By GREER FAY CASHMANWorld Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder addresses a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 2018(photo credit: KACPER PEMPEL / REUTERS)
A museum is essentially a repository for yesteryear’s arts and crafts, fashion, armaments lifestyle and more. A museum is usually built to house such objects, but rarely is the museum an essential memoir that is part of the display itself.The Warsaw Ghetto Museum currently under construction, is among the few exceptions to the rule. Not only was the building designated for this purpose already standing, but it was one of the few surviving structures within the Warsaw Ghetto. Obviously certain changes have to be made in view of the building’s new identity, and decisions have to be taken and implemented as to its content. Photographs, artifacts and documents have to be collected – and all this takes time.The official opening of the museum is scheduled for April 19, 2023 to coincide with the 80th anniversary (according to the Gregorian calendar) of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. By then, unfortunately, it is unlikely that any of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto will be in a position to attend. Most are no longer living, and the few who are still alive, are in most cases at a very advanced age, and too frail to travel.But there will be second, third and even fourth generation survivors for whom this museum is very important because it will represent part of their family histories.It’s not that Warsaw is bereft of museums that are either fully devoted to Second World War victims, heroes and events, or whose diverse displays include large sections relating to the period. Among them is the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, which is dedicated to commemorating the Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation, most specifically the uprising of 1944. There is also the Museum of the History of Polish Jews which stands in the ghetto areas.The Pawiak Prison Museum is another chilling reminder of the Nazi presence in Warsaw, though much of the building was destroyed during the war.Elsewhere in Warsaw, there are other places in which the most traumatic period in the saga of Poland’s capital are well documented.But the Warsaw Museum will be unique in many ways, because like the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw it will have roots not only for people who identify as Jews, but also for Poles who today are Catholics, agnostics or atheists, with Jewish forebears.In the late 1980s, in the course of a visit to Poland, I asked Mordechai Palzur – who served as Israel’s first ambassador to Poland following the renewal of diplomatic relations which had been severed in 1967 – to accompany me to the Warsaw Jewish cemetery in Okopowa Street, on All Saints Day.His initial reaction was to tell me that I was crazy because this was a holy day for Catholics and had nothing to do with Jews. But I argued that before the war, a third of Warsaw’s population had been Jewish, and that many Jewish families had entrusted their children to non-Jewish friends and neighbors, and even to total strangers. There had also been assimilated Jews who integrated with relative ease into the non-Jewish environment and had survived on false papers. Palzur was not altogether convinced, but decided to humor me, and we went to the cemetery together.There were scores of non-Jewish people visiting specific graves. We stopped to ask many of them if they were Jewish and did not receive a single affirmative reply, though each admitted to being of Jewish ancestry and had come to visit the grave of a parent, an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent.Over the past 20 to 30 years, increasing numbers of hidden Jews who were raised as Catholics either because their parents did not survive and therefore did not return to claim them or because their parents did survive, but in the virulently antisemitic climate of post-war Poland preferred to reject their religious identities, have begun to explore their heritage. In many cases they discovered their true identities through death-bed revelations by the people whom they believed to be their mother or father. In some cases, such revelations were traumatic because the Jewish child had grown up to be a priest or a nun, or worse still, an antisemitic skinhead.Prof. Daniel Blatman and Albert Sankowski of the Warsaw Ghetto MuseumPoland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich believes that the present Jewish demographic statistics in Poland are far too low, and that there are at least ten times as many people who halachically qualify as Jews. Perhaps more would come out of the woodwork if there was a museum with which they could identify more than with Warsaw’s currently existing museums.The building designated for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum is the former Bersohn and Bauman hospital, dating to the 19th century, which was built by Jewish philanthropists for the purpose of giving free medical treatment to children of all faiths. The building at 60 Sienna Street has been designated for preservation as a heritage site, and the museum itself