The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Images by Wendy Schneider, the Hamilton Jewish News
The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is built on the rubble of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
The museum is a striking architectural landmark that tells the story of a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland.
The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes sits directly across from the POLIN museum.
The Gwozdziec Synagogue’s reconstructed painted ceiling at the POLIN Museum is its most photographed element.
The POLIN Museum was designed by the Finnish architectural firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki.
From the museum’s light filled spacious lobby, the visitor descends into a virtual forest evoking a rabbinic legend about the first Jews to arrive in Poland hearing the Hebrew words “Po Lin” — “Rest Here.”
A display representing the more than 300 Jewish publications in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish during the interwar period (1918–1939), when Poland was a global centre of the Jewish press.
The 19th-century and 1919-1939 galleries illustrate the political, social, and cultural developments that fueled Zionist ideology in Poland.
During the interwar period, Warsaw remained one of the most significant centres of the Yiddish-language film industry. Jewish filmmakers played a vital role in the Polish film industry during that period.
The Holocaust gallery is a deeply immersive, somber, and emotionally heavy section of the Core Exhibition, focusing on the destruction of Polish Jewry between 1939 and 1944.