WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw has won the European Museum of the Year Award.
The 2016 winner was announced at a ceremony on Saturday in San Sebastian, Spain.
The museum opened to the public in April 2013. Its core exhibition, presenting the thousand-year history of Polish Jews, opened a year-and-a-half later.
“The long-shared history between Jewish people and other people of this region of the world is one of a continuously negotiated co-existence through conflict as well as cooperation, integration and assimilation,” the European Museum Forum said in conferring the award. “For very large and very diverse audiences, the Polin now serves as an absorbing place to confront and examine the perpetually relevant questions of how a co-existence, however fraught, can suddenly transfigure into an absolute rupture, into the near eradication of a whole population and destruction of a culture.”
The European Museum of the Year Award is organized by the European Museum Forum. More than 200 people from 29 European countries attended this year’s ceremony, the 39th.
The Warsaw museum was formally founded in 2005 by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, the City of Warsaw and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
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