Our Exhibition

This section of our website tells the story of our exhibition which, after travelling around the world, finally in 2016, found a permanent home in the Jewish Museum of Częstochowa – thanks to the Częstochowa Mayor and City Council. More information about the Jewish Museum can be found here HERE.

Unlike many exhibitions about the history of Jews in Poland, our exhibition, while of course covering the tragic period of Holocaust, places specific emphasis on how the Jews of Częstochowa lived, not just how and where they died. This is particularly important for two groups of visitors to the Museum:

• The descendants of the Jews of Częstochowa, who have read, seen and heard so much about how and where their ancestors perished, can now see how these ancestors of theirs lived and can also understand the contribution which they made to the city Częstochowa and also to Polish life.
• Polish young people, today, live in a country which is 90-95% mono-cultural. It is easy for them to think that it was always like this when, in fact, prior to World War II, Poland was probably the most multi-cultural country in the whole of Europe. They need to learn and understand that among this ethnic mixture, Jews in Poland made up 10% of the total population and, in Częstochowa, 30% of its inhabitants were Jews.

This section covers how the exhibition came to fruition. It features the people who made it a reality through vision and determined effort. It also shows how the exhibition travelled the world before it finally found its permanent home in Częstochowa.

This exhibition is one major legacy which we can leave to our future generations. It is almost a self-evident truth that to understand who you really are, you need to understand where you come from. Through the exhibition we commit to that truth and, in doing so, we preserve the history and memory of those who came before us and can no longer tell their own story.