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The foundation stone of the museum was laid in June. When it opens in 2009-2010 it will host exhibitions spanning 900 years of Polish-Jewish history.
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WARSAW (AFP)---Germany has donated five million euros (7.3 million dollars) to help build a new Jewish history museum in the Polish capital Warsaw, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community before the Holocaust.
"In this way, the federal government wants to make a new contribution to redressing the immeasurable suffering inflicted in the name of the Germans upon the Jews in this country, and thus upon Poland as a whole," said German Ambassador Michael Gerdts at a ceremony in Warsaw.
"The Germans remain conscious of their responsibility for this tragic past," he added.
The foundation stone of the museum was laid in June. When it opens in 2009-2010 it will host exhibitions spanning 900 years of Polish-Jewish history.
It aims to be one of the world’s three largest Jewish museums alongside Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Memorial in Washington.
The museum project is also being funded by the Polish government, Warsaw city authorities, the European Union, German foundations and private donors.
The museum is being built in the heart of the old Warsaw ghetto, which was set up by the Nazis after they invaded Poland in 1939 and razed by them following a failed uprising in 1943.
In 1939, Poland counted some 3.3 million Jews, 400,000 of whom lived in Warsaw. Jews made up 10 percent of the Polish population and a third of all residents in the capital.
After the Holocaust, Poland’s Jewish population numbered just 280,000.
Of those, many emigrated to the United States or Israel, either immediately following the war or during a wave of anti-Semitism under communist rule in 1968.
Estimates of Poland’s Jewish population today vary between 5,000 and 15,000, out of a total population of 38 million.
