MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — One of Poland’s most distinguished historians will be at West Virginia University to discuss a one-of-a kind museum in one of Poland’s most notorious locations.
Professor Dariusz Stola will be speaking at WVU to discuss the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Stola explained the primary mission of the museum on WAJR’s Morgantown AM.
“The mission is largely educational,” said Stola on WAJR’s Morgantown AM. “We are trying to show the 1,000 years of history of Polish Jews, or more generally the Jews of Eastern Europe because we cover the historic length of Poland,” he said.
The history between the Jewish people and Poland has been predominant, to say the least. According to Stola, the relationship started after religious persecution in Western Europe during the 13th Century. This, along with other policy changes which encouraged immigration, eventually led to Poland becoming home to one of the world’s largest Jewish populaces.
“So they had very open, liberal, even encouraging migration policies towards this minority, and then it was a miracle of the demographic expansion, greater than the Christian population itself, which made the Jews a minority of making some 10 percent of the population,” Stola said.
The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews is located within the walls of the former Warsaw Ghetto — one of the most infamous ghettos not only in Poland, but in all of Europe at the time. After a 600 year history, which included contributions to to Poland’s financial sector among them, the majority of the country’s Jewish population was essentially forced out or killed during Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during World War II. This includes over 300,000 people killed in the Warsaw Ghetto itself.
“Because of the concentration of Jews in Warsaw, Germans made this part of the city, the Northwestern part of the city, the biggest ghetto in occupied Europe,” he said. “So Warsaw Ghetto was a kind of a concentration camp in the middle of the city, surrounded by high walls and very closely controlled by the Germans.”
Still in its infancy, the museum has received international acclaim, winning two top European museum awards — including European Museum of the Year in 2016.
Despite being countries away from two of the largest Jewish populaces in the world, most of the Jewish heritage in both Israel and in the United States can be traced back to Poland.
Stola said this history and preserved heritage — even during some of the worst cases of genocide in world history — gives the museum that much more meaning.
“So about 80 percent of American Jews today, more than 80 percent are of Polish-Jewish origin either in the third or fourth generation,” Stola said. “Most of the founders of the State of Israel were Polish Jews, so 60 percent of the politicians, the people who signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 were also of Polish origin.”
Stola will be speaking at WVU Thursday night in White Hall at 7 p.m.