"(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt" Exhibit Opens

Opening of "(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt"

On May 17, 2024, POLIN Museum opened "(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt." This groundbreaking exhibition juxtaposes a vivid portrait of this prewar Jewish town or "shtetl", as recalled by memory artist Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916–2009), with the “post-Jewish” town it became. While this exhibition focuses on Opatów, its story is repeated in hundreds of post-Jewish towns in Poland today.

The exhibition stages a dialogue between the "shtetl," specifically the artist’s hometown of Opatów as represented in his paintings, and today's Opatów as a post-Jewish town, based on documents, maps, photographs, and interviews. This is a story of silence and historical amnesia, but also of an awakening of local inhabitants to all that was lost with the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors and of their efforts today to remember them.

The curators searched the Opatów town archive, talked with local historians devoted to recovering the town’s Jewish past, visited a local collector of all things Jewish, and used non-invasive archeological techniques to map the mikve, the ritual bath, which still exists in the basement of what is today a candy factory. They salvaged the wood from a kindergarten attended by both Christian and Jewish children before World War II, which was about to be demolished, and have used that wood to fabricate the exhibition. The curators also talked with Opatów inhabitants and explored what the Jewish past of their town means to them today.

At the heart of the exhibition are the paintings by memory artist Mayer Kirshenblatt, who left Opatów for Canada in 1934, when he was 17 years old. Self-taught, he began to paint what he remembered about his "shtetl" at the age of 73 and created almost 300 paintings during the last 20 years of his life. There in vivid color are the bustling marketplace, the 500-year-old synagogue, the cemetery, the holidays, the trades, and even the local kleptomaniac. The exhibition features about 70 of his original paintings.

The exhibition, which will close on December 16, 2024, was made possible thanks to the visionary gifts of lead funder Tad Taube and Taube Philanthropies and the generosity of Caryl Ratner and CBRAT Foundation in loving memory of Joseph and Miriam Ratner.

For more information: "(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt"

To purchase tickets online: Tickets