Galicia Jewish Museum
Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja | |
 Galicia Jewish Museum in Kazimierz | |
 | |
| Established | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Location | Kraków, Poland |
| Type | Historical |
| Collection size | History of Polish Jews in Galicia |
| Visitors | 30,000 |
| Director | Jakub Nowakowski |
| Website | http://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
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]
.JPG)
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]
Empty Void – photographs from Próżna Street
The Artist: "I visited ulica Próżna (Próżna Street) for the first time in April 2009, when I moved to Warsaw, Poland. I found an empty street, accurately reflecting its Polish name: próżna translates to ‘vain’, but can also mean ‘empty’ or ‘void’."
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[6]
Souvenir, Talisman, Toy
Souvenir, Talisman, Toy is an exhibit and intercultural dialogue project that seeks to understand and debate the popularity and meanings of Polish-made figurines depicting Jews. The goal of this project is to showcase the variety of cultural, religious, economic and political influences on the figurines, and to foster dialogue among those who hold different perspectives on their meaning. The website, www.jewishfigs.pl, is a trilingual (English, Polish, Hebrew), participatory site where the public can document and upload their own figurines and share in the dialogue.
The Galicia Museum is presented "phase II" of an earlier exhibit at Krakow's Ethnographic Museum, showcasing a selection of figurines, videos, and visitor responses as a prompt to further dialogue.
Memory Project
The exhibition was born out of artist Roz Jacobs’ need to recapture something that was destroyed – the life of a Jewish boy named Kalman who was separated from his sister, never to be seen again. The exhibition presents a series of Kalman’s portraits, painted based on his single surviving photograph, along with Kalman’s story and the stories of other members of the Jacobs family. The exhibition addressed the universal themes of memory and loss through the story of one family and illustrates the transformative power of art. “In painting Kalman,” says Roz Jacobs, “the sadness and loss became stronger, but so did my uncle’s presence. And in coming close to feeling the pain, I also feel the presence of the lost one.”
Agnieszka Holland about the exhibition: “The Memory Project: the film, the paintings, the whole exhibit is an extraordinary endeavor. An attempt to resurrect the memory of a murdered boy: fragments of a tale told by his sister - an American mother and grandmother today; 2 photos that survived; his portrait painted over and over by the author, like a mantra - all of this is made to dig up out of oblivion the fragile reminiscence of a being”.
Street art Jewish style
This extraordinary exhibition showed murals inspired by Jewish culture in its broad sense. Works have been designed and executed by artists invited especially to work in our Museum’s exhibition space. The exhibition will show the works of such artists as: Nawer, Dariusz Paczkowski, Mikołaj Rejs, Pikaso, Adam Niburski and a group associated with the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts: Jan Kutryba, Weronika Kasprzyk, Paulina Lichwicka and Ola Piórek. Using modern means of expression, the artists presented their view of the lively and colourful Jewish culture. The exhibition is curated by Jacek Kabziński and Artur Wabik.
21 x 21 - The Contemporary Jewish Community of Krakow
The 21x21 exhibition profiled 21 Jewish men and women in contemporary Kraków. In the pictures we see the small, but diverse and revitalizing community. Each of the exhibition's subjects is shown in two ways - in a formal portrait and in more action-oriented shots. The diptych format allows the viewer to examine each person presented whilst getting to know them better through glimpses of their daily life or favourite things.
The 21x21 exhibition was prepared by the Galicia Jewish Museum and the Jewish Community Centre (JCC). The photographer was Bartolomeo Koczenasz.
References
- ^ a b Chris Schwarz, 59, Dies; Photographer Who Honored Polish Jews, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2007
- ^ http://www.galiciajewishmuseum.org/aktualnosci/galicia-jewish-museum-krakow-appoints-new-director
- ^ Galicia Jewish Museum: Museum History
- ^ http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/aktualnosci/tuesday-17092013-1800-opening-of-the-exhibition-soshana--collector-of-worlds
- ^ Galicia Jewish Museum: Department of Education and Research
- ^ a b http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/