Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw

The Żydowski Instytut Historyczny is the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, a Warsaw public institution devoted to the study of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Its home is a restored building that once housed the prewar Institute of Judaic Studies and the Main Judaic Library; Edward Eber designed it, and construction ran from nineteen twenty-eight to nineteen thirty-six. Within the main hall, the floor preserves traces of a fire from the sixteenth of May nineteen forty-three, when German forces set the building alight after destroying the neighboring Great Synagogue.

The institute began in nineteen forty-seven, carrying forward the work of the Central Jewish Historical Commission. Its irreplaceable treasure is the Ringelblum Archive, assembled by the Oyneg Shabbos group during the Warsaw Ghetto’s existence. It contains about six thousand documents across roughly thirty thousand pages.

The holdings also include Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, diaries, memoirs, underground press, and records created by Jewish communal bodies. Since two thousand nine, the institute has borne Emanuel Ringelblum’s name and has operated as a public cultural institution. Here, preserved paper becomes a record of lives that occupying power tried to erase.