The functioning of Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Polin) is under threat because a minister is holding up its director’s reappointment, the institution’s partners claim.
Dariusz Stola’s reappointment was recommended last May through a competition organised by the Ministry of Culture, the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) of Poland, and the Mayor of Warsaw.
The director has previously clashed with Poland’s far-right populist government over issues of history and memory, including a law that criminalised accusing “the Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust.
He has been Polin’s director since 2014, the year its core exhibition opened.
But in spite of having committed to abide by the jury’s verdict, Minister Piotr Gliński has declined to formally reappoint him, according to the JHI chair Piotr Wiślicki and Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.
He has not been at work since February last year and Polin is currently run by an acting director, Zygmunt Stępiński.
In a statement published last week, Mr Wiślicki and Mr Trzaskowski called the impasse “beyond comprehension” and “damaging to the image of Warsaw as a place devoted to the memory and role of Polish-Jewish heritage in the history of Poland”.
With Mr Stępiński’s term as acting director concluding at the end of February, “the current situation poses a real and serious threat to the functioning of Polin”, they said.
The crisis, they added, “may prove detrimental both to Polin and to Polish-Jewish dialogue”.
Prof Stola was among those protesting the notorious law passed in February 2018 that critics said could prevent historians from pointing out individual Poles had collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
A March 2018 exhibition in Polin that drew attention to the communist regime’s antisemitic campaign of 1968 also drew the government’s ire.
In a statement, the Ministry of Culture called the museum’s condition “stable”, with work “proceeding as planned” under the acting director.
The statement contained no indication that Mr Gliński would concede Prof Stola’s reappointment.
