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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 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 TomczewskiMedia Relations

gtomczewski@polin.pl+48 535 050 204

Iwona Oleszczukioleszczuk@polin.pl

+48 604 451 422