Polish Souvenirs (Polskie pamiątki)
These objects were collected from Kraków, Poland in 2022.
Poland was once home to the largest Jewish community in the world. In the Holocaust (1941-1945), approximately 90% of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered, and after the war, when survivors returned to their homes, hundreds more were killed in antisemitic pogroms. Today, the Jewish population of Poland is less than half of one per cent of what it was before the war.
The common visual stereotype of the Jew was born 2,000 years ago. In medieval art, the beard, hooked nose, and bag of coins were used to depict Jews as ugly, evil, greedy, and despicable – and make them instantly identifiable – often in places where no real Jews lived. Across the world, in places like Poland, where Jews once existed but no longer do, these imagined Jews live on.