The Galicia Jewish Museum is located in the historic Jewish district of Kazimierz in Kraków, Poland. It is a photo exhibition documenting the remnants of Jewish culture and life in Polish Galicia, which used to be very vibrant in this area.

History

The Museum was established in April 2004 by the British photojournalist Chris Schwarz (whose father originated from Lwów), in cooperation with Professor Jonathan Webber of UNESCO, in an effort to celebrate the Jewish culture of the Polish Galicia and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in Poland.

Following Schwarz' early death in 2007, Kate Craddy became the director of the Museum. She was followed by Jakub Nowakowski in 2010. Both English and Polish have remained the Museum's main operating languages. The museum welcomes over 30,000 visitors annually from around the world.

Exhibitions

The main exhibition of the Museum, Traces of Memory, is the result of a twelve-year collaboration between photographer and museum founder Chris Schwarz and British scholar Jonathan Webber. It commemorates the 800-year Jewish presence in western Galicia (today's southeastern Poland) through contemporary photographs of synagogues, cemeteries and other relics of the Jewish presence in the region still visible today. The exhibition is divided into five sections, representing different ways of approaching the Jewish past in Polish Galicia: Jewish Life in Ruins, Jewish Culture as it Once Was, The Holocaust: Sites of Massacre and Destruction, How the Past is Being Remembered and People Making Memory Today. A part of the exhibition is dedicated to Auschwitz concentration camp.