean relations were bad, but it will make them better," he said.

The museum has been open to the public since April 2013 and has already drawn more than 400,000 visitors - in part thanks to its eye-catching design.

The serene, glass facade of the building is broken only by a wide, irregular opening that serves as the entrance and main hall.

According to its Finnish architects, Rainer Mahlamaeki and Ilmar Lahdelma, the fracture symbolizes the Red Sea crossing of Jews fleeing Egypt.

The museum - named after the Hebrew word for both "Poland" and "rest here" - uses narrative to bring the past to life, said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, director of the museum's core exhibition.

Rather than showcasing artifacts, the museum recounts that past with the help of multimedia installations and by recreating scenes of everyday life.

The narrative includes dark chapters such as the World War II Holocaust, during which Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews in occupied Poland, and the antisemitism that was a fact of Jewish life throughout Europe, Poland included.

But the exhibition also sheds a rare light on the richness of Jewish life in Poland, once home to the world's largest Jewish community.

Jews first arrived in the Middle Ages. By the mid 18th-century, 750,000 were living in the United Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania after being chased out of western Europe.

By 1939, that number had risen to 3.3 million Jews, or around 10 percent of the entire Polish population. Only between 200,000 and 300,000 survived the war.

Most emigrated, and now the active Jewish community numbers only around 7,000.

Tens of thousands of other Poles have Jewish roots, but either do not identify with the community or are unaware of their heritage.

The museum's creation has coincided with an unexpected "coming out" of a third-generation of descendants of Jews who survived the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust has cast a shadow onto this great civilization and the generations of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, as if those centuries of life were little more than a preface to the Holocaust," museum director Dariusz Stola said.

"But that is absurd. This museum stresses that 1,000 years of Jewish life are not less worthy of remembrance than the six years of the Holocaust."

Private donors, Diaspora Jews and Poles raised 33 million euros ($42 million) to pay for the museum's core exhibition, while the city of Warsaw and the Culture Ministry funded the building to the tune of 42.5 million euros.

AFP - AP

(China Daily 10/29/2014 page10)