Donor savors Warsaw museum opening

WARSAW, Poland - As his train rolled across Germany in 1939, passing through small towns where swastikas fluttered from flagpoles, Tad Taube cowered in fear each time Nazi police entered his compartment and barked orders for his documents - papers that plainly identified him as an 8-year-old Jewish boy from Poland.

But the full terror of the war was still a few months off, and Taube got safely through Germany to France, and then by ship to the United States, making a narrow escape from the Holocaust and a passage into a bright American future of Hollywood, entrepreneurial success and philanthropy.

Now the 82-year-old Taube, who lives in California, is back in Poland, the land of his birth, to celebrate the partial opening of a new Polish Jewish history museum for which he has spent years raising funds.

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened its doors to the public for the first time Saturday, a milestone that comes with Taube’s help. He runs two philanthropies that together have committed about $16 million forthe museum, the largest private donation to the project.

Though the museum, which celebrates the 1,000-year Jewish presence in Poland, does not yet have its permanent exhibition ready, officials were determined to at least have a small opening to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which was marked Friday in a state ceremony.

From now until sometime next year, when the core exhibition should be finished, the museum will host temporary exhibitions, films, lectures and other cultural events. This weekend, the museum is holding an open house, giving the public the first chance to explore a striking architectural creation that has been talked about for years. It is boxlike and glass on the outside, but inside the visitor enters a soaring foyer that looks like a deep curved canyon. With sand-coloredwalls, it symbolizes the parting of the Red Sea. A striking reconstruction of a painted wooden synagogue is already in place, though it wasn’t on view Saturday.

Taube expressed satisfaction at seeing the museum reach this stage after nearly 20 years of planning, explaining that it is part of his longer-term mission to ensure that Polish Jewish history is not forgotten.

“I am in awe,” Taube said in an interview from the museum. “As I go through and walk around all the nooks and crannies of this place and its unbelievable open spaces, these huge expanses of glass and these walls that are like a sculpture, and then seeing the wooden synagogue, it is a very remarkable experience.”

Over the decades, Taube had grown concerned that the Holocaust, as important as it was, was crowding out knowledge of the previous centuries of Jewish learning and culture. That Jewish world was for many centuries centered in the Polish lands, where it grew to be the world’s largest Jewish community for a time, numbering 3.3 million on the eve of the Holocaust.

“I became very concerned that the Holocaust became more or less the beginning and end of Jewish history,” he said. “I felt that being victims was too much a part of Jewish life.”

So he began trying to promote historical remembrance of Jewish life in Poland, a cradle of “culture, history, language, art, theater and music fundamental to Western culture.”