The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is a historical museum in Warsaw currently under construction.
The target seat of the Museum is the historic complex of the former Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital at Śliska 51 St./Sienna 60 St. The opening of the facility is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2025.
Since 2018, the Museum Director is Albert Stankowski. Hanna Wróblewska is the Deputy Director for Research and Exhibition Programming, and Joanna Dudelewicz is the Deputy Director for Investment, Economic and Organisational Affairs.
The mission of the institution is to disseminate knowledge about the everyday life, survival strategies, fight and extermination of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos on territory of the occupied Poland.
The Museum's team is working on the creation of a permanent exhibition in the revitalised building of the former Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital, collecting archives, artefacts and testimonies of memory and drawing on the achievements, experience and resources of Polish and foreign institutions that deal with the topic of the ghetto.
The statutory tasks of the Museum include: activities for the protection and care of the cultural heritage of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, conducting cultural, scientific, educational and popularisation activities related to the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos built on the occupied Polish territories, initiating and supporting social initiatives and non-governmental organisations that contribute to the protection and commemoration of the history of the Warsaw Ghetto.
History
Sigmund Nissenbaum, a participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was the first initiator of the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. At the end of the 1980s, he contacted the President of the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, prof. Henryk Jabłoński, to entrust the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum to the Nissenbaum Family Foundation. However, the works did not start at that point.
On 14 November 2017, the decision to establish the Warsaw Ghetto Museum was announced by the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński. The museum was officially established on 28 February 2018. On 7 March 2018, in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, there was a press conference on the establishment of the new institution, attended by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Minister Piotr Gliński.
In October 2018, the local government of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship leased the complex of the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital to the Museum for 30 years. Both buildings of the former hospital - the main pavilion and the southern pavilion - have been entered on the list of historical monuments by the Mazowieckie Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments in 2018. The permanent exhibition of the Museum will be presented in the main building of the former hospital, while the two-storey southern pavilion, where the ophthalmology department was located, is to become the seat of the Education Department of the Museum.
In November 2020, on the 80th anniversary of the closing of the ghetto borders, the authorities of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship sold the museum building for PLN 22.7 million (the funds for that purpose were provided by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage).
In 2020, the Institute of National Remembrance agreed to hand over the original of the Stroop Report as a deposit for the permanent exhibition at the Museum.
The first meeting of the international Warsaw Ghetto Museum Council, that consisted of 15 members, took place on 10 September 2019. The Chairman of the Council became the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich. In June 2021, the position was taken by Colette Avital.
Visual identification
The concept for the visual identity of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum is the result of an international competition organised jointly with the Polish Association of Applied Graphic Designers. The competition was announced in September 2019. In the first stage, 216 applications were submitted, out of which the jury selected 6. The authors of the winning concept are the designers from the Lithuanian studio DADADA.
Permanent exhibition
The work on the concept of the permanent exhibition began in 2019, under the supervision of Daniel Blatman, a historian and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The scientific team of the Museum prepared documents with the initial concept of the exhibition. The team adopted three key parameters, which will constitute dominant themes in the historical narrative of the Museum: