Closing event of the exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland«

On Thursday, 26 February 2026, the exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland« will come to an end. To mark the occasion, the Dubnow Institute invites to a closing event at its premises at Goldschmidtstraße 28 in Leipzig. The exhibition will be open for viewing from 4 p.m. This will be followed at 5 p.m. by a lecture. The exhibition emerged in cooperation with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which holds one of the most important collections on Polish Jewish history. 

Julia Roos, one of the three curators of the exhibition, highlights another exhibition that was created in the 1960s in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute in her lecture. Entitled »Leben, Kampf und Tod im Warschauer Ghetto« she presents a traveling exhibition that the Jewish community of West Berlin wanted to send throughout West Germany in 1963 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. This exhibition represents an unusual cooperation across the Iron Curtain. It is remarkable that the Jewish Community of Berlin is actively participating in the work of remembrance in the land of the perpetrators, while the Jewish communities in West Germany lived largely isolated from the rest of society during this time.

However, the exhibition was accused of bias and Polish propaganda and only shown at a few venues. It was therefore difficult to find out what was on display in the exhibition: it left hardly any traces. It's narrative and visual design could only be reconstructed via detours: The few surviving documents show us a well-thought-out historical documentation. The high-quality exhibition, which was academically supervised by Joseph Wulf and Bernard Mark, would have been an important counterweight to other exhibitions of the time, which often remained stuck in an internal German debate. But it fell between the fronts of the Cold War and German resistance to remembrance (»Erinnerungsabwehr«).

The exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland« offers insights into the ambivalence of Jewish life in Poland immediately after the Holocaust: between self-determination and violence, mourning and new beginnings, reconstruction and emigration. In Lower Silesia, on former German territory, Jewish life briefly flourished again for a few years. At the same time, there were repeated attacks against Jews throughout the country, the largest of which was the Kielce Pogrom in the summer of 1946. This escalation of violence was one of the main reasons for the emigration of a large number of Holocaust survivors by the end of the decade.

The exhibition can be viewed in the framework of public or reserved guided tours.

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