Visit Jewish Warsaw without leaving your home

POLIN Museum invites you to a virtual tour of the Warszawa, Varshe exhibition in the Street View technology. While viewing it through the Google Cultural Institute, visitors will be transferred to the forgotten world of multicultural Warsaw - they will be able to walk around the city and meet the Jewish community which  shaped it.

The journey through six typically Jewish districts of Poland's capital begins in the 16th century and ends in 1939. Prior to World War II Warsaw was inhabited by over 350,000 Jews who made up almost 40% of the capital's population.

Warszawa, Varshe was the first exhibition that presented Jewish settlement across the whole of prewar Warsaw. Between March and June 2014, it was viewed by over 35,000 POLIN Museum visitors. The exhibition, curated by Ewa Małkowska-Bieniek, was awarded with an honor distinction by the Self-Government of the Mazowieckie Province in the 9th edition of the "Mazowieckie Zdarzenia Muzealne - WIERZBA" competition.

The virtual tour of the Warsaw, Varshe exhibition is the 6th project of POLIN Museum available at the Google Cultural Institute platform.

“It is another project that we run in cooperation with the Google Cultural Institute. The platform users have the opportunity to visit both the core exhibition and exhibitions based on participative collection without leaving their homes. By sharing our collections with Internet users across the worl we restore the forgotten Jewish heritage," says Jolanta Gumula, the POLIN Museum's deputy director for exhibitions and museum collections.

In October 2014, POLIN Museum, as the first museum in Poland, made its interiors available in the Street View technology. The platform users can go on virtual tours of the 1000-Year History of Polish Jews, the core exhibition, as well as temporary exhibitions such as How to Make a Museum? and Biographies of Things. The Reclaiming the Story exhibition that presents selected items from the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews' collection has been recently made available as well. In order to reach a broad audience, POLIN Museum has prepared it in seven language versions, including Spanish, Czech, Russian, French and even Indonesian.

The Street View technology has been applied in museum interiors to enable online users to discover exhibitions in a way that is close to reality. So far interiors of over 350 of the Google Cultural Institute's partner institutions have been recorded, including more than 130 museums.