Neighbours – Witnesses. Objects, People, Stories
Museums take their collections and programmes out to their recipients, thus removing barriers in access to knowledge. Each year, POLIN Museum notes almost 1.5 million sessions on its web portals, platforms and virtual exhibitions. The Museum uses interviews with witnesses of history and donated objects to create exhibitions, publications and educational materials.
The audience was offered a chance to get to know POLIN Museum’s collection, donated items and the stories of donors through the Biographies of Things temporary exhibition, educational films, virtual exhibitions, meetings with donors and the album I Bring a Thing, I Bring a Story – all realised within the framework of the Jewish Cultural Heritage programme. Activities whose purpose was to educate and popularise provided an impulse for expanding the collection – especially through the digital collection of interviews with witnesses of history, donors, and representatives of national and religious minorities in Poland and Norway. In cooperation with the Centre for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, a collection of oral history interviews with Jews and Poles, pertaining to history and Jewish identity, was created.
The Virtual Shtetl portal features the histories of over 1900 pre-war Jewish communities from Poland across thousands of pages of historic descriptions and AV materials. The Jewish Warsaw multiplatform is a repository of knowledge on the Jewish community of Warsaw – a multimedia guide through the city of the past and of today, including a mobile application, granted the prestigious Lovie Award in 2016.
The Polish Righteous – Recalling Forgotten History portal is dedicated to Poles who assisted Jews during the Holocaust. It contains over 800 stories of rescue. It also boasts six virtual exhibitions, including the series In Hiding which received a Sybilla Award in 2015 in the Museum Event of the Year category.