I was in Poland this past summer to officiate a b’nai mitzvah for two brothers from Miami. My wife joined me, and together we toured Poland with the bar mitzvah brothers, their parents and their extended family. The meaningful bar mitzvah ceremony took place in their ancestral homeland of Łódź, but first our journey took us from the solemn ground of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps to the historic streets of Kraków.
We then ventured to Warsaw. Given its communist past, I did not expect Warsaw to showcase cutting-edge technology, so the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews’ multimedia exhibits were a striking surprise. What many expected to be a quick one-hour walk through the sprawling museum became a four-hour experience, fully immersing us in the remarkable space. It was powerful how 21st-century technology could bring a millennium of Polish Jewish history vividly to life.
From the moment you enter, the museum communicates in both design and substance. The cavernous main hall, framed by soaring glass and copper walls, sets a reflective tone before you even begin exploring. The exhibit then unfolds across eight galleries, tracing Jewish life in Poland from its medieval roots through the Reformation, the Shoah and into the present. The Holocaust is treated with care and depth, using powerful survivor testimonies, poignant archival footage and interactive displays, yet it is placed within the broader continuum of Jewish history.
