Museum Unveils Rich Story Of Jewish Life In Poland

The story of this great flourishing of political and cultural life is part of a 1,000-year history told in a visually striking new museum, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opens its long-awaited core exhibition to the public Tuesday amid days of celebrations. “The Holocaust has cast a shadow onto this great civilization and the generations of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, as if those centuries of life were little more than a preface to the Holocaust,” museum director Dariusz Stola said. Despite their once-significant presence, memory of the Jews all but disappeared from public discourse in Poland in the communist era, leaving postwar generations largely unaware that their country was once a multi-ethnic land where Jews and other religions lived in relative peace, even avoiding the religious wars that devastated other European lands. Built with taxpayer money and private donations including the Bay Area’s Taube Philanthropies and the Koret Foundation, the museum’s liberal message has been welcomed by young Poles, many of whom flock to the dozens of Jewish festivals that take place in Poland each year. “That narrative says that the Nazis were bad but the Poles were worse, that the Holocaust happened in Poland because the Germans realized that the Poles were so anti-Semitic they were prepared to collaborate,” said Afek, a teacher for more than 25 years. [...] the gallery on the years between the two world wars shows an outburst of Jewish cultural and political creativity along with rising anti-Semitism, without hinting at the Holocaust to come.