Jewish Museum

From Yahoo:

"Warsaw museum to celebrate Jewish life in Poland"

The box-like glass building rises from soil marked by tragedy in the heart of Warsaw's former Jewish district. At certain angles, its luminous facade reflects the outlines of a dark memorial to those who fought and died in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis. Yet despite reminders of Jewish suffering all around, the modern building will soon open as a key remembrance site of a mostly upbeat Jewish story, becoming home to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a major new museum dedicated to the 1,000 years of Jewish existence in Polish lands. "It is a museum of life," said Sigmund Rolat, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and American benefactor who has helped bring the museum to life. "We are showing 1,000 years of a magnificent history." The museum fulfills a dream of Jews from around the world to preserve the rich legacy of their ancestors by creating what will be the first-ever museum of Polish Jewish history. Meanwhile, the Polish government, a major partner, also seeks to celebrate both the country's Jewish past and its own past eras of cultural tolerance and diversity. In doing so, the young democracy hopes to burnish its Western credentials and shed a reputation for anti-Semitism that has hung over it in recent decades.

Jewish history was largely ignored in the communist era, and the fact that the museum has risen with the help of the Polish government makes it a monument to a new consciousness and wealth. Museum officials say it will open in stages, with educational and cultural programs starting in April to mark the 70th anniversary of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Then in December the heart of the museum is scheduled to open: a core exhibition of eight interactive multimedia galleries organized chronologically. Using diaries, memoirs, film footage and other original sources, the story will unfold in the voices of those living in the historical moment. With its opening, the museum is expected to join the ranks of world-class Jewish history museums like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. What will set it apart will be its focus not on tragedy, but on creation, achievement and life. In keeping with that theme, the Warsaw museum will devote just one of the eight galleries to the Holocaust. Visitors, in fact, will not be able to access the Holocaust gallery without passing first through at least one other gallery, a reminder of the life that came long before and which still exists today in Poland's small but growing Jewish community.

Jews.

.^ It's good that there is going to be a museum in Poland that highlights Jewish culture and history in the country and not solely what happened during the Holocaust. While the Holocaust is a major part of current Jewish history within Poland (and the rest of the world) and deserves its own museums and memorials people need to also realize that Jews lived in Poland for centuries before World War 2. I don't agree that Poland wasn't anti-Semitic before the war and it was only after the Nazis invaded that things for the Jews turned bad. I have seen first-hand documents that prove the Poles were highly anti-Semitic long before 1939. In fact Polish universities and schools had "Ghetto benches" where the restricted number of Jews allowed to study were permitted to sit. Even after the war, the Poles continued to openly discriminate against the Jews and forced many to leave the country in the 1960s. There is a reason the Germans put all of the death camps inside Poland and that is because of the pre-war attitudes of the Poles towards the Jews. The Nazis could have put them in Western Europe or even in the Soviet Union (and they did put concentration and labor camps there, but not death camps), but they chose Poland because of the strong anti-Jewish feelings there. I'm not saying that every Pole was anti-Semitic, but the majority alive at the time of World War 2 were and continued to be through the Communist Poland period. I am part Polish and feel that a country needs to admit both the good (which most do willingly) as well as the bad (which most try not to do.)   ^

http://news.yahoo.com/warsaw-museum-celebrate-jewish-life-poland-090839505.html;