NEW YORK (JTA) — An archivist who has spent his life trying to preserve Jewish monuments in Poland will receive a San Francisco foundation’s annual righteous gentile award.
Jan Jagielski, chief archivist at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, will receive the Irena Sendler Memorial Award from the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.
Jagielski was the first to initiate in the pre-1989 communist era a project to document and preserve what remained of Jewish monuments in Poland. He has co-produced numerous guidebooks about prewar Jewish history in Warsaw and leads a conservation program at the institute.
The award, named for the late righteous gentile who saved some 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, is given each year to a non-Jewish Pole who helps preserve Jewish life in the country.
Jagielski will receive the award at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow on July 1.
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