Lunch Options: Museum visitors grab a bite to eat at the cafe on opening weekend. Image by Ruth Ellen Gruber

Making sure food is part of a museum is not an easy task — fresh dishes will perish, plastic ones miss the point.

But, at Warsaw’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, food, drink and the special Jewish relationship to eating and drinking will be a recurring thread woven throughout the yet to be installed core exhibition.

The Museum’s striking building was opened to the public April 19, but its permanent exhibition, a narrative presentation of 1,000 years of Jewish life, won’t debut until next year.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

“We don’t have separate sections on discreet themes such as women, children, dress, or food,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, the NYU scholar in charge of the team putting together the core exhibition. “There are no encyclopedia entries.” Rather, she said, food, drink and issues related to them would be addressed within the context of the chronological narrative.

For example, she said, the first Hebrew book printed in Poland was Isaac of Dueren’s “Sha’arei Dura,” a 16th century treatise about ritual purity, mainly dealing with the laws of kashrut and women’s ritual purity. “The book tells how to apply the laws of kashrut to everyday life,” she said. “The first pages are about salting meat” and there are practical descriptions of what to do in specific circumstances.

In the medieval gallery, she said, “there will be a whole section on trade, including the trade of spices, as an aspect of the economy.”

In another gallery there will be a section mocking up a market stall, with a focus on three key items of the Jewish table — garlic, goose and herring. Using old texts and other sources, she said, “We’ll show how goose fat was the ‘Jewish lard,’ how garlic was considered an aphrodisiac, and how there were discussions in a 17th century Yiddish medical manual about whether a fish could be considered meat.”

One particular hero of the exhibit is Ber of Bolechow, an 18th century wine importer who wrote an autobiography in which he detailed wine purchasing journeys to the Tokaj region of northern Hungary. “Jews were important in the alcohol trade, and we will be putting this into historical context,” she said.

In addition to these historical references, visitors to the museum will be able to enjoy a first-hand taste of Polish Jewish cuisine in the museum’s restaurant. “They asked me to prepare a menu with local and seasonal dishes that are Jewish — but which Polish visitors will also recognize as part of the culinary tradition.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount