Taste the history – springtime activities within the "Jewish Cultural Heritage" project
Within "Jewish Cultural Heritage" project we organise many various activities during springtime. At POLIN Museum we create events for adults and children, develop the oral history collection, set up mobile outdoor exhibition and "POLIN on the Meadow" program.
"Night of Museums" at POLIN Museum
This year’s "Night of Museums" at POLIN took place on 14 May under the slogan "What’s Cooking" which is also the title of our temporary exhibition which opened for viewing last March. As part of the "Jewish Cultural Heritage", we invited our guests to discover Jewish culinary culture together.
Animations within the space of core exhibition proved very popular, as well as a family workshop, urban game and multimedia installation in the POLIN Museum building’s main hall. The visitors had an opportunity to find out what indeed is cooking at our Museum—they visited places within the building which are normally not accessible to the public, and they found out what working at a museum really entails. In total, 2,822 people visited us on the "Night of Museums". Some of our activities were also available in Ukrainian.
We will continue to carry out activities as part of the "Jewish Cultural Heritage" project within the space of the "What’s Cooking" exhibition—all the events accompanying our temporary exhibition are part of the project. In June, we will invite you to a culinary workshop for seniors, to a workshop in culinary photography for children with disabilities, and to walks for people within the autism spectrum.
Children’s Day
In the last days of May, we invited children with their guardians to celebrate with us the International Children’s Day at POLIN Museum. On that special day, we also celebrated multiculturalism by discovering the cuisines of the world with our youngest guests.
Together, we set off on a city tour to solve culinary riddles and to taste delicious food from all the corners of the globe. We played a family game within the space of our temporary exhibition. During a workshop, we learnt how to make shortbread and we also learnt… the Hebrew alphabet! Last but not least, we had lots of fun listening to the concert of Tęgie Chłopy (Sturdy men) band. In total, over 1,000 people took part in the Children’s Day events, including a large number of families from Ukraine.
Developing the oral history collection
As part of the collaboration with our Norwegian partner, the Norwegian Centre for the Holocaust and Minorities Studies, we document the fate of Polish Jews from the personal perspective of witnesses to history and activists in the field of preservation of Jewish heritage.
The interviews, recorded by POLIN Museum staff, will supplement the oral history collection which already boasts over 1,000 accounts. We conducted the interviews with a special focus on the contemporary role and significance of Jewish communities and institutions, the importance of Holocaust commemoration in Poland and Norway, and the Jewish identity within a multicultural society. A number of the interviews will be shared under the "Oral History" tab on our Virtual Shtetl portal and on the "Oral history/POLIN Museum collection" YouTube channel.
Activities related to the oral history collection are part of the process of developing POLIN Museum portals: Virtual Shtetl and Polish Righteous.
"They Fill No Space" exhibition is on the road again
"They Fill No Space. Recalling the Memory of the Polish Jews in the Urban Space" mobile outdoor exhibition is setting off on the road again. It was produced in 2017 in cooperation with the Norwegian Centre for the Holocaust and Minorities Studies in Oslo. In the coming weeks, it will be displayed in Białystok, Ełk, Olsztyn, Tri-City (Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot), Bydgoszcz and Toruń.
We tell the story of the selected fragments from Polish Jews’ history, culture, economy and everyday life with the help of over 30 murals from different locations in Poland. The exposition in Polish towns and cities is accompanied by a rich program of events developed in cooperation with local partners. We have planned, among others, historic walks, discussions, workshops, urban games, and even biking tours.
"POLIN on the Meadow"
We invite everyone to come to the green space next to the POLIN Museum building and relax together with us between 25 June and the end of August. In 2021, we said good-bye to Bolesław Leśmian, patron of the previous five editions of our summer cultural program, which this year has been renamed to "POLIN on the Meadow"! The program includes, among others, culinary workshops, meetings with poetry, movement classes, concerts, outdoor cinema, and classes for seniors. Many of the events will be held in Ukrainian.
