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At new
Jewish museum in Krakow,
past seen via lens of
Poland's present
By Carolyn Slutsky KRAKOW, May 10 (JTA)
— A new museum in Krakow
hopes to fill a void in
Jewish cultural sites
in this city and offer a
new perspective on the
Jewish past. The Galicia
Jewish Museum in
Kazimierz, Krakow’s
Jewish district, opened
with an exhibit by Chris
Schwartz, a British
photojournalist who has
worked in Poland since
the early 1980s.
Schwartz collaborated
with British professor
Jonathan Webber, who
provides text for
Schwartz’s photos, and a
team of researchers on
the project, which they
said has been “10 years
in the making.
The
135 color photographs
display scenes from
contemporary Polish life
that are connected with
the Jewish past.In
five sections, the
exhibit shows modern
streets, farmers’ fields,
buildings, synagogues
and graveyards that once
were centers of Jewish
life in Galicia, the
eastern part of Poland.
The structures that
represented Galicia’s
Jewish life now are all
in ruins or completely
remodeled.A
book accompanying the
exhibit, “Traces of
Memory,” published by
the Littman Library and
University of Indiana
Press, will include 400
color photographs and
more of Webber’s text,
and will be out in the
fall of 2005.
In
the exhibit, one photo
shows faint Yiddish
writing next to a modern
city street sign.
Another depicts a ruined
synagogue, the roof long
gone and trees
sprouting from the top.
A third photo shows a
field in which a Jewish
cemetery once stood;
farmers have taken care
to plow around the
cemetery, leaving the
site untouched.At
the opening for the
museum, which is located
in an old furniture
factory that has been
transformed into a hip,
new art space, Schwartz
said people were
“universally knocked out”
by his exhibit.
He
also said it was
Krakow’s only
contemporary treatment
of its Jewish past in
the form of a museum.
Most relics of Jewish
life in Poland exist in
the form of
centuries-old synagogues.
Schwartz, whose father
is Jewish but who
considers himself “post-denominational,”
said history can be
viewed in two ways: “We
can either compare
everything to the prewar
glory, or we can realize
that it’s amazing that
anything survived at all
after the ferocity of
the Nazi destruction.”His
photos, he said, strive
to preserve what
survives. Schwartz said he and
Webber focused their
research on Galicia
because it was the heart
of Jewish Poland. “Galician Jews were
proud to be Galician, as
were the non-Jews, and
this was one of the most
exciting, thriving areas
of Jewish culture in the
world,” he said.
Przemek Piakarski,
chairman of the Jewish
studies department and
professor of Yiddish at
Jagiellonian University
in Krakow, said he
initially had low
expectations for the
museum.“I
thought, ‘Once again,
something useless,’ ” he
said. But instead, he
said he was pleasantly
surprised and enthused
when he visited.He
said the organizers
should translate the
captions, which are in
Polish and English,
into Hebrew and Yiddish
and run educational
events that incorporate
Yiddish music and
explanations. Schwartz agreed that the
next step for the museum
will be to develop
educational programs,
with everything from
dialogue programs to
debates on topics such
as “Where was God during
the Holocaust?”
Gilad Roth, an Israeli
musician living in
Krakow, said he found
the museum realistic and
moving. “Most Israelis want to
continue living; they
don’t want to go to the
past,” he said. Roth pointed to what he
said was a common
problem among organized
trips to Jewish
historical sites in
Eastern Europe by
Israelis, Americans and
Western European Jews:
They often have a very
rigorous schedule, are
heavily guarded and
have little time to meet
Jews who still live in
Poland and other Eastern
European countries.
The
Galicia Jewish Museum,
he said, gives them an
opportunity to see
beneath the surface of
contemporary Polish
cities and town to find
the roots of their
Jewish pastThe
museum’s sponsors hope
the museum will prompt a
new generation of Poles,
Jews and Polish Jews to
learn about and grapple
with this history.No
one tries to understand
what happened through
contemporary photographs.
This generation has to
look at it and
understand it for
ourselves,” Schwartz
said.
source:
JTA News Service |
