Jewish Museum in Poland: More Than a Memorial

PETER S. GREEN

New York Times

January 9, 2003

WARSAW - Several times a week, the tour buses pull up to the monument to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, spilling out dozens of Israeli students or military cadets for a brief ceremony to honor the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Each year, more than 100,000 Israeli and American Jews visit Poland, viewing plaques that mark significant sites in the wartime ghetto and visiting former Nazi death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkenau or Maidanek, where three million Polish Jews and millions of other Jews were put to death.

The visitors come to honor the memory of the lost Jews, but they see little more of the country, in which Jewish life was effectively destroyed. As Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz
Cimosziewicz noted in a recent interview, "These visits result in them perceiving Poland as just one big cemetery" for Jews.

Now, with the government's support, a group has drawn up plans for a $60 million interactive Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to rise this decade just yards from the
memorial in the heart of the former ghetto.

The American architect Frank Gehry, the son of Jews who emigrated from Poland before 1939, will design the building.

The idea for the museum grew in part out of the extraordinary searching of the national soul that followed the revelations two years ago that the Jewish residents of the town of Jedwabne were killed by Polish villagers, not occupying Nazis.

Much as Roman Polanski's current film "The Pianist" showed that some shred of Jewish life and Polish decency survived World War II, this museum is an effort to show that for eight centuries, Poland was a vibrant center of Jewish culture.

Today, Poland is a country of 39 million people with only about 15,000 Jews. But on the eve of World War II, one in 10 Poles was Jewish, with Jews constituting up to one-third of the population of cities like Warsaw.

"We can't tell two stories, the history of Poland and then history of the Jews, because simply they exist together and they must be told together," said Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, who leads the fund-raising effort for the museum.

Supporters of the project, who include Jews and non-Jews, see it also as an attempt to counter the widespread image of Poland as a deeply anti-Semitic country - an image burnished after World War II by anti-Jewish riots and the expulsion by the then ruling Communists of about 20,000 remaining Polish Jews in 1968.

Some Polish intellectuals say the country has started to face its past.

"This really happened with Jedwabne," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a professor of logic at Warsaw University and a member of the board of the Union of Polish Jewish Communities. "Everything has been said, there are no taboos. All the things of Poles murdering their neighbors have been discussed, and no one can say `I haven't heard
about it,' as they could have even two years ago."

But the situation is still complicated. Poland's Catholic primate, Jozef Glemp, the cardinal of Warsaw, has long taken an equivocal stance on anti-Semitism. When President Aleksander Kwasniewski traveled to Jedwabne in 2001 to make a formal apology to Jews on behalf of Poland, Cardinal Glemp refused to join him.

Meanwhile, the rabidly anti-Semitic radio station Radio Maryja, run by the Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, has remained widely popular. And in Gdansk, the Rev. Henryk Jankowski continues
to preach anti-Semitic sermons at the church of St. Brygida with little rebuke from his church superiors.

Jews began settling Poland in significant numbers in the 13th century; by the 16th century, they were the first Jews in Europe to win the right to self rule.

Poland was home to some of Judaism's greatest scholars and Yeshivas, or religious schools. Many of Poland's prominent cultural figures have been Jewish, including Mr. Polanski,
the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and the author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Much of Europe's richest Jewish culture emerged from Poland - from medieval scholars to the
mystical Hasidic movement.

"Until 1900, when New York replaced it, Warsaw was the heart of the global Jewish diaspora," Ms. Junczyk-Ziomecka said.

Museum exhibits will include a recreation of a Warsaw street from this golden age, a theater with a recreated performance, a virtual synagogue, and a recreation of the Warsaw ghetto itself.

Historians have spent several years creating an electronic archive of documents, official registers and family photographs from Poland's now-vanished Jewish communities that will be part of the exhibit.

Supporters say the museum must be built quickly, before the last of those who remember Poland's rich Jewish heritage are gone.

"We won't be alive much longer to tell people about it. We must leave something behind," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the former Polish foreign minister who during World War II was liaison between the Polish underground and the Warsaw ghetto. He was named a "righteous gentile" by Israel for his efforts.

Jerzy Halbersztadt, a prominent historian who has been named the museum's project director, said the new museum is needed in order to ensure that the conversation about Poland's past that began with the Jedwabne revelations is continued.

"A lot has changed in the knowledge and attitudes of Jews towards Poles and Poles towards Jews," Mr. Halbersztadt said. "But mainly it is limited to the elites. What is needed is mass education, and in my opinion it is needed on both sides."

Even among supporters of the museum, there are those who worry that it looks too much to the past.

"I am sick and tired of people burying me, even with the best intentions in the world," said Konstanty Gebert, editor of the Jewish monthly magazine Midrasz.

He suggested that some of the museum's money should go to help build Poland's Jewish community, like supporting Jewish elementary schools in Warsaw and Wroclaw or helping
young people who are rediscovering their Jewish origins.

"It is wonderful that they are building the museum, that the history of Polish Jews will not fade into oblivion, and that Polish kids will go there and it will help fight anti-Semitism," said Malgorzata Szymanska, a 22-year-old who helped found a liberal Jewish community in Warsaw. "But that's a lot of money to put into history. Why don't they see that there are Jewish people who want to continue Judaism, who are fighting to be Jewish?"