Warsaw: Groundbreaking for Jewish Museum

Here’s another bit of news from Poland: Earlier this week a groundbreaking ceremony was held for a new museum to be built in Warsaw. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews will be a $65 million undertaking that should rise in central Warsaw by late 2009. It will sit next to a monument to the Jews who resisted the Nazis during the 1943 ghetto uprising, and down the street from the rails where many Jews were deported to death camps.

The hope is that this museum will become a cultural landmark to match Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, Washington DC’s Holocaust Memorial Museum and Berlin’s Jewish Museum. At the groundbreaking, Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski told the crowd that the Museum is “a great chance to… break the lack of knowledge about one another” and forge “deeper reconciliation” between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles as they remember their common history. Here’s a video and a gallery that shows what it should look like when it’s done.