Polin highlights

The Polin Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, which opened at the end of 2014, covers 1000 years of history, and it is also an educational center (it holds conferences, public lectures, and programs for different sectors of the population) for Poles to learn about the Jews who used to be so plentiful in the land.  The core exhibition is divided into seven galleries, each representing a historical period.

These two summaries describe elements from the “Encounters with Modernity (1772 –1914)” gallery.

Poland lost its independence
for 123 years

Dat: The modern era in Poland begins when the Polish state “disappears” at the end of the eighteenth century.  Poland was partitioned between Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire, and by 1795 the Polish state was no longer on the map.  This was depicted in the first room in that gallery with an empty, royal throne – this is Poland.  Facing the throne, hung from the ceiling, were three separate royal portraits: Francis I (Emperor of Austria), Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia), and Frederick Wilhelm (King of Prussia).


Poland was restored to political independence in 1918.

paintings by an interwar Polish
Jewish artist from Yung Yiddish

Rebecca: The gallery "On the Jewish Street (1918 –1939" included information about Jewish avant-garde artists of the interwar era.  The term avant garde refers to elite artists who are not trying to appeal to a wide public, but to other artists and intellectuals – they tend to experiment and in this era drift away from realism.  During the interwar era in Poland it was a good time to be such an artist, but that ended with the rise of Nazism.  The Nazi regime began to regulate artists in terms of subject, style – for example, Hitler had a background in painting, and he opposed non-representational art and favored realism.  In 1937 he ordered Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Ziegler to organize two traveling exhibits: Degenerate Art (the pieces he thought were bad and socially destructive) and Pure German Art.

Yiddish paper featuring
religious news

Yiddish newspapers

Sydney: Also in the gallery "On the Jewish Street (1918 –1939)" was a display of the many newspapers written for and read by Jewish people.  Some of these were in the Polish language, and some were in Yiddish.  You can tell by the photos of the front pages of the newspaper that some newspapers focused on arts and culture, some were religious, some were political.  If Jews were reading these newspapers, they were educated.  This section also showed that some Jews had gained prominence in independent Poland. 

Art: The Holocaust gallery included photos and charts of the events leading up to the “Final Solution,” which was the murder of the Jews.  The museum focused on the Polish lands conquered by Germany, where one of the first things done was to make Jews move to restricted parts of a town.  These were called ghettos.  One wall chart listed the names of the 600+ ghettos scattered throughout Poland.  Later, the Jews in the smaller ghettos were forced to move to the larger ghettos, and from there they were sent to death camps.  In all, 6 million Jews were murdered, after years of terrible treatment and torture.



The last gallery in the museum was "Post-War Years (1944-present).  The Polin Museum itself is part of that story, and so is the huge phenomenon of cultural tourism in Poland.  In our visit to Poland, we exemplified both of these!