We Are Here. POLIN Museum celebrates 10th birthday
This autumn, 10 years will pass since the opening of the POLIN Museum Core Exhibition dedicated to the 1000-year history of Polish Jews. This history is alive and relevant today, its new chapters still being written. During the Grand Opening of the Core Exhibition, Marian Turski, Chair of the Museum Council and a Holocaust survivor himself, quoted a phrase from a Jewish partisan song: "We are here. Mir zenen do." With these words, he referred to the uninterrupted—despite the Holocaust and all other adversities—presence of Jews in Poland.
Today, ten years on, these words are still extremely relevant: "We are here," meaning in Warsaw, in Muranów, the area of the former Jewish Quarter, full of hustle and bustle before World War II. Now POLIN Museum is restoring the memory of Polish Jews. "We are here" for our audience. You are most important to us, and we want to continue to grow for you. In 2024, while celebrating our anniversary, we want to thank you for the ten years together. "We are here" thanks to you, our Donors who made the opening of POLIN Museum possible. We wouldn’t be able to implement our program without you. And finally, "We are here," the POLIN Museum employees, people who chose the Museum as their workplace and have done loads of very important things over the past ten years. Birthdays are the right time to celebrate that.
In our anniversary year, aside from celebrating and reminiscing on the past decade, we want to reflect upon the Museum’s future in the reality filled with misinformation, conspiracy theories, challenging scientific discoveries, and information bubbles that contribute to division and polarization; in the world where innocent civilians are still being killed in wars.
Together, we change the way of thinking and emotions
POLIN Museum also runs an intense activity in the fields of education and culture—to date, we have run thousands of workshops and events attended by nearly six million people.
For ten years, we have been teaching ourselves and those who want to talk to us about openness towards people who are different, making ourselves and others more sensitive to exclusion and discrimination. We are convinced that openness is one of the competencies of the future, and we undertake our activities in this spirit. We change the way people talk about Polish Jews, we dispel myths and break taboos, we restore little-known Polish history and the forgotten past of Polish towns and cities. Together, we strive to rediscover local history.
In our activities, we encourage conversations about values. We tell a vibrant, interesting story that allows our guests to better understand themselves and others.
Program of events to celebrate the 10th birthday
On 28-30 September 2024 we invite you to POLIN Museum birthday weekend. Marian Turski’s words: "Mir zenen do. We are here" guided us also while we were planning the anniversary program. We have planned, among others, a series of guided tours which will offer a new perspective on the Core Exhibition, and a series of talks with well-known guests on the challenges of the twenty-first century that institutions of culture are now facing.
We will announce a detailed program of anniversary events in August. As a preview of the September birthday celebrations, in July we will present to the public a new arrangement in the Postwar Gallery, which will include works by two renowned contemporary artists—a painting by Wilhelm Sasnal and a documentary film by Mikołaj Grynberg.
Also in July, we will launch the "We Are Here. Rotating Gallery" project, focusing on works by Jewish artists. For the fans of our Core Exhibition, we have produced a series of films under the title "Planet POLIN" by the two TOK FM radio journalists, Adam Balcer and Paweł Sulik.
Stay with us here, at POLIN!
