Jason Francisco

Polin

Jason Francisco

The ambition of the newly-opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews––called “Polin” for short, the Hebrew name for Poland––is nothing less than to put 1000 years of Jewish life in Poland in a box, and to do it in a way that thinks outside-the-box. The box which should not act as a box is no ordinary box. It is a large and lavish structure located directly across from the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw’s Muranów section, the bustling pre-war Jewish district where the Nazis created and then destroyed their largest and most notorious ghetto. The museum’s mezuzah is made from a brick from the ghetto’s rubble. Conceived in 1993 and under construction for seven years, the museum has been hugely successful in its first month, receiving tens of thousands of visitors since its grand opening on October 28, 2014.
So what’s in the box?

In a word, what’s in the box is an extravaganza. In a phrase, it is part treasure chest, part fairytale theater, part high-tech expo, part sound and animation lab, part scholarly pop-up book, part multimedia kindergarten, and part solemn carnival. More than a museum per se, it is better called a museum-experience, a sequence of encounters rather than a temple of precious objects (though it does contain many remarkable objects).

Organized chronologically in eight sections, “Forest,” “First Encounters 960-1500,” “Paradisus Iudaeorum 1569-1648,” “The Jewish Town 1648-1772,” “Encounters with Modernity 1772-1914,” “The Jewish Street 1918-1939,” “Holocaust 1939-1945,” “Postwar Years 1944-today,” the museum’s core exhibition presents a braided story of Jewish-Polish relations and internal Jewish life. Religion, culture, business and economics, politics, art and literature––all of these domains are present in each section of the exhibition, with the balance between them shifting constantly. Each section of the core exhibition is comprised of subsections which focus on discrete events, personalities, and locations. While designed as a continuous flowing experience, there are spatial distinctions that correspond to interpretive distinctions about the periods represented. The first five sections, covering the years 960-1772, are organized in open, curved spaces, something like an intestine, with the spaces becoming gradually harder, boxier and smaller in subsequent sections. This shift culminates in the Holocaust section, which consists of small, angled passages in the manner of fractured Cubist sculpture.

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