POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Museum of a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
POLIN Museum stands in Muranów, the Warsaw district that was enclosed as the ghetto during the German occupation, directly opposite the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. The building, designed by the Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, opened in April 2013; the core exhibition followed in October 2014. Its restrained glass and copper-mesh envelope is split by a curving canyon-like atrium, a form often read as a passage through parted waters. The museum is run jointly by the state, the city and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute.
The core exhibition traces a thousand years of Jewish presence in Polish lands across eight galleries, from medieval settlement and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to the interwar republic, the Holocaust and the post-war decades. Reconstructions, documents and multimedia are used rather than a large holding of original objects; the painted ceiling of the seventeenth-century wooden synagogue at Gwoździec is a centrepiece. Alongside it the museum mounts temporary exhibitions, a rotating contemporary art gallery, guided city walks in the former Jewish quarter, and an education and research programme.
Highlights
- Core exhibition covering 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland
- Reconstructed painted roof of the Gwoździec wooden synagogue
- Mahlamäki's curving atrium cut through the glass-walled building
- Faces the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Muranów
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