“Signing of the agreement between the WGM and the Foundation is a historic event”

Signed on 6 June in the Józef Piłsudski’s Chamber – located on the eleventh floor of the PAST building – an agreement on mutual cooperation between the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and the Nissenbaum Family Foundation is already the sixth agreement in a row on cooperation signed by our institution. The WGM has already signed such agreements with the Treblinka Museum, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland, the State Museum at Majdanek, and the Institute of National Remembrance.

This is the first cooperation agreement signed by Albert Stankowski, Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, with an international organization. For 36 years, the Nissenbaum Family Foundation has been saving testimonies and monuments of Jewish culture in Poland, commemorating places of struggle and martyrdom of Jews, disseminating knowledge about the traditions of common Polish-Jewish relations. „We commemorate those that no one else can speak up for” – said Albert Stankowski, the Museum’s Director.

The joint activities of the WGM and the Nissenbaum Family Foundation will aim to „preserve the memory of the Jewish community, especially that of its part that lived and died in Warsaw, in the Warsaw ghetto” – said Dr. Halina Postek, Head of the Museum Education Department, emphasizing that she counts on many common educational undertakings.

„The signing of this agreement is a historic event and God’s blessing” – said Gideon Nissenbaum, the President of the Nissenbaum Family Foundation. – „For Jews, coincidence does not exist. My father (the founder and the Foundation’s first President – editor’s note), Sigmund Nissenbaum, was one of those children in the Warsaw ghetto who smuggled into it food and weapons with ammunition. He found himself in one of the last transports to Treblinka. He always wanted that the Warsaw Ghetto Museum would be created in Warsaw. It was in this very building, the PAST building, that the first office of the foundation, founded in 1983, was located.” He added, among others, that it is no coincidence that the date of signing of the agreement is 6 June, exactly eight months after his mother, Sonja Nissenbaum’s death, who had also been the Foundation’s President.

Director Stankowski pointed out that the signing of the agreement symbolically initiates the launching of the „There was a ghetto here. We remember!” action associated with commemorating the Jews deported from ghettos located in Mazovia.

The following persons were present at the signing of the agreement, among others: Monika Krawczyk, Chairwoman of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, and Artur Hofman, Chairman of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.

Anna Kilian