A new permanent exhibition has just opened at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, north of Acre, entitled “Jewish Warsaw: A Story of the Human Spirit,” offering a lesser-known chapter in the story of the Jewish community in Warsaw before and during World War Yisrael Beiteinu – the richness of pre-war Jewish life and the complexity of life in the ghetto.
The exhibition, which attempts to bring the story of the past closer to the younger generation, presents diaries, letters, photographs, film clips and artifacts, many of which come from the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum and are presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition’s uniqueness lies in that it tells the story through the eyes of the Jews who lived before and during the Holocaust, shedding light on their daily lives, their beliefs and their struggle for survival.
The exhibition focuses on Warsaw as a microcosm for the history of the Holocaust and the uprising. The exhibits include the transition from the multifaceted pre-war Jewish life in Warsaw to facing the increasing terrors of the Nazi regime: repressive edicts, life in the ghetto, deportations, extermination. Prominent throughout the exhibition are the youth movements’ underground educational and public activities, and their developing leadership that led to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This new exhibition emphasizes the distinctive educational and ethical aspects of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum’s narrative, with contexts relevant to the lives of youth and adults in our day.
Dr. Anat Livne, General Director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House, said: “This exhibition seeks to bring some of the scope and variety of Jewish life, to illustrate a fraction of what was lost, and to underscore the enormous void left by the Holocaust in the Jewish world and in mankind as a whole.”
“We have tried to convey the vitality of the people in the ghetto, their resourcefulness, their expressions of solidarity and their calls for mutual help, despite the ever-worsening situation. This, alongside other human manifestations of helplessness and even corruption,” Livne said, “We wanted to focus on our belief in man and compassion; to create empathy for the people trapped in a harsh reality of isolation and uncertainty; to shed light on their ability to choose the path of goodness, to be creative, and to support one another. They and their actions can be a source of inspiration for us and for our children.”
Tal Kobo, exhibition curator, said: “We are familiar with the history of World War II from visiting other Holocaust museums. This exhibition is the story of life, although we are accustomed to hearing a story about annihilation. Here, we give a platform for a chapter in the story that is often neglected – life, its richness and complexity, and those turbulent years that preceded the outbreak of World War II. In this exhibition, we present this richness, of which very little documents remain.
This is an opportunity to break away from the horror images that we are used to seeing when we visit Holocaust exhibitions, and to discover complexity and development within one experience. At the end of the war, Jews emigrated to various parts of the world, some of them arriving in Palestine. The seeds planted in their souls as children in the educational frameworks where they were raised long before the outbreak of the war, the Zionist youth movements, the prayers in the synagogues for the Yishuv in the Land of Israel, the sports associations and the Hebrew-language press – all these played a role in their decision to emigrate to Israel and close a circle in their lives, to put an end to this terrible crisis and return to life and prosperity.”
Although it was still possible to maintain the family unit and a Jewish way of life, the ghetto as a new human condition expresses the utter loss of the individual’s right to privacy and legal protections from abuse. This exhibit is the first in the exhibition to include portrayals of the individual’s situation under the new Nazi order.
Woven into the exhibit narrative are events external to the ghetto which provide a broader context about the war and its developments. The exhibit introduces this content in the same manner it was received and processed by the sealed ghetto’s inhabitants. The young leaders of the Zionist youth movements were among the first to realize the fate of total annihilation awaiting the Jews. Comprehending this reality obliged them to undertake responsibility for the public welfare and to devise plans of action, although it left them isolated and frustrated by the limited influence they could wield.
The exhibition ends in the summer of 1942, on the eve of the expulsion of 300,000 Jews, about two-thirds of the ghetto inhabitants, to the death camps.
The Ghetto Fighters’ House is located on the Coast Highway (Route #4) between Akko and Nahariya.
D. N. Western Galilee25220
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