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Galicia Jewish Museum

Coordinates: 50°3′3.02″N 19°56′58.73″E / 50.0508389°N 19.9496472°E / 50.0508389; 19.9496472 (Galicia Jewish Museum)
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The Galicia Jewish Museum
Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja
Galicia Jewish Museum in Kazimierz
Map
Established2004
LocationKraków, Poland
TypeHistorical
Collection sizeHistory of Polish Jews in Galicia
Visitors30,000
DirectorJakub Nowakowski
Websitehttp://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/

The Galicia Jewish Museum (Polish: Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja) is located in the historic Jewish district of Kazimierz in Kraków, Poland. It is a photo exhibition documenting the remnants of Jewish culture and life in polish Galicia, which used to very vibrant in this area.

History

The Museum was established in April 2004 by the British photojournalist Chris Schwarz (whose father originated from Lwów), in cooperation with Prof. Jonathan Webber of UNESCO,[1] in an effort to celebrate the Jewish culture of the Polish Galicia and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in Poland.

Following Schwarz' early death in 2007, Kate Craddy became the director of the Museum.[1] She was followed by Jakub Nowakowski in 2010.[2] Both English and Polish have remained the Museum's main operating languages. Today the Museum welcomes over 30,000 visitors annually from around the world.[3]

Exhibitions

Main exhibition hall

The main exhibition of the Museum, Traces of Memory, is the result of a twelve-year collaboration between photographer and museum founder Chris Schwarz and British scholar Jonathan Webber. It commemorates the 800-year Jewish presence in western Galicia (today's southeastern Poland) through contemporary photographs of synagogues, cemeteries and other relics of the Jewish presence in the region still visible today. The exhibition is divided into five sections, representing different ways of approaching the Jewish past in Polish Galicia: Jewish Life in Ruins, Jewish Culture as it Once Was, The Holocaust: Sites of Massacre and Destruction, How the Past is Being Remembered and People Making Memory Today. A part of the exhibition is dedicated to Auschwitz concentration camp.

In 2008, the Museum collaborated with the Auschwitz Jewish Center to create the exhibition Polish Heroes, which focuses on the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. Today, the exhibition can be seen in six museums across Poland, England and the United States.

The Museum also hosts two to three temporary exhibitions. At the moment, the Museum is hosting a temporary exhibition: Soshana - collector of Worlds'. The exhibition presents paintings by Soshana (born 1927 in Vienna), an Austrian artist of Jewish descent, whose output received international acclaim. This is the first exposition of her works in Poland. The selected paintings, similar to all of Soshana’s work, are very diverse, both in terms of stylistics and subject matter. This makes her an artist who is quite hard to classify. For Soshana, painting was always (and still is) the fundamental way of experiencing and expressing the world, a way to enter into a dialogue with reality, and a way of being open to the inspirations coming from it. “To me, painting is like writing a diary,” she says[4].

Klezmer concert at the Museum (2009)

Activities

The Museum provides opportunities for groups to meet with local recipients of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations Awards as well as Holocaust and concentration camp survivors.

In addition to tours and meetings, the Museum's Education Center offers workshops, lectures, and seminars on Jewish religion and culture and the Holocaust for different age groups. It is one of the only providers in southern Poland to offer Holocaust education classes on a permanent basis for visiting schools.[5]

The Museum regularly hosts klezmer concerts and other cultural events. In 2010, the Museum became an official partner of the Austrian Service Abroad.

Past Exhibitions

Next to the temporary exhibition the Galicia Jewish Museum has three temporary exhibition spaces, and shows a range of changing temporary exhibitions that compliment the mission of the Museum, both curated in-house and sourced externally, including modern art on Jewish themes. The Museum is also the venue of choice for many international travelling exhibitions coming to Central Europe for the first time, and is an experienced tour manager for exhibitions travelling in both Poland and overseas[6]

In Hasidic Circles

The exhibition of the photography of Gil Cohen-Magen. The project of photographing the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem – a bastion of the ultra-orthodox Hasidim – began as a typical assignment for Reuters and then became an original photographic project spanning more than a decade. The result of this long-running and systematic project is a photographic essay about the communities who build their lives around the Torah, Judaism’s holiest book[7]

References

  1. ^ a b Chris Schwarz, 59, Dies; Photographer Who Honored Polish Jews, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2007
  2. ^ http://www.galiciajewishmuseum.org/aktualnosci/galicia-jewish-museum-krakow-appoints-new-director
  3. ^ Galicia Jewish Museum: Museum History
  4. ^ http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/aktualnosci/tuesday-17092013-1800-opening-of-the-exhibition-soshana--collector-of-worlds
  5. ^ Galicia Jewish Museum: Department of Education and Research
  6. ^ http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/
  7. ^ http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/

50°3′3.02″N 19°56′58.73″E / 50.0508389°N 19.9496472°E / 50.0508389; 19.9496472 (Galicia Jewish Museum)

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