Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja, Kraków

Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja is housed in a restored former Jewish furniture factory in Kraków’s Kazimierz district. Founded in 2004 by photographer Chris Schwarz with scholar Jonathan Webber, it centres on Traces of Memory, a photographic exploration of Jewish heritage in Polish Galicia and the Holocaust.

Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja occupies a restored former Jewish furniture factory on Dajwór Street in Kazimierz, Kraków’s historic Jewish quarter. The museum was created in 2004 by British photojournalist Chris Schwarz, whose father came from Lwów, together with UNESCO professor Jonathan Webber. Schwarz had first come to Poland in 1981 to photograph Solidarność.

After communism fell, he returned to investigate surviving signs of Jewish history in the towns and villages around Kraków. That work became the museum’s central exhibition, Traces of Memory. Its large colour photographs record synagogues, cemeteries, and other surviving places across Polish Galicia, honouring more than eight centuries of Jewish life in the region.

The exhibition also confronts the Holocaust, including sites of murder and destruction, Auschwitz, and the ways people now preserve this past. Schwarz died in 2007, but the museum continues the purpose he established: celebrating Jewish culture while commemorating Holocaust victims in Poland. Beyond its permanent galleries, it presents changing exhibitions and runs education on Jewish culture, religion, and the Holocaust. This former industrial building has become a place for photographs to carry a vanished world into the present.