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| POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews |
Museums can
mean and have meant many things, but I guess that the most general definition
of it in contemporary terms would be, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it:
“institutions that preserve and interpret the material evidence of the human
race, human activity, and the natural world.”
Many are open to public view, and can exhibit everything from art to
dinosaur bones, fire engines, famous baseball players or chocolate. One that has recently opened in Warsaw,
Poland (2013) completely blew my mind: POLIN, the Museum of the History of
Polish Jews. I made a one-day trip to
Warsaw from Berlin a couple of weeks ago (it takes less time to fly between
those cities than between Dallas and San Antonio), and spent my whole day
there. I should have gone for two and
stayed over.
The museum
is very large and beautifully designed, and totally integrated into the digital
age. It is more than just a collection
of artifacts, rather it is a journey, through digital magic, through a thousand
years of Jewish history in Poland, and the core exhibition is laid out as a
sort of directed maze through which you wander through time, with all kinds of
mixed media evoking and explaining the historical trip, and simply gathers you
in.
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| Map of the Core Exhibition Space |
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| Tower of San Martín, Teruel |
I first
became aware of it through an interest in vernacular architecture, especially two
regional groupings of specific types of buildings made with inexpensive
materials. In each case, the building
and certainly a lot of the architectural painted decoration was done by Muslims
or Jews, both of whom shunned human representation. The building techniques
were those of all kinds of buildings in their respective regions. One is a
group of medieval churches in Aragon, Spain, built mainly in brick and ceramics
in the 14th to 16th centuries, mostly by Muslim workmen
with local materials. Many of these
survive, and their gorgeous decorations are undergoing thoughtful
restoration. The other was a group of
wooden synagogues, built mostly in the 17th and 18th
centuries by Christian and Jewish carpenters, in present-day Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, likewise beautiful
and distinctive designs in wood, many of their interiors lavishly decorated
with painted wildlife, plants and words.
None of these survive. Many
simply deteriorated over time, as Jewish populations dwindled or shifted; those
that remained were destroyed during World War II—Nazi casualties along with the
populations that attended them.
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| The Wooden Synagogue of Zabludow |
Fortunately,
those that made it to 1939 were documented by Polish photographers, and in
1957, the Architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka published a wonderful book
of many of the surviving ones, republished as Heaven’s
Gates in English in 2003, reproducing the photographs and presenting plans and
drawings too. I was able to get the English edition a number of years ago in Krakow, and now it has been reissued
as a paperback, but so far as I know, only available at the museum. Also in 2003, an American architect, Thomas Hubka
published a superb detailed study of just one of these buildings, entitled Resplendent Synagogue, dealing with the
one at Gwozdziec.
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| Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka |
Hubka’s text
was in inspiration. It was decided to
reconstruct the painted interior and exterior of the ceiling of the Gwozdziec
synagogue as the centerpiece of the new Warsaw Jewish museum. The job was given
to Handhouse studio in Massachusetts, under reconstruction specialists Rick and
Laura Brown, who are neither Polish nor Jewish, but quite a number of the
students from several different countries participating in the project were. There were also Polish millennials who had
never met real live Jews before. They
researched materials and construction methods, as well as the sort of paints
used in the originals. In 2013, their
ceiling as well as the gazebo-like bimah
(Torah-reading platform) was installed in the new museum as its centerpiece.
It was to
see that reconstruction that was my primary reason for making the trip, with a
secondary one that my grandfather came from Poland (Brzeziny) and had spent
time in Warsaw as well, before seeking better opportunities, first in England
and finally the U.S. The museum gave all
my grandfather’s stories that I had heard in childhood context, and helped me
understand the American Immigrant experience that shaped my parents as
well.
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| The Old Country, 1920's: No Thanks! |
Everything
I had heard about the Old Country had sounded negative: poverty, ignorance and
prejudice. The photos I had seen of impoverished Jewish towns, or shtetls, Fiddler on the Roof not withstanding, made it seem awful. I was glad to be an American, and glad that
my grandparents had come here, beyond the fact that if they had lingered behind,
they would have been wiped out. A trip to Krakow several years back had been charming, but the pilgrimage to
Auschwitz nearby pretty much convinced me to vow never to revisit Poland or anything
Polish again. The discovery of the wooden synagogues book made me think that
maybe there was something more, and the Museum changed everything.
