Jerusalem Post Breaking News from Israel

Etgar Lefkovits

THE JERUSALEM POST

Mach 3, 2005

The construction of a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw is a 'debt' that Poland owed both the Jewish people and the Polish nation, Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski said Wednesday.

"This museum is needed for my city, for my country, and is our debt to the Jewish people and to the history of Poland," Kaczynski said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on the start of a three-day trip to Israel.

The Mayor's first-ever state visit comes just weeks after the City of Warsaw agreed to contribute over $13 million towards the costs of the construction of the museum, with the Polish Government agreeing to pay an equal sum for the grandiose project.

In all, the $26 million that the Polish authorities agreed to fund represents nearly 80 percent of the entire $33 million budget of the museum, with the remaining funds slated to come from Jewish philanthropists and Polish-Americans, the museum's project director, Jerzy Halbersztadt, said in a telephone interview from Warsaw.

The long-planned state of the art museum, which aims to depict a millennium of vibrant Jewish culture in Poland before the Holocaust, is to be built on the site of the demolished Warsaw Ghetto.

Construction of the museum is now scheduled to get underway next year, with the museum planning to open its doors to the public sometime in 2008, Halbersztadt said.

The Polish Government's decision to fund the vast majority of the costs of the museum gave a huge boost to the project, which had previously become mired in financial difficulties.

The museum's original $63 million budget, considered immensely extravagant by critics, especially during a time of economic difficulties in Poland, was subsequently halved, and is still high by Polish museum standards, the Warsaw Mayor said.

After the renowned American architect Frank Gehry decided not to take part in the project, an international tender for the architectural construction of the museum was made public, with nine winners expected to be selected at the end of June.

The idea to create such a museum in Poland, whose Jewish community numbers around 7,000 in a country of 39 million, gathered steam over the past years following a period of national soul-searching that stemmed, in part, from the publication of a book stating that it was Poles, not occupying Nazis, who murdered thousands of Jewish residents in the village of Jedwabne.

The book, and the large media and public response it provoked, came at a time of increased Polish awareness of their mixed role in the Holocaust, and followed four decades of a virtual news and educational blackout on the subject during communist rule.

Moreover, the Polish decision to fund over 75% of the project comes at a time of blossoming Polish-American and Israeli-Polish ties, especially in the military sphere, with Poland now considered to be one of the most pro-Israel countries in Europe.

The cross-party Polish state and city funding is also seen as an attempt to counter the image of Poland as an anti-Semitic country.

"We have to free ourselves from all sort of stereotypes from the past," Kaczynski said in the interview. "Granted it is going to take a lot of time, but we have just got to do it," noting that while the average Warsaw resident was likely to be supportive of the museum, the feeling in the periphery "could be different."

In the interview, the 55 year-old Warsaw Mayor, who is considered to be a leading contender in this year's race for Poland's next President recalls how personally moved he was, when he received a photo album of the faces of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust before he came to Israel.

Then, during a visit to Yad Vashem Tuesday, the mayor recounted how heartened he was to hear from a group of Israeli high school teens that were visiting Israel's Holocaust Museum that a third of them had Polish ancestry.

"I am among those politicians who feel that, because of the past both good and bitter, it is important to maintain close ties with the Jewish people and the State of Israel," Kaczynski said.

He confessed that although he knew the number of Jerusalem residents ahead of his trip he was completely surprised by the life in the city.

"I thought that the whole city was crowded like the Old City, and that people here lived in a sense of permanent insecurity and war," he said.

"But in my short time here, I do not find it at all that way," he concluded.

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