Warsaw Fellowship 2016

The Significant Other In Poland

Yosef Palanker, 2016 Ideas Incubator Fellow, Poland

Today, we attended a short lecture by the wonderful director and curator of the Polin museum, Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. She addressed the functions of museums by posing the question of “what does it mean to be a witness?” and discussed how we, as witnesses through active engagement can produce and in many ways revive culture and heritage, namely Jewish culture within Poland.

Following the speech, we explored the magnificent award winning museum. Through the many forms of multimedia, we traced Jewish life in Poland during the middle ages until today. We celebrated how Warsaw once became the epicenter of Jewish life in the Jewish Diaspora and mourned for how it met its terrible fate during the Holocaust. But ultimately, we explored how Poland, which was once a very diverse state became, following World War Two and the Holocaust a very homogenous nation. Witnessing this cataclysmic transformation of homogeny, we further explored how Poland is at a crucial standstill, faced with the upcoming surge of a very visible and rapidly diverse newcomers.

We heard from two keynote speakers, Anna Zielińska, a leader in Warsaw’s Jewish community and Daniel Slomka, a senior HIA fellow about contemporary anti-Semitism in Poland. After defining anti-Semitism and providing a short and simple history of its ideology, they addressed how defacement of Jewish property like Jewish cemeteries and commemorative sites are a continual problem within Poland. Within many of these cases, the perpetrators are rarely ever found and brought to justice and those hateful messages take weeks and sometimes months to be scrubbed clean. These acts of anti-Semitism, perpetuated by however small group of bandits displays how unique the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is within Poland considering its small population of Jews.  Furthermore, Poland’s anti-Semitism has become cloaked with anti-Zionism rhetoric, where some rallies for Palestinian nation are transformed into a verbal blood bath of the world’s Jewish Problem. All of these problems for a community, following the exodus of 1968 that was left at a mere 7000 for the entire state.

Once the lecture was over, our two fellows Yosef and Joanna orchestrated a conversation with the group. They addressed the positives and negatives about the comparative study of genocide. Can we benefit through possible forms prevention by comparing the Holocaust to other genocides or do we ultimately reduce the unique experience of each terrible moment, like the Holocaust in the world’s consciousness? Within this line of thinking about the Holocaust, we addressed issues of authenticity in representing the Holocaust. Is there a hierarchy in Holocaust artifacts like photographs, testimony, or videos when representing the Holocaust? Can photographs bring us closer into the horrors of the Nazi regime or should we bow to the horror as unimaginable and unrepresentable. 

Yosef Palanker