Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich Polin, Warsaw

The broad, restrained building before you is Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich Polin, a historical museum devoted to Jewish life in Poland. It occupies ground within the former Warsaw Ghetto, in Muranów, the city’s prewar Jewish district. Along the outer skin, glass blades and a mesh of copper give the postmodern building a deliberately spare presence; its design came from Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma after an international competition.

The name Polin is written here in Latin and Hebrew script. In Hebrew, Polin can mean Poland or “rest here”; the name also recalls a legend about the arrival of Jewish settlers. Pass through the entrance and the building opens into an immense, sculpted hollow, conceived as an image of breaks in the history it tells.

The museum opened in April twenty thirteen, on the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; its long-term exhibition followed in October twenty fourteen. Across eight galleries and more than four thousand square metres, that exhibition follows Jewish history in Poland from early settlement through the Holocaust and into the period after the war. It is a museum, but also a place for culture and learning, placing a millennium of Polish-Jewish life beside the memory embedded in this ground.