Jewish Life in Poland (2012)

This exhibition will be presented in conjunction with the launch of the website, Digital Archives on Jewish Life in Poland, made possible by the generous support of the Gruss Lipper Family Foundation. The materials presented here embrace a broad geopolitical definition of Poland, whose borders varied by historical period. From its earliest days as a distinct political entity in the tenth century, the country's core territory (Crown Poland) between the Oder and Vistula rivers expanded, eventually extending as far as the Baltic, the Dnieper, the Black Sea, and the Carpathian Mountains. By the early seventeenth century, what was known as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest country in Europe, encompassing all of present day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Latvia, as well as most of Ukraine and Estonia. After 1795, Poland was divided between Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia and ceased to exist as a political entity. In 1918, it was reborn as the Second Polish Republic, one of the countries newly carved out of Europe in the wake of World War I, and included within its borders parts of its former territories, including western Ukraine and areas which are now part of Belarus. Throughout all these changes, the Jews who lived in these territories retained a distinctively Polish character, though one which evolved constantly with the times.