POLIN Museum 2022

Statement of Andrzej Rojeck, President of American Friends of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Inc.

Winner of the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award, POLIN Museum is recognized as one of the leading museums of Jewish history in the world and the only one dedicated to the history and legacy of Polish Jews. More than 4 million people have visited since we opened in 2014, and despite the pandemic and economic downturn, visitors have been returning. We do hope you might be among them.

POLIN Museum will be commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 2023. We hope you might consider coming to Warsaw for this landmark event. We will open a special exhibition dedicated to the experience of civilians in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Uprising. There will also be concerts and guided tours related to the Warsaw Ghetto, in addition to the official commemoration at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. This will be a most memorable event.

During the past year, POLIN Museum has many successes to its credit. We would like to share a few highlights with you:

  • POLIN Museum launched a comprehensive project to investigate and combat antisemitism in Poland, with the goal of changing public perceptions and attitudes. This project is supported by more than 300,000 USD from the European Commission and donors from the United States.

  • POLIN Museum’s Global Education Outreach Program organized an international conference, “Operation ‘Reinhardt’ and the Destruction of Polish Jews.” Scholars from around the world came to Warsaw to present the latest research on the Holocaust in Poland.

  • Such a Landscape, a temporary exhibition featuring the work of Wilhelm Sasnal, a leading contemporary artist, exposed traces of the Holocaust in the Polish landscape hidden in plain sight. The exhibition, which focused on the difficulty in facing this history in Poland today, raised many questions. What can artists contribute to historical awareness and moral reckoning? How can “artistic truth” illuminate “historical truth”? Such a Landscape was named best art exhibition of the year in Poland and attracted more than 75,000 visitors.

  • POLIN Museum and its staff responded immediately to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, providing hot meals to Ukrainian refugees, as well as internships, scholarships, and employment, and tours and programs in Ukrainian. 

  • What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture, a temporary exhibition, drew almost 85,000 visitors. More 100,000 people have been exploring the online version, available here: https://whatscooking.art/en. POLIN Museum’s TISH Jewish Food Festival, organized since 2018, helped to bring visitors to the “What’s Cooking?” exhibition and won the prestigious 2022 Europa Nostra Heritage Award.

POLIN Museum is also bringing a rich online program of lectures, debates, and workshops to you. If you would like to receive our monthly newsletter, with links to these online events, please contact aszczesniak@szih.org.pl.

American Friends of POLIN Museum works to raise awareness of POLIN Museum as the only museum in the world dedicated to the thousand-year history of Polish Jews and raises funds to support the Museum’s rich programs. Our greatest success in 2022, was the auction at Christie’s New York, where a painting donated by an anonymous donor to American Friends of POLIN Museum, was sold, with all proceeds benefiting POLIN Museum. The hammer price of $1,56 million dollars for "Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)" by Ewa Juszkiewicz, set a record for a work by this artist. We are deeply grateful to our generous donor and to Christie’s, and we are hoping for similar successes in our collaboration with Christie’s in the future.

Every gift matters. “Show your love” invites everyone to “adopt” an object and support POLIN Museum’s collection with a small gift. Featured this year are objects related to Jewish culinary culture, among them plates for fish produced in Pruszków, Branka cookie cans from Lwów, a 19th-century silver lidded platter for bread made in Warsaw, as well as paintings, postcards, and sculpture related to the history of Polish Jews. Visit POLIN Museum’s website to select and object. https://www.polin.pl/en/show-your-love

We hope you too will show your love and support POLIN Museum in bringing the thousand-year history of Polish Jews to the world.

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The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has extended the term of Director Zygmunt Stępinski

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International Conference "Operation Reinhardt and the Destruction of Polish Jews" Conference