Poland Reconnects to Jewish Past with Museum - Nytimes.Com 8/30/13 10:35 AM

Poland Reconnects to Jewish Past With Museum - NYTimes.com 8/30/13 10:35 AM

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Piotr Malecki for The New York Times Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor, right, at the new Jewish museum in Warsaw. By NICHOLAS KULISH Published: April 18, 2013

WARSAW — In the entryway of the new Jewish museum here this FACEBOOK MOST E-MAILED MOST VIEWED

week, Poland’s chief rabbi unveiled an unusual sculpture: an old, TWITTER STATE OF THE ART hollowed-out brick engraved with a single Hebrew letter. 1. GOOGLE+ A Better Way to Bring Your Desktop to Your iPad The brick, an imaginative adaptation SAVE Related in Opinion 2. Gay Marriages Get Recognition From the of the traditional mezuza case that E-MAIL I.R.S. Op-Ed Contributor: The Jewish Jews put on their doorways as a sign Hero History Forgot (April 19, SHARE of their faith, came from a demolished 2013) 3. POGUE'S POSTS tenement building on Nalewki Street, PRINT Use the Airline's App, and Other Tips for Flying Efficiency Connect With once a vital part of Jewish Warsaw, REPRINTS Us on Twitter and it serves as an apt symbol of the 4. Farewell to Gus, Whose Issues Made Him a Follow Star @nytimesworld for relationship between Jews and Poles: international troubled, buried and only recently breaking news and unearthed. 5. House Bid to Undo Dialysis Cuts Shows headlines. Lobbyists’ Muscle Twitter List: Reporters and Editors When dignitaries from around the world gather here on Enlarge This Image Friday on the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto 6. Seeking Edge in Academics, Chinese Spend Summer in U.S. uprising, they will find the imposing Monument to the

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Ghetto Heroes dwarfed by the grand museum, a shining 7. FRAME symbol of Warsaw’s transformation from a dark and A Feast of Street Art, Luminous and Legal cheerless post-Communist city to a thriving Central European capital. 8. CHOICE TABLES Portland, Me.: Locavore in Menu and Décor In neighboring Germany, the relationship with Jews may be troubled but it is much simpler. German society has 9. Like a Wheel, but Turning Slower accepted collective guilt as the perpetrator of the Nazi genocide and recognizes the Jews as its victims. But Polish THE TV WATCH identity is also bound to the nation’s victim status after a 10. The Elusive Pleasures of French TV Series history of centuries of conquest, partition and occupation.

The New York Times Among civic leaders here there is a strong sense that Go to Complete List » Show My Recommendations Enlarge This Image Poland will never fully recover from its 20th-century traumas until it recognizes its Jewish past, and the museum is seen as a major step. “Jewish memory is becoming part of Polish memory,” the chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said in an interview at the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, “and the building we’re sitting in is the best example of that.” Piotr Malecki for The New York Times Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, placing a mezuza at the About 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland at the outbreak of Museum of the History of Polish Jews. World War II. The last census showed a mere 7,508 people Enlarge This Image identifying themselves as Jews in 2011, and that was a leap from the 1,133 who said they were Jews in 2002.

Clad in glass panels on the outside, the museum has a curved passageway inside that runs from front to back, almost like a natural canyon, which the building’s architect has compared to the parted Red Sea. A meticulous Piotr Malecki for The New York Times recreation of the colorful painted ceiling of a wooden A recreated synagogue painting. synagogue is complete, but coiled cables rise from the bare concrete floor, waiting to be connected to the multimedia Ads by Google what's this? displays that have yet to be installed. "Canon vs Nikon:" Although it chronicles centuries of Jewish history in Poland, the museum was not an Which is better? Here is the truth exclusively Jewish undertaking. The Polish government, Jewish groups and private donors one of them doesnt want you to know worked together to raise roughly $100 million. The city provided the land free of charge UglyHedgehog.com and, along with the federal government, covered the construction costs. The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland raised money for the permanent exhibition, which was not ready for this week’s soft opening but will be ready next year.

