My main place of employment is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. When the museum opened about a decade ago, it was a museum without a collection. There were hardly any obejcts in its possession that would speak to the history of Polish Jewry. A few items integrated into the main exhibition were borrowed from other museums.
In the intervening ten years, that has changed dramatically as people have come to see POLIN as a repository for saving Jewish history from oblivion. People have donated thousands of objects –judaica, art, books, archival collections, and much more – leaving our collections department scrambling to make sense of it all.
It's my privilege to be able look through some of these things, even before they have been catalogued, to help contextualize what POLIN has. I wrote a bit about one particularly fascinating set of letters, literally saved from a pile of trash.
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