History of Poland's Jews To Go on Display

BY ALEX STOROZYNSKI - Staff Reporter of the Sun
The New York Sun

November 28, 2005
http://www.nysun.com/article/23554

The government of Poland and the city of Warsaw have allocated $26
million and donated land in the former Warsaw ghetto for the construction of a new Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Jewish philanthropists have raised about $7 million for the exhibits and are trying to raise another $17 million.

The museum's backers are planning two events in Manhattan this week. On Wednesday evening, a reception at an Upper West Side apartment will help raise funds for the museum. And on Thursday, the Center for Architecture will host a discussion focusing on the winning design of the building by a Finnish architect, Rainer Mahlamaki.

One speaker at Wednesday's event will be Michael Berenbaum, a former president and chief executive officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and a former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is one of the Jewish scholars assisting a Warsaw University historian, Jerzy Halbersztadt, the museum's director, in developing the museum.

Said Mr. Berenbaum, "The Polish audience has to deal with the presence of the absent and the absence of the present. Jews lived among them for 1,000 years, and the city has remnants of the presence of Jews, but now they have to grapple with the fact that they are absent."

For a thousand years, the history of the world's Jewry ran parallel to that of Poland. From painters to poets, bankers to brewers, and craftsmen to holy men, Jewish life, culture, and religion flourished in Poland.

Even though there are only between 10,000 and 30,000 Jews living in Poland today, before World War II there were 3.5 million. But now, there is so much interest in this lost history that the Jerusalem Post recently reported: "It's hot to be Jewish in Poland these days, as re-energized youth and those reclaiming roots they never knew they had enjoy a cultural and religious renaissance."

Since the collapse of communism 15 years ago, Poland has held a Jewish festival each year in Krakow. And in Warsaw, there are two Jewish festivals each year: one celebrating Jewish authors and another dedicated to Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who left Poland when he was 31 to move to New York City.

Mr. Singer was one of the millions of Jews who had his beginnings in Poland. Another was Artur Rubinstein, the great piano virtuoso from Lodz, Poland.

As the new museum's deputy director, Eva Junczyk-Ziomecka, tells it, in 1945, Rubinstein was invited to play at the San Francisco Opera House for diplomats who had gathered from around the world to sign the United Nations charter. Rubinstein was so upset to see that the Polish red and white flag was not among the banners hanging in the great hall, that his first reaction was to say that he would not play. His wife convinced him to take the stage.

"I don't see my country, Poland," Rubinstein said, motioning toward the flags. So before he began the concert, he played the Polish national anthem and asked the audience to stand.

While the world has heard of Jews from Poland like Rubinstein, Singer and Israel's founding leaders such as Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, and Shimon Peres, there are millions of other stories waiting to be told.

The earliest historical record of Poland was written by Ibrahim Ibn Jacob, a Moorish Jew from Spain who arrived around 966, the year that is regarded as the birth of the Polish nation. Through the centuries, Jews who were persecuted in Western Europe migrated to Poland after a succession of kings pledged to protect them and allowed them to organize their own communities through self- government.

Poland's most significant historical figures were often close to the Jews. Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff to enter a synagogue and declared anti-Semitism to be a sin. Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the leader who re-established a free Poland after World War I, was so close to the Jews that some referred to him as the "Jewish Grandpa." And American Revolutionary War hero General Tadeusz Kosciuszko had the support of the Jews during his War against the Russian tsar to free the serfs. Colonel Berek Joselewicz assembled 500 Jewish volunteers against the tsar to form the first Jewish battalion to fight since biblical times. For his service, Colonel Joselewicz received the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest military medal.

While there is resurging interest in Jewish life in Poland, creating a museum about Poland and the Jews is no easy task. On the one hand, Polish kings invited Jews to immigrate to Poland, where their culture thrived for centuries. On the other hand, Polish Jews often suffered from discrimination and even pogroms.

"There is a love-hate relationship," Mr. Berenbaum said of Poland and the Jews. "Remember, people only coexist either in part because it works, or because they get used to the misery that they cause each other."

In a phone interview from Warsaw, Ms. Ziomecka, the museum's deputy director, said, "Most of the European Jewry came to Poland because they wanted to come and stayed for generations. For most of the centuries there was a coexistence of two nations in one country. Why not in Germany, why not in France? Why did they pick Poland? Because for centuries, Poland was friendlier to Jews than any other European country."

Ms. Ziomecka said that the museum expects to attract 500,000 visitors each year.

Mr. Berenbaum said Poland's government should make the point: "Jews lived here; they not only died here, but they lived here."

Jews not only lived in Poland. They flourished. Poland became the center of the world's Talmudic scholarship. Jewish painters and writers also bloomed.

And few probably recognize the name Schmuel Gelbfisz, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879, and then moved to America and changed his name to Samuel Goldwyn, becoming one of Hollywood's most legendary movie producers.

New York University professor Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, who is also a consultant on the project, called the museum "an intervention to make a difference. If Jews visiting Poland in the last three decades have come to Poland to commemorate the Holocaust, they will visit concentration camps, the former ghettos and monuments, and leave. The museum is hoping to give visitors the opportunity to reflect on Jewish history in Poland as being broader, wider, deeper, and richer than they would have considered."

Ms. Gimblett said the museum will have an education component, where schoolchildren and Jewish descendents will be able to do genealogical and other research in person and online. "I see it as a portal to Poland," Ms. Gimblett said.

The museum's Web site is at www.jewishmuseum.org.pl, and the phone number for its North American Council, whose chairman is Stephen Solender, is 212-836-1536.

November 28, 2005 Edition - Section: Arts and Letters