Monument planned for Polish Righteous
PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge
09.09.2014 13:29
A competition has been announced for the design of a memorial to Poles who risked their lives saving Jews during the Nazi occupation.
Medals of Righteous Gentiles: wikipedia
The submitted designs will be judged by an international jury and the authors of the five shortlisted projects will be invited to present the final versions of their concepts.
The memorial is the brainchild of Zygmunt Rolat, a Polish Jew who lost his family during the war and as a boy of 15 emigrated from Poland and settled in the United States, developing a successful business career there.
The unveiling of the memorial is scheduled for the autumn of 2015, and the monument is to be located close to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, whose core exhibition opens next month.
Addressing a press conference in Warsaw, Rolat said that the project will be financed entirely by Jews in Israel and other countries. ‘This memorial will be an expression of gratitude, not of the [Polish] government or the city [of Warsaw], but of those Jews who were saved’, he added.
Medals for so-called ‘Righteous Gentiles’ are awarded by Israel via the Yad Vashem Institute.
Rolat’s initiative has won the support of President Bronislaw Komorowski, and the International and Polish committees that monitor the realization of the project include the Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich, former foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld, former Israeli Ambassador in Poland Shewach Weiss, film directors Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, and the director of the National Opera Waldemar Dąbrowski. (mk/nh)