Curator of Polish Jewish Museum To Speak At U-M

Detroit Jewish News, January 7-13, 2016

If you’ve visited a Jewish museum lately, chances are that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has visited it, too.

    The list of museums where she has served as a consultant reads like a directory of some of the most well-known Jewish exhibitions in the world: Beit Hatfutsot in Tel Aviv, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She new serves as the chief curator of the core exhibition of POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jewish in Warsaw — and she insists no other museum is like it.

    “POLIN Museum is a gesamtkunstwerk, a remarkable integration of a memorial site, fitting architecture and innovative multimedia narrative exhibition,” she said. “Nowhere else is this story told in this way. And there is no more appropriate place to tell this story.”

    How the museum came to be is the subject of her talk on Jan. 13, “Rising from the Rubble: Creating the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.” The free lecture is sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Copernicus Program in Polish Studies (CPPS). It will take place at 5:30 p.m. at the U-M Museum of Art’s Stern Auditorium, 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor.

        “The core exhibition at POLIN recovers the thousand-year history of Polish Jews and tells the story in the very place where it happened,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explained. The museum stands on land once part of the Warsaw ghetto. It has attracted over a million visitors since it opened in 2013.

    Kirshenblatt-Gimblett hopes those who attend her lecture will see why POLIM represents much more than an ordinary exhibit. “Museums,” she said, “can be agents of transformation that can move a whole society forward.”

Her visit is the latest event planned as part of an official partnership established last year between the museum and the CPPS, along with the Frankel Center.