The Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum

Based on the Act of 21 November 1996 on Museums, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage appointed the members of the Board of Trustees at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Pursuant to the Act, the Board of Trustees supervises the Museum’s fulfilment of its duties as regards the collections and society; assesses, on the basis of the annual report submitted by the Museum’s Director, the activities of the Museum and gives its opinion on the annual activity plan submitted by the Director; in the event of announcing a competition for the position of Director, designates two additional members to the competition committee. The term of office of the members of the Museum`s Board of Trustees is four years.

In the years 2019 – 2023 the following persons make up the committee (order of publication according to the Official Journal of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of 10 June 2019):

Colette Avital

Israeli diplomat and politician of Romanian origin, survivor of the Holocaust. In the years 1999-2009 she was a member of the Knesset from the Israeli Labour Party and One Israel. In her long-lasting diplomatic career, Ms Avital was, i.a. Consul General of Israel in New York. As a member of the Knesset she was in charge of an investigation aimed at identifying real estates in Israel belonging to European Jews, victims of the Holocaust. The Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, led by her, represents 50 organisations which support the Survivors.

Anna Stupnicka-Bando

Righteous Among the Nations, a liaison officer „Anka” in the „Żywiciel” group in Żoliborz in the Warsaw Uprising. During the occupation, in the winter of 1941, the mother of Anna Stupnicka-Bando led a Jewish girl, Liliana Alter, daughter of Bund activist Hilary Alter, out of the ghetto with the help of her daughter. Since then until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, Liliana was hidden by the Stupnicki family in their apartment in Żoliborz. Anna Stupnicka-Bando is the Chairman of the Polish Association of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Barbara Jolson Blumenthal

Merited for saving the Jewish cultural heritage, founder of conservation activities for the benefit of monuments, daughter of a Holocaust Survivor – an engineer Leon Joselzon vel Jolson born in Warsaw who financed and donated to Yad Vashem the cast of the monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument by Nathan Rapoport and who funded Janusz Korczak’s statue in the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.

Mieczysław Cisło

A Roman Catholic clergyman, Doctor of Theology, Rector of the Higher Clerical Seminary in Lublin, since 1998 Lublin auxiliary bishop. In the structures of the Polish Episcopate Conference, he was a delegate of the Catholic Movements and acted at the Secular Catholics Council. He was also Chairman of the Inter-Religious Dialogue Council and the Committee for Dialogue with Judaism. For his involvement in the Catholic-Jewish dialogue and actions to preserve the heritage of Polish Jews, he received the Laurel Crown Decoration, awarded by the Israeli Embassy in Poland.

Abraham Foxman

Son of a Polish Jewish couple, Helena [Helen] and Józef [Joseph] Foxman, born in Baranowicze [Baranovichi]. In 1950, he emigrated with his parents to the United States. He graduated from the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. He obtained a BA in Political Science and, with honourable mention, in History at the City College of New York. He also graduated from the New York University School of Law. He wrote his diploma thesis on Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and international economy at the New School university. In 1965 he became a member of the Anti-Defamation League, and organisation which counteracts against anti-Semitism. In 1987, he was elected by the board to the position of the new ADL Chairman, in place of Nathan Perlmutter. Since March 2016 he has been leading the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Artur Hofman

Chairman of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland, actor, director and journalist, activist of the Jewish community in Poland, editor-in-chief of Słowo Żydowskie. In the years 1977–1982 he was an entrant, and in the years 1982-1991 an actor in the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. In the years 1993-1998 he worked as a director of the Opera and Operetta in Szczecin. Since 2003 he has been a director in the Jewish Theatre. For many years, he has been involved in the Polish-Jewish dialogue and the cultivation of the memory of martyrdom and the struggle of Polish Jews.

Wacław Kornblum

Survivor of the Holocaust, eyewitness of history, born in Paris to a Jewish family, at the end of the 1920s he moved to Warsaw. He lived at 42 Śliska Street. His parents were members of the Bund. After the outbreak of the war, the Kornblum family moved to 35 Niska Street. He survived the first liquidation action by bribing the Jewish Police. In 1943 his uncle ransomed him from the Umschlagplatz. Since then he had been in hiding, first at his uncle’s place in the ghetto, later in Warsaw’s Praga and the Bialystok region. He survived the war and in 1957 he left for Israel. He returned to Warsaw after thirty years. He lives at Saska Kępa. Wacław’s father, Szlojme Kornblum , was a writer writing in Yiddish, whose books were printed and published in Warsaw. His work was digitalized in Vilnius and sent to YIVO in New York.

