Before World War II three Jewish museums existed in Poland: Mathias Bersohn Museum of Jewish Antiquities, opened in 1910 in Warsaw; the Museum of the Jewish Kehilla in Lviv, opened in May 1934; the Museum of Jewish Art opened in 1935 at the YIVO Institute in Vilnius. The outbreak of the war interrupted the activities of Jewish museums in Poland. The Third Reich and the Soviet Union, for obviously different ideological reasons, were not interested in preserving such institutions. The Germans confiscated the collection of the Bersohn Museum; in spring of 1940 it was carried off and pillaged. Its fate remains unknown. The Soviet occupational authorities closed down the museum in Lviv. In the years 1939–1941 the Art Museum in Vilnius continued, albeit with difficulties, its activities, first under the Lithuanian regime and then under the Soviet occupation. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union the most valuable items from the collection of the YIVO Museum were carried off to Frankfurt. The last attempt of those long-lasting efforts to preserve the national Jewish heritage was the idea of the Jewish Museum proposed after World War II by the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts but it was not implemented.

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.

A work in progress, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw offers a new vantage point for considering the wider question of what constitutes a Jewish museum and the role such museums can play in Europe today. Will it be a Jewish museum, however that is defined, a Polish museum, a Holocaust museum by another name, or something else? What will be the relation of the “museum of life”, as the Museum resolutely defines itself, to Holocaust education and commemoration, without becoming a “Holocaust museum”? This essay explores these questions from an international perspective.

This article seeks to explain and evaluate coverage of early modern Polish Jewry in the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. The author describes his own role in the development of the museum’s galleries and explains, with reference to the historiography of East European Jewry, the decision-making process behind choices made with regard to Polish-Jewish history.

The State Museum at Majdanek was created in November 1944, with its first permanent exhibition officially opened in September 1945. Although the creators of the exhibition did not marginalize the subject matter connected with the extermination of Jews intentionally, the main goal of the Museum at that time was to lay the foundations of national martyrdom in post-war Poland. At the end of the 1940s Majdanek became a symbol of international martyrdom. The “Jewish” exhibition opened in 1946 as one of the so-called “national barracks” and functioned until the end of the decade, when the state policy turned towards cold war isolationism. The exhibition that opened in 1954 was mainly a propaganda tool of the communist regime, marginalizing the Holocaust subject matter by presenting it as one of the elements in the “destruction of millions” intended to annihilate the Slavic nations. In the 1960s the Jewish subject matter was still not officially tolerated by the communist state, but the authors of the 1962 exhibition (which remained the same for over 30 years) prepared it with much greater care and accuracy. Moreover, ambiguities and defects of the exhibitions from the communist period were not fully corrected in the exhibition opened in 1996, seven years after the fall of the communist regime. The exhibition techniques used for its creation hindered museum visitors from gaining comprehensive information concerning the Holocaust at Majdanek from the general narration. Nevertheless, a positive tendency started with this exhibition: the highlighting of facts concerning individual victims. This idea was further developed in 2008, when a modernization program was implemented in the Museum. Putting emphasis on the narration concerning the extermination of Jews at Majdanek was one of its elements. The new permanent exhibition, which will be opened at the Museum in the nearest future, will strive to show that the history of mass murder which took place at Majdanek is a sum of individual people’s fates and tragedies.

Rola, the leading Polish anti-Semitic weekly (published in Warsaw in the years 1883–1913), referred to the Talmud quite often on its pages. In addition to the less numerous texts which attempted to provide the historical circumstances of the Talmud’s origins and its subsequent history, there appeared—more frequently—statements that argued the disastrous impact the Talmud had had on the mentality of the Jewish people till modern times. Relying on the Talmud interpretations authored by August Rohling, Rola carried the arguments of German anti-Semitism onto the Polish grounds. The most important issue for the periodical were the Talmudic references to the social life of the Jews, and especially to the relations with the non-Jewish world. Acknowledging that there were also noble and sublime passages in the Talmud, the former were indicated as being dominant, having provided an incentive for a fraudulent, hypocritical attitude towards non-Jews, especially Christians. In one article the hostile attitude of the Talmud towards women was pointed out. Both the Talmud itself and the adjectives “Talmudic” and “Talmudistic” constituted in Rola’s vocabulary the synonym of falsehood, deception, duplicity in the attitude and behavior of the Jews, or—more rarely—the backwardness or even absurdity of some of their beliefs.

“The Tumblers” is one of the stories from Nathan Englander’s debut collection of short fiction entitled For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). In this story a group of orthodox Jews from the Chelm ghetto tries to impersonate a troupe of acrobats in order to escape transportation to the death camps. The humorous stories of the Sages/Fools of Chelm, popularized for a wider international audience by Isaac Bashevis Singer, are a vital part of Yiddish folklore. Englander’s story delivers a fresh perspective on the lost world of the Eastern European shtetl by juxtaposing comedy with the horrors of the Holocaust in an unlikely combination of farce, irony, and profundity.