is funded by the Polish government.Prof. Albert Stankowski, an historian specializing in Jewish history, is the director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. The project was adopted in November 2017 by Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki and deputy prime minister Piotr Glinski who is the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Stankowski, who is Jewish, was among the historians whose vision resulted in the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He has also written extensively about Polish Jews.Earlier this year, Stankowski was in Israel to present the Warsaw Ghetto Museum education and research project to the Israeli media, educational tour guides and Holocaust historians and researchers. He did so in collaboration with Daniel Blatman, professor of Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, who has been appointed the project’s chief historian.While this museum will not be as large as Yad Vashem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, it will have a greater sense of authenticity because it is located in the Warsaw Ghetto where 400,000 people were enclosed in a restricted area of approximately 3 sq. km. Most were sent to Treblinka, and some to Auschwitz. The museum is part of the continuing history of the area.One of the survivors of Auschwitz was Shmuel Gogol, who had been given a harmonica by famed Jewish educator Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit) who was the head of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Gogol was a natural musician and it was the harmonica that spared his life in Auschwitz where he was asked to play in the Auschwitz orchestra and to occasionally give solo performances for Nazi officers.After the war, he moved to Israel where he established a harmonica ensemble, and taught children how to play the harmonica. In 1993, he was part of the entourage of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who went to Poland to participate in the 50th anniversary ceremony of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the visit, Rabin and his wife, Leah, also went to Auschwitz where Rabin, the Sabra who had fought in several wars, gave an extremely moving and emotional addres , and Gogol again played his harmonica in Auschwitz – only this time he played Hatikva. Rabin turned to his wife and said, “Leah, sing loud! In this place we have to sing Hatikva louder than ever.”Hopefully, Gogol’s harmonica will be among the exhibits at the museum. Stankowski’s vision is to as far as possible explore the personal dilemmas and tragedies of people confined to the ghetto, which was the largest of all the ghettos in German-occupied Europe. In addition he wants to deal with diverse reactions to what happened and to present the manner in which people were deported to death camps, to disclose the identities of the Nazi perpetrators and to examine the ramifications of the German propaganda machine.Despite the cramped circumstances, the poverty and the starvation, life continued in the ghetto. There were schools, concerts, cabarets, publications and more. The diversity that existed among Jews in pre-war Warsaw, as depicted in still photographs and videos at the Ghetto Fighters Museum at Kibbutz Lochaemei Hagetaot in Israel, also existed in the Warsaw Ghetto.Blatman is keen to show how Orthodox Jews coped with the situation and how they managed to keep the Sabbath and a traditional Jewish life style. Not enough is seen of this segment of Jewish life in Holocaust memorial museums around the world, he says.Both he and Stankowski are in total agreement that the museum must serve not only as an exhibition place, but also as an education center for students, and a training facility for teachers.Stankowski acknowledges that the history of Jews in Poland has sometimes been painful, but nonetheless connected for nearly a thousand years to that of Poland itself.Many elements of Jewish history in Poland, particularly during the Holocaust years have been distorted and are undergoing renewal, he says. In this respect, Blatman refers to Jewish resistance, which for decades was attributed almost entirely to Mordechai Anielewicz and his Hashomer Hatzair group.This was extremely troubling to Moshe Arens, a former Likud politician, foreign minister and defense minister who was aware that there had been other resistance groups in the Warsaw Ghetto, most notably one led by Pawel Frankel of the Jewish Military Organization which was a right-wing Betar group compared to Anielewicz’s left-wing group. Research conducted by Arens resulted in the publication of a book Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto, plus a memorial plaque in Frankel’s name in the ghetto’s Grzybowska Street and a memorial stone in the ghetto dedicated to Frankel and to those who fought with him.Everything related to Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto will be integrated into the exhibitions and will not favor any particular group, says Blatman.The museum will not be exclusively focused on the Warsaw Ghetto, say the two scholars, but will be a reference point to other ghettos and their liquidations.
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