Born in Opatów (Apt in Yiddish), Mayer Kirshenblatt left for Canada in 1934 at the age of 17. Barbara recorded his recollections of growing up in Poland before the Holocaust for more than forty years. In 1989 at the age of 73, he began to paint what he remembered, lest the world know more about how Jews died than how they lived. This lecture will present the artist and his work in the context of two exhibitions, one at the Jewish Museum in New York (2009) and the second at POLIN Museum (May 17–December 16, 2024). For the POLIN Museum exhibition, curators Justyna Koszarska-Szulc and Natalia Romik documented the process by which what remained of Mayer’s shtetl after the war was appropriated, neglected, or dismantled by the local population to produce today’s “post-Jewish” town. Known as a foe of historical amnesia, Romik explains, “The Jewishness of these towns, though denied, still lingers. Specters of their former inhabitants still haunt them.” The exhibition at POLIN Museum is staged as a dialogue between the shtetl, specifically the artist’s hometown of Opatów as represented in 70 of his paintings, and today’s Opatów as a post-Jewish town, based on documents, maps, photographs, archeological evidence, and interviews.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is the first and only museum dedicated to the memory of Polish Jews over the course of a millennium. Located on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood, the museum faces the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. POLIN Museum is the winner of the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award and has welcomed more than 4.5 million visitors since its Grand Opening in 2014. By raising historical awareness and fostering dialogue in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect, POLIN Museum seeks to counteract antisemitism, discrimination, and exclusion.

About the Speaker

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), and Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), among others. She has received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to the creation of POLIN Museum, and received the 2020 Dan David Prize. She has served on Advisory Boards for the Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, and Jewish Museum Berlin, and is Vice-Chair of ICMEMOHRI, the International Committee of Memorial and Human Rights Museums. She advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.