Dr Jan Kutnik

Member of the board of the “Well of Memory” Association, which deals with documenting the history and culture of Lublin Jews. The Association organises workshops for students on human rights and counteracting discrimination, organises meetings, debates, and conferences commemorating important historical events, promotes European integration by organising international educational trips to memorial sites in Poland and Ukraine. It is the first representative of Lublin higher education institutions accepted for the Inter-University Program of Interdisciplinary PhD Studies of the Artes Liberales Academy.

Małgorzata Naimska

Graduated from the humanities at the University of Warsaw, she worked at the Polish PEN Club for many years as well as NGOs. She participated in the Political Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Władysław Bartoszewski. She has been working for many years in the capital city’s local government, acting as the Director, next Deputy Director of the Culture Office of the Municipal Office of the Capital City of Warsaw.

Gideon Nissenbaum

President of the Board of the Nissenbaum Foundation, son of its founder Sigmund Nissenbaum. Founded in Warsaw in 1983, for over 30 years the foundation has been rescuing the traces of Jewish culture in Poland and commemorates the place of struggles and martyrdom of Jews during World War II, and popularises the knowledge about the best traditions of the history of Poles and Jews around the world. Sigmund Nissenbaum was one of the first advocates of the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Irene Kronhill Pletka

She runs a foundation dedicated to the memory of her parents that supports Jewish cultural and educational projects and activities promoting social justice around the globe. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish History, and the JOINT (JDC) organisation which helped her family and many others in the most difficult times of war and the after-war period.

Michael Schudrich

American and Polish religious scholar and historian, since 2004 Chief Rabbi of Poland. In the years 1990–1998 he worked in Warsaw for the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. In the year 2000 he became the Rabbi of Warsaw and Lodz. It is mainly thanks to him that Jewish kindergartens and schools have been established in Poland. He is a member of the Rabbinate of the Republic of Poland. He actively participates in the Polish-Jewish and Christian-Jewish dialogue. He was awarded the Officer of the Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for his outstanding merits in the activities for the Polish-Jewish dialogue, and the Missio Reconciliationis decoration for his work for the development of the Polish-Jewish dialogue.

Jarosław Sellin

Completed his history studies at the University of Gdańsk, where he defended his Master’s thesis on the Jewish Issue in the First Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Times of the Four-Year Sejm. He belonged to the Young Poland Movement, Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity”, Christian National Union, Conservative Party, Poland Plus, member of Law and Justice (PIS) party since 2010. Initially, he worked as a high school teacher, then he lectured at the University of Gdańsk. He has been a journalist since the 1990s, i.a. in: the Młoda Polska [Young Poland] weekly, TVP and Polsat broadcasting companies. In the years 1998-1999 he was the press spokesman of Jerzy Buzek’s government. In the years 1999-2005 a member of the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT), next, until 2007, secretary of state in the Ministry of Culture. Deputy since 2005 (5th–8th term), he was a member of the following committees: culture and mass media, foreign affairs, and European Union affairs. Since November 2015, secretary of state in the Ministry of Culture in the governments of Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki.

Adam Struzik

Physician, local government activist and social worker, parliamentarian. Senate Marshal in the years 1993-1997, senator of the second, third, and fourth term, from 2001 the Marshal of the Mazovia Province. A volunteer firefighter and member of the Provincial Board and the Chief Board of the Association of Volunteer Fire Brigades of the Republic of Poland. Since 1998 a councilman of the Mazovia Province. Chairman of the Health and Physical Culture Committee in the 1st term of the Mazovia Province Regional Council. In October 2018, on behalf of the Mazovia Province local government, he signed the lease deed for the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital for the benefit of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum for a period of 30 years.

Marian Turski

Historian and journalist. Prisoner of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, an editor of the Polityka weekly. He was awarded the Commander’s Cross with Star – The Order of Polonia Restituta and the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his merits for Polish-German relations. He has devoted all his creative life to the struggle for human right to dignity.