The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is slated to open in the fall of 2013, is the first and only museum to focus on the history of Polish Jews as a whole. Visitors of the Museum’s Core Exhibition will soon find themselves journeying through forests full of legends, navigating bustling streets, reading books in cafes and admiring intricate ornamented ceilings.
Thanks to the $7 million in collaborative and matching funds awarded by the Koret Foundation and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture that the Museum can now move ahead in the development of its Core Exhibition.
The Koret and Taube Foundations latest donations are a milestone in the development of the Museum’s Core Exhibition and are crucial to its completion. The donations enable work on the exhibition to enter a new phase of production.
The Core Exhibition is the heart and soul of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Eight galleries, occupying more than 4,000 m2 of space, will present 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland. The exhibition brings to life the world of Polish Jews, once the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world.
The journey through the Exhibition begins in an evocative Forest – a space of legend, imagination, sounds, voices and magic. On this journey through one thousand years of Polish Jewish history, one will be able to stop and admire a 85%-scale replica of the roof of the now lost XVII-century wooden synagogue from Gwoździec, along with its ornamented ceiling, recreated by students using traditional materials, methods and tools; or walk down a bustling inter-war street, strolling past shops, theaters and cafes and glancing at political posters.
The purpose of the exhibition is to restore the Polish and Jewish memory of historical events, which are the common history of both Poles and Jews. This is the first museum exhibition in the world to address this subject, while showing the whole story. The exhibition is based on primary sources, iconography, documents and multimedia elements forming a chronological and thematic narrative. www.jewishmuseum.org.pl