POLIN Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Memorials

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews stands at ulica Mordechaja Anielewicza 6 in the Muranów district of Warsaw, Poland, on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940 and confined up to 400,000 people in it; deportations to Treblinka in 1942 emptied it, and the Ghetto Uprising of April-May 1943, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, was crushed with the destruction of the district. The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, unveiled in 1948 in front of the museum, commemorates the uprising. The museum building, designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma, opened in 2013 and the core exhibition opened in 2014. Its glass facade is split by a curving interior passage that evokes the parting of the sea in the Exodus story. The core exhibition is chronological and immersive, covering eight galleries from the first Jewish settlers in medieval Poland through centres of learning, Hasidism, interwar life, the Holocaust and the post-war period. Highlights include a reconstruction of the painted ceiling of the Gwoździec synagogue, a recreated Jewish street, and multimedia installations. The museum emphasises a thousand years of Jewish life rather than only its destruction. Because the ghetto was levelled, little physical fabric survives, so the museum and surrounding memorials, including the Path of Remembrance with granite markers, carry the memory. The museum is a modern institution with ongoing temporary exhibitions and educational programmes.