Art Of The Day Weekly

Letter from Warsaw: a Jewish memory

Nearly 3.3 million in 1939, maybe 15,000 persons today. The Jewish population in Poland dramatically decreased and the Shoah is obviously responsible for this. While there already was a museum dedicated to the Warsaw uprising, there was a great need for a general view of the Jewish presence, that marked ten centuries of the country's history, since the 11th century (according to the legend, the Jews who were persecuted in Germany found refuge in the mythical forest of Polin, where the barks of the trees bore the verses of the Talmud), up to the latest wave of emigration in 1967-68. Now this vaccum has been filled with this glass museum, symbolically fractured down its middle, designed by Finnish architects Lahdelma & Mahlamäki. The museum holds a few pieces such as paintings, religious objects, and even some food ration tickets. But, based mainly on references -photographs, movies, models - and reconstitutions such as that of a shtetl or the synagogue of Gwozdiec with its superb mural paintings, it covers an extremely rich history. There are golden ages under Casimir the Great for example in the 14th century, and persecutions - even in 1946, the residents of Kielce accused the Jews of a ritual murder on a Christian child. The quantity of information can be disconcerting but it meets the wishes of the designers: while we know how the Jews of Poland died, we know a lot less about how they lived. A way of partially renewing with the thread of memory.
• The Polin museum of the History of the Jews in Poland was inaugurated on 28 October 2014.

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