What can you see inside POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews?
The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened in 2013 on Mordechai Anielewicz Street in Warsaw's Muranów district — named for the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — on a site that was occupied by the Great Synagogue of Warsaw before German forces destroyed it in May 1943 as a symbolic conclusion to the suppression of the Uprising. The museum building, designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, is a clean geometric form of glass and copper-clad walls that rises from a former void in the urban fabric, its exterior deliberately understated in contrast to the weight of its contents.
The permanent core exhibition — eight galleries covering 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland from the first medieval traders through the mass immigration waves of the 19th century, the rich interwar cultural life of the 1920s and 1930s, and the Holocaust in occupied Poland — is considered one of the finest museum exhibition designs in the world. The galleries progress chronologically through reconstructed environments: a shtetl market square, a wooden synagogue ceiling (a full-scale reconstruction of a destroyed 17th-century original), interwar Warsaw streets, and the documentation rooms of the Ringelblum Archive — the clandestine record of ghetto life buried in milk cans and excavated after the war.
The museum's name, POLIN, is a Hebrew word meaning "Poland" — but in a folk etymology it is also read as the Hebrew phrase po lin: "here you shall rest" or "here shall you dwell," representing the welcome that Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Western Europe found in Poland from the 10th century onward, when Poland was one of the few places in Europe where Jewish communities could legally settle, own property, and practice their religion. The museum received the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2016 and is widely considered the most important museum of Jewish history built since the postwar period.