The Galicia Jewish Museum is celebrating its 20th anniversary!

The museum was created in April 2004 by Chris Schwarz, a British photographer in cooperation with Jonathan Webber, a British anthropologist, and for two decades it has been serving all those who want to get to know and understand Jewish history and culture. In these 20 years, we have organized innumerable exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and discussions. Since 2004, we have been visited by tens of thousands of guests from Poland and abroad. We want to continue our work and to present the variety of Jewish culture and heritage to all those who have an interest in Jewish life in Poland.

That is why, in this special year, we want to assure you that these 20 years is just the beginning: the Galicia Jewish Museum intends to intensively develop its program of activities now and in the future, for decades to one. Come and celebrate our anniversary with us!

Jacek Stawiski
Galicia Jewish Museum Director

 

A Speech by Prof. Jonathan Webber delivered on the Galicia Jewish Museum’s 20th Anniversary

 

A BIRTHDAY GREETING
From Jonathan Webber
Co-founder of the Galicia Jewish Museum

First of all, let me wish the director and all the staff of the Galicia Jewish Museum a very happy birthday, and many happy returns of the day!

The Chinese have a saying which comes to mind on such an occasion: “When you drink the water, remember the spring.” Of course I am very happy to offer good wishes to you all – but I do not think that I can take too much of the credit for establishing the Museum in 2004. The credit for establishing this museum goes really to Chris Schwarz – he had a vision of a cultural centre, whereas my original idea was simply to produce a book. Chris had a cultural salon in his own home in the UK, with concerts, films, lectures, and workshops – it was in fact a model for what he wanted to create at the Galicia Jewish Museum, and when he emigrated to Poland in order to fulfil this dream he sold his house in England to pay for the new museum. Chris was indeed full of imaginative and creative ideas in everything he did: he had huge artistic insight and a very strong commitment, charisma, energy, and moral involvement with the Jewish heritage in Poland.

Chris and I worked together for fifteen years, including twelve years on the photography of key places of Jewish interest in Galicia. He accumulated a thousand photos in about 150 towns and villages. He was totally dedicated: he came to Poland many, many times; he insisted on making photos in all seasons; he waited for hours for the right light; he carried his equipment across deep snow in Birkenau. He and I had long discussions about specific photos, knowing that some could be interpreted in different ways.

It was ten years from the time when I first met Chris to the opening of the Museum in 2004, ten years during which we exchanged ideas and developed a vision. Chris passed away in 2007 aged 59, having seen the Galicia Jewish Museum come into existence in this building and be widely acclaimed. Through his outgoing personality he had a huge impact on people. His pictures of Jewish Galicia formed the basis – the main permanent exhibition – of the Museum. That exhibition is still here, though it has been updated a couple of times, most recently in 2016. And just as he had hoped, the Museum is indeed also a cultural centre – for seminars, workshops, conferences, musical events, films, special lectures, and so on.

By now, partly because of the contribution of the Museum and other cultural institutions operating since the fall of communism, positive attitudes to Jewish culture have become very well established here in Poland: interfaith dialogue groups are flourishing, and abandoned Jewish cemeteries throughout the country are cared for by Polish youth groups. It is a world away from how things were here before 1989.

My idea was essentially to use Chris’s photos to show a contemporary perspective on the Polish Jewish experience; and Chris was fully supportive of this. The challenge was, how to do this, and with what take-away messages for the visitor? After a lot of thought I decided that our exhibition should not be arranged geographically (for example, with all the Kraków photos together), nor chronologically (for example, beginning with the oldest synagogues or the oldest tombstones). Instead I came up with five themes, five ideas, around which the photos would be organized. Contrary to the views of many Jews in foreign countries that the Polish Jewish heritage today is just one huge Jewish graveyard, our exhibition demonstrates that it’s very, very much more complicated than that. It is divided into different sections, to emphasize that there are different ways to interpret present-day realities. For example, the photos in the first four sections have no people in them, to emphasize the absence of the Jews from the towns and villages where they used to live in Galicia; but the fifth section reverses that and shows photos of the people, both Jews who take part in reviving Jewish life, and the numerous local non-Jews who participate in such events and encourage and support them. What this five-part exhibition means is that the Jewish heritage is a multi layered and multi-dimensional set of realities that all coexist with each other. What all this amounts to is that our Traces of Memory exhibition offers a very inclusive approach to the subject, a chorus of different voices. No one single stereotype can capture it all. That is the main take-away message we wanted to offer our visitors; and I feel that the activities of the Museum as a whole are organized around that basic idea.

I am enormously proud of the Galicia Jewish Museum – not only because of its main permanent exhibition which I helped to create but also because of the high standards and the care and attention in everything it does, thanks to an energetic, creative, and dedicated staff. It’s really not often in life that one can witness the twentieth anniversary of a major project that has clearly matured – like a fine old wine. It has expanded and diversified, far beyond anything that Chris and I imagined twenty years ago.

We are a private institution, not a state museum. So I want to thank our sponsors who have shown their faith in us throughout all these twenty years. Chris sold his house in England in 2004 in order to provide the original finance, and in his will he donated his photo archive and his apartment in Sarego Street to the Museum. I am perfectly sure he would have been extremely proud of what the Museum has achieved and what it has become now as a real cultural centre in a significantly expanded building. We look forward to many more years of growth and further achievement under our new director.

Let me conclude with two traditional Jewish blessings that express my emotions on this important day.

Baruch ata hatov vehameitiv – Blessed is the One Above, who is good and does good.

Baruch ata hashem eloheinu melech ha’olam shehecheyanu vekiyemanu vehigianu lazeman hazeh – Blessed is the One Above, who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this happy time.

Jonathan Webber
27 June 2024

The 20th anniversary program of events will start in April 2024 with a special concert. In the spring, we will also invite you to a trip through the shtetls of Lesser Poland, to follow the footsteps of Jewish inhabitants of the region and their heritage. We will not forget our youngest visitors: we have prepared for them a program including Family Sundays of workshops, meetings with fascinating guests, and books.

Birthday themes will also be included in our program of events accompanying the Jewish Culture Festival, to which the Galicia Jewish Museum is a partner institution. On June evenings, as part of the 10th anniversary edition of “The Space of an Image”, a series of films on Jewish topics, we invite you to ten film screenings, which I hope you will enjoy.

Among our upcoming events you will find:

11.04.2024, 19.00
Galicia Jewish Museum birthday concert: Kroke

For more information, click HERE.

15.04.2024, 18.00
A meeting with Prof. Jonathan Webber, co-founder of the Galicia Jewish Museum

For more information, click HERE.

The Galicia Jewish Museum functions thanks to the trust and support of many individuals and institutions. By becoming part of the jubilee of our museum, you will help ensure the continuity of operation of an institution that takes an active part in the revival of Jewish life in Poland and offers a rich cultural and educational program addressed to both the local community and visitors from around the world. Together we can create an open and tolerant society which is aware of its past and is actively building a common Polish-Jewish future!

For a 20th anniversary sponsorship offer click HERE.
To find out how you can support the Galicia Jewish Museum, click HERE.