“Economically we are not a poor country anymore,” said Waldemar Dabrowski, the minister of culture’s liaison to the museum. “As a society it is healthy to be morally capable of doing such a thing.”

While many significant donations came from American organizations and individuals, Poland’s richest man, Jan Kulczyk, who is not Jewish, gave $6.4 million last summer. “When the Jewish nation and the Polish nation, when we are together, when we look in the same direction, it is great for us, great for Poland and great for the world,” said Mr. Kulczyk, whose worldwide holdings include oil, real estate and beer.

It has not always been easy. A proposal to build a monument to Poles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust on the same square has provoked passionate opposition. Writing in the leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, the Holocaust scholar http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/world/europe/poland-reconnects-to-jewish-past-with-museum.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& Page 2 of 5 Poland Reconnects to Jewish Past With Museum - NYTimes.com 8/30/13 10:35 AM

Barbara Engelking said, “This is a small fragment of Warsaw that belongs to the Jews and that should not be appropriated.”

When 1,250 Warsaw high school students were recently asked which group suffered more in the war, Poles or Jews, nearly half, 44 percent, said the two groups had suffered equally; 28 percent answered Jews; and 25 percent said Poles.

Poles are particularly sensitive about the Nazis’ decision to build death camps on occupied Polish territory. It was on a visit to Warsaw in 1970 that Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany dropped to his knees in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes.

The large black stone and bronze monument remains a moving icon of suffering and martyrdom. On one side, a relief depicts women, children and the elderly trudging to their deaths. On the other stand armed figures, representing the brave but doomed fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which began on April 19, 1943.

When the permanent exhibition at the museum is complete, it will tell the story of the Holocaust, as well as the difficult chapters in Polish-Jewish relations, including the murders of camp survivors after the war and the Communist government’s 1968 anti- Semitic campaign. But it also covers the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland, from the shtetls to the cities, from successful businessmen to pioneering Yiddish writers.

Organizers and curators repeat the same phrase over and over again: “This is a museum of life.” They hope to remind visitors of the centrality of Jewish life to Polish society and history.

“You can’t put the pieces back together again, but you can build bridges,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Canadian-born ethnographer in charge of the permanent exhibition. “They’re fragile, but you can build them.” Her father left Poland in 1934 at the age of 17. While working on the project, she learned to speak Polish and acquired Polish citizenship last year.

Maciej Bulanda, 23, who with his father designed the brick mezuza holder, became interested in his Jewish great-grandmother as a teenager, learning that she had three brothers who perished in the Holocaust and even finding two of their graves in Lodz.

“Our parents’ generation did not have the courage or inclination or interest to find out about that,” Mr. Bulanda said of the growing interest among young Poles in exploring their Jewish pasts. “We were brought up in a completely different world.”

That does not mean it is always easy. The same poll that examined the question of Jewish versus Polish suffering found that 61 percent of students said they “would be unhappy” to learn a boyfriend or girlfriend was Jewish, while 45 percent would rather not have a Jew in their family.

“When you’re 7 years old and playing football in the courtyard, in a fight you hear people using Gypsy or Jew as swear words,” Mr. Bulanda said.

After the museum announced a design competition for the mezuza, Mr. Bulanda brought up the possibility of entering at the family dinner table. His father, Andrzej, an architect, had the idea of using a brick.

They used old maps of the city to find where Nalewki Street once ran and excavated a spot in what is now a public park and was once the foundation of No. 10, No. 12 or the retaining wall between them.

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Piotr Wislicki, chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute, speaking to an audience in the museum’s auditorium after the mezuza was unveiled, recalled: “When I was a little boy I was afraid to look up when someone said the word Jew. I had the urge to run. As a young man I only told my close friends, swearing them to secrecy.”

“Today,” Mr. Wislicki said, “I am standing in front of you proud to be a Polish Jew.”

Hanna Kozlowska contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 19, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Polish Museum Repairs a Tie to a Jewish Past.

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