Today ground was broken on the building of another museum in Warsaw, this time dedicated to the centuries of Jewish heritage in Poland. A ceremony took place at the site where the Museum of the History of Polish Jews will stand in a few years, after nearly two decades of planning. The museum will aim to showcase 800 years of history of Polish Jews, the largest community of Jews in the world until the Holocaust.
The project was conceived and started in the early 1990s by Shaike Weinberg, a Warsaw-born Israeli. Weinberg was the directory of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and envisioned another museum in Poland, in what had been the centre of pre-war Jewish life. The site of the museum is Warsaw's former Jewish quarter, which at its height was once home to a community of 400,000 Jews, and later became the site of the Jewish Ghetto. Opposite the museum stands a monument to the heroes of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising. But while the museum will feature extensive information on the Holocaust, its focus will be Jewish culture before the war, and centuries of Polish-Jewish tradition.
The museum is planned to open in 2010 during the 10th anniversary of Weinberg's death, but if you can't wait that long to get a taste of Jewish culture, head to Krakow this week for the annual International Festival of Jewish Culture, going on through July 1st. Meanwhile, in Warsaw a travelling photography exhibition from Tennessee in the USA will be on display until the 24th of August at the Academy of Fine Arts. The display features photographs and stories of Polish-American Holocaust survivors, liberators and U.S. Army witnesses. |