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| By: Israel Insider staff and partners |
| Published: June 30, 2005 |
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A design by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaeki and Ilmari Lahdelma was chosen for a new Jewish museum in Warsaw, beating 10 other submissions.
Judges from Poland, Israel and several European countries chose the plan for the rectangular building in glass and limestone with a passageway running through it. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, due to open in 2008, will depict Jewish life that flourished for eight centuries in Poland before it was virtually wiped out under Nazi occupation.
In a blind competition where the anonymous entries bore numbers, the architects' Helsinki-based firm beat out better-known competitors such as Daniel Libeskind, designer of Berlin's landmark Jewish Museum, and Peter Eisenman, designer of the Berlin Holocaust memorial.
The jury looked for a design that would fit with the museum's interior space and exhibits, which have already been designed. The project has a budget of US$30 million.
It will be built in a park in downtown Warsaw next to a monument to the victims of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Although it will devote space to the Holocaust, it will focus on the centuries when Jews flourished in this central European land.
Museum organizers hope the new facility will stand alongside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Berlin's Jewish Museum as one of the world's pre-eminent museums devoted to Jewish history.
"Poland was the heart of the Jewish Diaspora for centuries, and it is a forgotten story," said Ewa Junczyck-Ziomecka, the museum's director for development. "The accomplishments of Polish Jewry _ to the culture of Europe, to the founding of Israel, to culture in the United States _ is so powerful and people are not aware of it."
Other contenders were Andrzej Bulanda and Wlodzimierz Mucha from Poland; David Chipperfield, Britain; Marek Dunikowski, Poland; Zvi Hecker, Israel and Germany; Kengo Kuma, Japan; Josep Lluis Mateo, Spain; Helena Casanova and Jesus Hernandez, the Netherlands; and Gesine Weinmiller, Germany.
The AP contributed to this report. |
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