Half way through update!! +Pictures

Wow, this last month really flew by. I have gotten to do so many cool things here in Warsaw, both related to my internship and outside of it. I figured I would show what I have been up to pictures:

A picture from a few weeks ago when I traveled from Warsaw to Krakow. I went to the Galicia Jewish Museum there, as part of my Independent Project.

Here are some of my favorite parts of the main exhibition at POLIN.


The reconstruction of the Gwozdziec Synagogue that we have at POLIN. It is incredible, and its history has been a big part of my work as of lately (more on that later).


The museum falls under the museum type called "Black Box." It is entirely underground, essentially a giant black box, and all the elements within the exhibition are lit up with spotlights. 


The other interns and I were able to go on a walking tour of Warsaw. The missing brick in this wall (part of the original Warsaw Ghetto wall) now is in the Holocaust Museum in DC.


Those two tall pole type structures are the exact place where a bridge used to exist within the Warsaw Ghetto. Between those two poles was an often crowded staircase, moving from one part of the Ghetto to another.


I worked on the programming for an Educators' Seminar, and as part of the Seminar we had a food making workshop. We got to make bagels at Menora, a cafe associated with POLIN. They were so yummy :)


The bagels in an earlier stage of their life!


Me and Sara, another Education Department intern, after a 5k run we did together on the weekend.

Now, for what I have been working on lately. We have a toolkit that we are developing for North American educators, and part of the toolkit highlights the geographic significance of different key parts of our exhibition. Basically the idea that a group of American school kids could come to Poland, and go all around Poland with our toolkit to visit key sites, and they ultimately end up the museum where they would be able to connect everything they had seen in one place. One specific part of our exhibition that I earlier mentioned is the reconstruction of the Gwozdziec Synagogue. The way that we were able to reconstruct it, considering it was completely destroyed, was through a series of drawings and paintings done by a couple of men who were commissioned to do so by the Polish Academy of Learning. It so happens that this organization is still around today, in Krakow. After making this connection I suggested that, with the real synagogue destroyed, we could have students see the Academy of Learning instead, before seeing the reconstruction, in order to have that geographical connection that we are looking for. The following images are some of those drawings and paintings that allowed the synagogue to symbolically survive, despite its destruction. 
Here, a drawing by Karol Zyndram Maszkowski.

This is really fascinating: below is a painting from an entirely different man, Alois Breir, but you can see the resemblance between the above drawing and the below painting so well:

Here are some more that I found most interesting and neat:
The painting that once existed on the synagogue's ceiling. The painting was all replicated beautifully in the museum.

Common structures found within the intricate painting.

A sketch from the outside.

The East West cross section sketch.

The North South cross section sketch.

I even attempted to reconstruct a paper version of the synagogue myself with printouts of the two above images. It sort of worked :)


And this is a real photo.

Well, that is all I have for this update! Working at POLIN is exciting and humbling. I am learning so much, and I cannot believe that it is already half way over. 






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