Warsaw museum exhibits 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland

[IndianaGreen]

Last update - 19:48 16/03/2009

Warsaw museum exhibits 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland

By The Associated Press


Pre-1939 photo released by Jewish Historical
Institute in Warsaw shows a group of orthodox
Jewish men in a park in Poland. (AP)

A new exhibition by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has brought together photos and documents depicting the rich history of 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland.

The exhibition, previewed Monday in Warsaw, goes on display April 1 at the European Parliament in Brussels and will run nearly a week.

With old paintings and photographs, the show recalls how Jews found refuge in Poland during the Middle Ages after being expelled from many parts of Europe. It also stresses the mark the community made on the larger, mainly Roman Catholic Polish community.

"That knowledge is little known outside Poland," said European Parliament lawmaker Ryszard Czarnecki, who came up with the idea for the exhibition.

"People in the West know - and very rightly so - about the Holocaust, but they don't know what was before the Holocaust, the hundreds of years of a very rich history," Czarnecki said. "The Jews had their significant share in creating the Polish state, its economy, architecture, culture and art."

The institute drew from its archives to present religious Jews, synagogues and Yiddish-language newspapers and posters.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1071479.html

Prewar European Jewish population: 9.5 million.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_nm.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005143&MediaId=3372

1 September: The Nazis invade Poland (Jewish population: 3.35 million, the largest in Europe). World War II begins.

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/holocaust/chronology2.html

[babylonsister]

1. This looks great. Thanks. nt

[emilyg]

2. Thank you.

[struggle4progress]

3. From Jedwabne to Kielce

Violence and Antisemitism toward Jews, 1918-1946
Sara Bender

... From the liberation of Poland in January 1945 onwards, Poland was flooded with flyers and leaflets calling Poles to disinherit Jews of their property, drive them out of Poland, avoid any contact with then, not buy from them or sell them anything and boycott all things Jewish. These calls found a receptive audience in Poland, so much so that in the first months after liberation underground gangs belonging to the Polish right caused the deaths of hundreds of Jews returning to their home towns or making their way there, and murdered Jews in their homes, on the streets, in public buildings, on public transport, on trains etc. In at least five incidents that occurred in 1945, Jews were murdered as a result of a medieval-style blood libel, and in 1946, following the repatriation agreement signed between Poland and the Soviet Union, the attacks were expanded to include trains carrying Jews returning from the USSR to Poland. On the whole, some 1,500 Jews were killed in Poland in the period between November 1944 and late 1947.

In May 1945, five Jews lived in Kielce; in early 1946 their number reached 306, and in May of the same year, it decreased to 163. About 40 Jews living in a building on Planti Street were members of a Kibbutz organized by the "Zionist Youth" movement. They were survivors who came to Kielce to attend a preparatory course prior to their emigration to Israel ...

A rumor of a missing eight year old Polish child, which spread in Kielce, caused on July 4th 1946 a pogrom in which Poles murdered in cold blood dozens of Jews. Although since the liberation of Poland in 1945 hundreds of Jews were killed by Poles all over Poland, the Kielce pogrom was unequalled in both the number of victims killed at one place, and the brutality of the pogrom ...

http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:oXOZGc2bpdwJ:icj.huji.ac.il/conference/papers/Sara%2520Bender.pdf+Kielce+pogrom+1946
http://icj.huji.ac.il/conference/papers/Sara%20Bender.pdf