For Immediate Release
July 31, 2012
Contact
Brianne Nadeau Tel: 202.265.3000
Email: brianne@rabinowitz-dorf.com
Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney Visits the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland
Taube and Koret Foundation representatives join in welcoming the Romneys
July 31, Warsaw--On a two-day visit to Poland, Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, toured the site of the new the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Completing the third leg of a three-country tour that also included Britain and Israel, the Romneys met with museum chairman Piotr Wislicki, deputy chairman Marian Turski, interim director Waldemar Dabrowski, exhibition director Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and representatives of the museum’s two largest benefactors, the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation and the Koret Foundation, Helise Lieberman and Yale Reisner.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, slated to open in 2013, is the first and only museum to focus on the thousand-year history of Polish Jewry. The Museum is a public- private partnership, the first of its kind in Poland. The Polish government financed the building at a cost of over $70 million; the City of Warsaw donated the priceless land; and a Jewish nonprofit is solely responsible for the content of the Museum's educational and exhibition programs, developed by an international team of Jewish studies scholars from Poland, the US, Europe and Israel.
This interactive, narrative museum will be a center for lifelong education and remembrance for a diverse, global public, its importance reaching beyond Poles and Jews. The millennium of Polish Jewish culture has left a strong mark on Western civilization, particularly in the United States.
“We are honored that Mr. Romney, during his brief visit to Poland, has paid tribute to the enduring legacy of Polish Jewry in shaping both modern Jewish culture and Western, Judeo-Christian civilization,” stated Tad Taube, president of the Koret Foundation and chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture.
The museum will take its place alongside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as some of the most important Jewish cultural institutions of their kind. The primary difference is that the Museum of the History of Polish Jews will extend the historical narrative beyond the Holocaust to encompass an epic Jewish heritage from which the majority of world Jewry descends. At the same time, it will be Europe’s largest Jewish history museum. The museum also will provide Poland’s capital city with a new cultural institution that will set a standard for museums internationally.
The Museum stands on the sacred site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and faces the Monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes, where the Romneys placed flowers to honor the victims of the Holocaust.
Mitt Romney meets Taube and Koret Foundation representatives Helise Lieberman and Yale Reisner.
Photo Credit: Museum of the History of Polish Jews/Rafal Grunt
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For more information or to receive photos, contact Brianne Nadeau, Rabinowitz-Dorf Communications, at: Tel: 202.265.3000; Email: brianne@rabinowitz-dorf.com
