Poland: Miejsce, a small Jewish museum, opens in Białystok, spearheaded by longtime Jewish heritage activist Tomasz Wiśniewski

A small private Jewish museum and education space has opened in Białystok, in eastern Poland. Called “Miejsce” — The Place — it is a project spearheaded by the longtime, tireless Jewish heritage researcher and activist Tomasz Wiśniewski.

It grew out of the virtual Jewish museum about Bialystok and area on the platform www.jewishbialystok.pl.

The small space displays photographs, information panels, and documentation as well as some artefacts. These include material found by volunteers during work at Białystok‘s Bagnowka Jewish cemetery last year. It also programs lectures and events.

One of its planned features  is “Memory Drawers” — with which Wiśniewski hopes to involve the broader Bialystok community.

Individual local residents can volunteer to carry out research and create a small exhibition in a drawer or space like a suitcase or trunk about a particular Białystok Jewish family or person —  a family or person, for example,  “about which he or she has heard in family accounts, with whom our ancestors were friends, worked or lived next door, or who for some reason is close to him or her (because he or she is also a shopkeeper, doctor, photographer, etc.).”

For example, Wiśniewski says that the Lutheran pastor Tomasz Wiglasz will put together a “drawer” on the family of Bialystok Rabbi Gedali Rozenman, and  Mieczyslaw Marczak, who collects old photographs, will create one on the family of a prominent Jewish photographer, Solowiejczyk.

In this video, in Polish with English subtitles, Marta Sawicka-Danielak describes creating a “memory drawer” about Benjamin Midler, now in his 90s, the last known living survivor of the Białystok Ghetto, who now lives in Israel.

And here, for Polish speakers, this video shows how Jaroslaw Parzyszek, an expert in the invented language Esperanto, plans to create a “drawer” — in this case a small suitcase — full of material in memory of, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, who was born in Białystok in 1859.

Tomasz Wiśniewski has been working for more than 30 years to preserve the memory of the Jewish communities of Białystok and Poland’s eastern borderland. He has won many awards, including the  POLIN Award in 2018, granted annually by the POLIN Museum in Warsaw to “people, organizations and institutions that, in the past few years, contributed to both the revival of the memory of the history of Polish Jews, and to building mutual understanding and respect between Poles and Jews.”

He has written several books, including a guidebook to Jewish Bialystok and surroundings, and on his YouTube channel  you can find more than 2,000 films presenting Jewish history of the region. He has documented Jewish cemeteries and runs the site bagnowka.pl , which collects data on almost 40,000  tombstones, mainly Jewish ones, and also present other heritage information.