Polish, Jewish leaders to break ground on landmark museum

Polish, Jewish leaders to break ground on landmark museum

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews—an austere glass and limestone structure designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaki and Ilmari Lahdelma—is to be opened in two years' time.

It is being built in a central Warsaw square, next to a monument dedicated to Jews who resisted the Nazis during the 1943 ghetto uprising, and down the street from the rail siding were many Jews were deported to death camps.

President Lech Kaczynski was to join prominent members of Poland's renascent Jewish community at the site for Tuesday's ceremony.

Officials hope the museum will become a cultural landmark to match Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, the United States' Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Berlin's Jewish Museum.

To many, such a center is long overdue in a country that had Europe's largest Jewish community until World War II, numbering about 3.3 million, or ten percent of the total population. The society produced a vibrant Yiddish-speaking culture and a string of great scientists, writers and thinkers.

Poland is also where Nazi Germany built extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.