JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND YEARS
- core exhibition in brief
by Prof. 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.
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 one more gallery: 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 said “Po-lin.” According to these
stories, it was divinely ordained that Jews should come to Poland and stay here until the Messiah
arrives. 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
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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 (960 –1500), they
cross the threshold between legend and
history. The earliest mention of Poland
appears in the travel account of Ibrahim
ibn Jakub, 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 the right to
mint a certain number 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 until the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned, starting in 1772, was established in
this period.
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 Jews. 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 (1569 –1648), 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 was one of many complaints about the
social order. 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.
Visitors next pass through a dramatic corridor of fire, which is dedicated to the Khmelnytsky uprising
in 1648–1649, during which the Cossacks massacred the Polish nobility and Jews, holding them
responsible for the misery of the peasants. A period of recovery followed a century marked by war.
Visitors then enter The Jewish Town
(1648-1772), 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, beautifully set against
large
projections
of
the
Commonwealth’s rural landscape, and
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 arise 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,
the story of Jewish Encounters with
Modernity (1772 –1914) 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
stands in stark contrast to the desperate situation of Jewish workers in the poor Łódź neighborhood
of 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 three 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 On
the Jewish Street (1918 –1939), a interwar gallery.
Behind the multimedia 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 will 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
(1939 –1945) 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 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 (1944-to the present) 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 postwar
Poland’s tumultuous 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? Can
you be a Jew alone? 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,
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 the 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.
CORE EXHIBITION IN NUMBERS:
4200 m2 of exhibition space
73 interactive multimedia positions
120 passive multimedia positions
170 original objects (historical) are part of the exposition
200 copies, models and facsimiles
100 tons of steel used to build the walls and mezzanines
8500 files for the needs of multimedia and scenography
30 tons, the weight of the synagogue roof
Media contact
Grzegorz Tomczewski
Media Relations
gtomczewski@polin.pl
+48 535 050 204
Iwona Oleszczuk
ioleszczuk@polin.pl
+48 604 451 422