Michal Majewski is head of the POLIN Museum Resource Centre, Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of the Rzeszów University, and a member of the board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

Michal is an academic researcher engaged in the field of Jewish studies and was one of the curators of the On the Jewish Street (interwar years) gallery of the POLIN Museum core exhibition. Over the last 8 years he has been conducting genealogical research for Jewish families from Poland and abroad.

“POLIN Museum Resource Centre in Warsaw – Project Presentation” (Tues-122), 4:30-5:45 P.M.

Sources documenting the history of Jewish community in Poland are scattered all over the world. They can be found in many countries, including Poland, the United States and Israel. The POLIN Museum Resource Center gathers information on resources available from other institutions, and facilitates access to them. It also offer access to a library as well as various types of resources for conducting historical, genealogical and local research.

The Resource Center aims to provide the most extensive database on available sources on the history of Polish Jews, thus enabling its visitors to conduct research on their own.

Category: Beginning genealogists

“Polish Jews in Iran (1942-1943) – Documentation From the Polish Embassy in Teheran” (Weds-117), 3:00-4:15 P.M.

Following the outbreak of World War II, eastern borderlands of Poland were annexed to the Soviet Union. Part of the local Jewish population as well as people who had escaped from the German occupation zone were arrested and deported – on Stalin’s orders – to mainland Russia.

As a result of an agreement between the Polish and Soviet governments, Polish citizens were granted amnesty in order to form Polish armies in the Soviet territory. 389,041 Polish citizens including 90,662 Jews were released from Soviet prisons. Former inmates of Soviet labour camps who had managed to arrive at the pre-arranged meeting points were sent off to Iran.

The group was taken care of by the Polish Embassy in Teheran, which collected personal data of each Polish citizen temporarily residing in Iran. The Embassy documentation containing numerous records on individual refugees has been preserved at the Archive of New Records in Warsaw.

Topics: Ashkenazic research, Cemetery research, Holocaust research, Immigration and migration over the ages