Exhibit documents revival of Polish Jewish life

American photographer Chuck Fishman was just 21 when he began travelling behind the Iron Curtain in 1975 to document a Jewish community on the verge of dying out after centuries of existence in Poland. He couldn’t have foreseen a Jewish revival that came after the fall of communism in 1989.

A new photo exhibition opened this week in Warsaw that brings together Fishman’s early documentation of a melancholy and declining Jewish world with the revival of traditions by the third and fourth generation after the Holocaust, a transformation that left him astounded.

Titled “Re-generation: Jewish Life in Poland,” the exhibition showing at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw will run until Oct. 28 and then go to the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow for several more months.

Fishman, now 65, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his motivation for documenting Poland’s Jews in the 1970s and 1980s was to document history before the centuries-old Jewish community died out completely.

On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jews numbered around 3.3 million, the largest community in Europe. Most were killed by Nazi Germany, while post-war violence and an anti-semitic campaign by the Polish communist regime in 1968 forced most of the survivors into exile.

“It was supposed to be the last of 1,000 years of Polish Jewish life. That’s what everyone was saying - everyone,” Fishman said.

“And if it was not for the fall of communism, it would have been the end.”