World Jewish News

Jewish-Polish museum to open in central Warsaw.

Poland's president Kaczynski and Jewish leaders broke ground Tuesday for a landmark museum that will celebrate the history of Jewish life in Poland that flourished for 1,000 years before it was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Kaczynski and other officials, including Israeli Ambassador David Peleg, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Meir Lau and Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz signed the groundbreaking act. The leaders then used a trowel and mortar to bury the documents in the red-brick foundations of an 18th century building that was used by the Judenrat, or head of the Jewish administration in the ghetto during World War II.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews - an austere glass and limestone structure designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaki and Ilmari Lahdelma - is to be opened in two years' time.
It is being built in a central Warsaw square, next to a monument to the Jews who resisted the Nazis during the 1943 ghetto uprising, and down the street from the rail siding were many Jews were deported to death camps.
President Lech Kaczynski was to join prominent members of Poland's renascent Jewish community at the site for Tuesday's ceremony.
Officials hope the museum will become a cultural landmark to match Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, the United States' Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Berlin's Jewish Museum.
To many, such a center is long overdue in a country that had Europe's largest Jewish community until World War II, numbering about 3.3 million, or 10 percent of the total population. The society produced a vibrant Yiddish-speaking culture and a string of great scientists, writers and thinkers.

Источник: aen.ru; haaretz.com