An empty lawn in the heart of what was once the Warsaw Ghetto will soon become a place not only of mourning, but of celebrating the Jewish life that flourished in Poland before it was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Jewish leaders and President Lech Kaczynski will break ground Tuesday for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It sits on a highly charged site - next to the city's monument to the Jews who resisted the Nazis during the 1943 ghetto uprising, and just down the street from the rail siding where many were deported to their deaths.
The multimedia museum will have exhibits on the Holocaust, but organizers say its primary purpose is to remember the vibrant Jewish community that flourished in Poland for a thousand years through varying degrees of anti-Semitism and discrimination.
'This will not be another Holocaust museum,' said Marian Turski, one of the originators of the idea for the museum, and president of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland. 'It will be a museum of life,' she said.
To many, such a center is long overdue in a country that had Europe's largest Jewish community until World War II, numbering about 3.3 million, or 10 percent of the total population. The society produced a vibrant Yiddish-speaking culture and a string of great scientists, writers and thinkers.
Museum creators say the project will chronicle the fate of Jews in their Eastern European homeland with interactive and multimedia displays and video - not just traditional artifacts and exhibits - in order to give visitors a deeper sense of what was lost. ..."we want our visitors to feel as if they were in the actual place, and intuitively to grasp the richness of the inner life and artistic breadth of Polish Jews in the 18th century," said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an American scholar leading an international team developing the exhibition.
Long overdue, indeed, but worth celebrating.
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