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| Isidor Kaufman: Rabbi in Jablonow Synagogue |
To visit
the core exhibition, you go downstairs and enter the labyrinth, beginning in
the 14th century, when traveling Jews in the area were asked to
leave their weapons at the synagogue door before entering (so resonant
now)! Winding through tentative
beginnings—life for Jews, with no homeland to go to and no military clout was
always dicey, since they were allowed in at the whim of the places they
meandered through—into their gradual settling down both in cities and small
towns. It was a precarious journey, but they managed to survive, into a short golden age in the 17th century under the relatively permissive
Council of the Five Lands (four in Poland and one in Lithuania), when they had
some autonomy. They managed reasonably
well (except for a rampaging Cossack massacre in 1648), mostly under direct
protection of the Aristocracy, who employed them. They kept their distinctive dress, customs,
and regional jargon (later to evolve into Yiddish), and also to the professions
to which they were restricted. The
grandest of the wooden synagogues were built then, and the Gwozdziec
reconstruction takes pride of place in the museum as a symbol of that era.
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| The Gwozdziec Reconstruction |
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| The Gwozdziec original ceiling |
The museum
beautifully evokes those times via models, artifacts, maps and recreated sounds
(though mercifully no smells). The
visitor is channeled into ever-changing spaces, each devoted to a different
aspect of daily life and larger religious and cultural events; lighting levels,
spotlighting, and even the colors of the spaces evoking or explaining different
topics. Some rooms are large, such as
the one with a model of 17th century Krakow; some are almost niches
or nooks. Drawers can be opened,
revealing objects of significance. For
later times, there are photographs, newspapers and film footage. In each room or gallery niche, the visitor is
encouraged to look for and read texts and examine pictures and things that
suddenly bring everything to a personal level.
As the
history becomes turbulent again, through Poland’s own tragic partitions and the
waxing and waning of anti-Semitism from without and sectarian conflict from
within, the spaces wind in on themselves. Marking the beginning of the
secularism of the “Enlightenment,” they become somewhat more rectangular. With the Yiddish literary movement,
paralleling so many of the linguistic revivals of diverse ethnic European minorities at that time, I enter into more familiar territory: this was the culture of my
grandparents. Along with it came labor
movements and protests, and for the first time, prominent participation by
women. It also explains the strong
Socialist and Communist leanings of many American Jewish immigrants then (and residually,
Bernie Sanders, who is from my generation). Unsaid but always present is the
thought of where that culture might have gone if it hadn’t been so abruptly
extinguished.
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| Alley-courtyard, Warsaw, 1920's |
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| The Museum's street evocation |
A very tall
corridor-like passage evokes a street in a Jewish neighborhood in a city: it
reminds me of a photo of one such alley in Warsaw, though it’s actually based
the prewar Zamenhofa Street, by the present museum (and a strategic place
during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising); the museum street has real cobblestones. But the light is eerie and gray, with
indistinct figures projected at the end of street, which leads into the very graphic, jagged and angular spaces of the Holocaust.Poland was particularly gruesome at this
time, since all the major death camps were located within its borders. The black ceilings seem lower here and low
lighting adds to a sense of claustrophobia. I’ve been to many other Holocaust
museums and Auschwitz too, but coming to it from the rest of this museum world,
it is particularly poignant.
The postwar
galleries are sort of anticlimactic, since there are very few Jews in Poland
now, but having this big museum in Poland is at last a tribute to what
was. Though it’s gone, there’s a
fascination there now to find this culture and treasure it s remnants by the
Poles themselves. When I was there,
there were not only foreign tourists (including a bunch of elderly Israelis
with their Hebrew-speaking guide), but large numbers of local visitors and
groups of school children. Maybe some
day real Jews might even come back.
One
postscript: the realization that up to about a century ago, women were just as
repressed here as they were in most places at that time. During the time it functioned, I would have
been banned from the glorious Gwozdiec prayer hall; women had to sit upstairs
in a narrow space relegated to them, where they could enjoy the view through a four-inch
slit cut into the wall that excluded them.
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| Thomas Hubka's reconstructed view of the women's section in Resplendent Synagogue |
And another
Postscript: Hitler was rumored to have actually planned his own Jewish Museum
in Prague: “The Museum of an Extinct Race,” displaying confiscated Jewish
artifacts from destroyed synagogues and private homes, first from Bohemia and
Moravia, later from all over Europe, as evidence of the total destruction he
was carrying out (it did involve the survival and preservation of many of these
objects). POLIN represents a dignified and thorough tribute to what Hitler
wiped out, but affirms that Jews are hardly extinct! Ha!
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For a brief article on the diverse nature of museums see The Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
The two best books on wooden Synagogues are:
Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven's Gates. Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Krupski I S-KA, Krakow, 2003
Thomas C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue. Architecture and Worship in an eighteenth Century Polish Community, University Press of New England, Hanover, 2003.
For a briefer treatment of wooden synagogues and links online see:
