MINI - MUSEUM

What is MI POLIN MEZUZAH CENTER?

MI POLIN MEZUZAH CENTER is a new, privately owned Jewish museum in Warsaw. This place is dedicaded to mezuzah traces and Polish-Jewish history.
The core part of the mini-museum is Mezuzah Trace Archive. The Archive tells the story of 170 mezuzah traces found in 93 localities in 5 countries. This mezuzah trace research journey was started in 2013.

Why did we create
Mi Polin Mezuzah Center?

We drove 60,000 km, visited 5 countries, 160 cities & villages, and discovered
170 mezuzah traces. We spent around 350 days on the road. Why? Back in the day, there were millions of mezuzahs in Poland. Along with the memo­ry of their owners – Polish Jews, they vanished during the war. Mezuzah traces are letters from the past, which we read as follows:

We, who were murdered in the Holocaust and are no longer here, your old neighbors, whom you will never meet, or members of your family, with whom you will not coexist, we leave something behind, a way to find us in the future. We leave you mezuzah traces.
It’s likely our last hope for you to find us.

At the MI POLIN MEZUZAH CENTER you will see:

• Emptiness: the story of the extermination of the Jewish-Polish town of Trachimbrod.
• Traces of Presence: old mezuzah scrolls from Lodz, Biala Podlaska and Przemyśl.
• Mezuzah Trace Archive – Stories of 170 traces of mezuzahs
• Last Shabbat: a metaphysical journey through time telling a story of one Jewish home in Jędrzejów Nowy.
• Traces of Mezuzahs: salvaged frames with traces of mezuzahs from Lodz, Sokolow Podlaski, Warsaw, Jedrzejow Nowy and Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski and their stories

Who is behind Mi Polin Mezuzah Center?

The Israeli HAAARETZ called the founders of MI POLIN MEZUZAH CENTER – mezuzah hunters. In 2013, Aleksander Prugar and Helena Czernek founded the MI POLIN design studio, which has been focusing on combining Jewish tradition, history and religion with modern design. Over the course of 11 years, they found 170 traces of mezuzahs and, based on this documentation, they founded the MI POLIN MEZUZAH CENTER – a first historilcal mini-museum dedicaded to mezuzah traces.

The Collection

At the exhibition, we show part of our collection of door frames with mezuzah traces and the most valuable: original mezuzah scrolls and saved torah scroll fragments.