Moshe Rosman
Studia Judaica, Nr 2 (32), 2013, s. 47 - 75
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a daring enterprise that symbolizes the new Poland. It relates the story of the Jewish experience in Poland in a way that reflects the metahistory implicit in Polish-Jewish historiography written over the generation. The main points of this metahistory are: for most of its history Poland was a multiethnic and multicultural country; Poland’s Jews did not live in “shtetl-land” but Poland, being not only in the country but of it; a story of achievement and stability punctuated by crisis and persecution, Polish-Jewish history can be described as categorically Jewish and distinctly Polish; there is the Polish-Jewish history in the nineteenth century; the Jewish experience in Poland was not one of unrelenting antisemitism and the Shoah was not the culmination of Polish-Jewish history. The Museum also alludes to various historical controversies.