Maria Kaczynska, the wife of Poland’s president, presented her country’s highest honour to Irena Gut, who hid 12 Jews from the Nazis in Tarnopol during the Holocaust.

Gut’s daughter, Jeannie Smith, accepted the Commander’s Cross of the
Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her mother, who died in
2003. More than 150 survivors and their descendants were on hand at the
special ceremony at the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, hosted by the
North American Council for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Kaczynska was in New York to introduce Americans to this museum currently being built on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.

A benefit performance of the play about Gut, Irena’s Vow, starring Tovah Feldshuh, followed at the Baruch Center for Performing Arts.

Sigmund A. Rolat, chair of  the Museum’s North American council, and a Holocaust survivor from Czestochowa, said the hi-tech, state-of-the-art museum, will tell the 1,000-year history of the Jews of Poland. The museum is one of Poland’s largest public works projects, with $110 million (US) committed to construction from the Polish republic and the City of Warsaw. Another $35 million is needed to create the core exhibits.

The museum is being designed as a portal to Poland and its Jewish history for all people visiting Jewish heritage sites and the camps, especially participants from March of the Living programs and Polish students. It is expected to become the most important museum of Jewish history in the world.

The museum will offer a perspective often neglected in the post-Holocaust period and present the positive, rich Jewish heritage and culture that invigorated pre-Holocaust Poland while setting the foundations for contemporary Judaism. While this millennial history is marked by violence and anti-Semitism, the museum will also tell the stories of those Polish Jews who, after the Holocaust, revitalized Jewish culture and Judaism in the Diaspora, and of those who are re-establishing Jewish culture in today’s Poland.

“After the Inquisition, Poland welcomed us with open arms and we thrived there compared to the rest of Europe,” said Rolat.

“When visitors come to Poland, they rarely see anything positive that Jewish people have contributed to Polish society. Jewish and Polish youths must discover the important and nation-changing contributions Jewish people made to Polish culture before the Holocaust – we were poets, artists, industrialists, philosophers and philanthropists, as well as Torah scholars, who were part of the fabric of Polish society.”

Rolat, a recipient of the Commander’s Cross, is a frequent visitor to Poland and often speaks in Polish schools. He has been approached by hundreds of young Poles seeking their roots and feels the new museum will be a good place for them to start. Many feel driven to study things Jewish and many suspect they are Jews.

“I want to make it easier for them to discover who they are,” said Rolat. “This museum is needed. Anyone who visits it, if he is Jewish, will be proud, and if he is not Jewish, he will know all there is know about Jewish history in Poland. The past, after all, illuminates the future.”