Warsaw Exhibition Highlights the Role of Language in Jewish Culture

Jerusalem, 20 November, 2025 (TPS-IL) -- (PAP) – Jewish culture is inextricably linked to language, text, and the alphabet. For most of their history, Jews lived in the diaspora; their languages, traditions, and texts built community, Dr. Tamara Sztyma, curator of the new temporary exhibition at POLIN Museum in Warsaw, “The Power of Words: On Jewish Languages” told PAP.

The exhibition will be on view from November 21 to June 8, 2026. It is organized by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in cooperation with the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Sztyma is an art historian, exhibition curator, and chief specialist in the Exhibition Department at POLIN Museum. She has authored publications on the work of Jewish artists and Jewish art.

PAP: Before the war, millions of Polish Jews and Jewish women spoke Yiddish. Where can Jewish languages ​​be heard in Poland today?

Tamara Sztyma: Before 1939, the vast majority of the over three million Jewish people living in Poland spoke Yiddish, although they generally also knew Polish, especially the younger generation attending Polish schools. Most Yiddish speakers perished during the Holocaust. After the war, their numbers continued to dwindle – due to government policies, emigration, and because many survivors, traumatized by their experience, desired to distance themselves from their prewar identity.

Today, there are virtually no native speakers of Yiddish in Poland, meaning those who knew it from their families. Despite this, hundreds of people are interested in learning it—for them, it renews their ties to their heritage or serves as a way to explore the richness of Jewish culture. For researchers of the prewar history of Jews in Poland, knowledge of Yiddish is crucial—it allows them to decipher historical sources and gain greater insight into the life of the Jewish community.

Yiddish can be learned in courses organized primarily by the Shalom Foundation and the Center for Yiddish Culture in Warsaw. Yiddish language courses are offered at universities, such as the University of Warsaw.

Yiddish also inspires cultural creators. For many years, wonderful contemporary music with Yiddish lyrics has been created, for example by Maria Ka, Paweł Cieślak and Joanna Schumacher, Karolina Cicha, and Ola Bilińska. From 2010 to 2014, the literary and artistic quarterly “Cwiszn” was published in both Polish and Yiddish, and for a time, a Yiddish radio station even operated. The Center for Yiddish Culture organizes Yiddish-based artistic classes, lectures, and meetings.

In Poland, you can also learn Hebrew. Hebrew studies are offered at universities in Warsaw and Poznań, and language courses are also available at other universities. For many years, the Professor Moses Schorr Foundation in Warsaw has been offering Hebrew courses at all levels. Hebrew in its ancient, biblical, and medieval forms can be heard during services in synagogues in Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków, as Hebrew has traditionally been the language of liturgy and religious studies in Judaism.

PAP: What is the importance of languages ​​for Jewish culture?

TS: In the exhibition “The Power of Words,” we want to show how closely Jewish culture is connected to language, text, and the alphabet. Jewish languages ​​served various functions: they served everyday communication, shaped the sphere of the sacred, and built a distinct Jewish identity, first understood as a religious and social identity, and later, in the modern period, as a national one.

For most of their long history, apart from ancient times and modern times, Jews lived in diaspora, without a state of their own. Therefore, their languages, traditions, and texts related to them built community; they provided an intangible space in which they could develop their culture. This is still true to some extent today – Jews living in different parts of the world are united by language.

Hebrew played a significant role in shaping the distinct ethnic and religious identity of Jews in antiquity. The first evidence of this language dates back to the time of the ancient Jewish state, initially written in the so-called Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The Torah (the Five Books of Moses) and most of the books of the Hebrew Bible were written in Hebrew. Even in antiquity, Jews living within the great empires – Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman – began to speak other languages, primarily Aramaic, which were close to Hebrew, and Greek.

Later, in various countries of the Diaspora – in Europe, Africa, and Asia – Jews spoke languages ​​similar to those of their surroundings, a necessity for adaptation to new conditions.

However, Hebrew was never forgotten – as the language of sacred scripture, it became the language of liturgy, prayer, and religious study, and remained a kind of code of Jewish identity. Jewish languages ​​developed in the Diaspora—for example, Yiddish and Ladino—always had a strong Hebrew component, especially in vocabulary related to tradition and custom. Moreover, these languages ​​were generally written in the Hebrew alphabet. We are thus dealing with a cultural continuity that exists regardless of the differentiation of Jewish communities.

As for the languages ​​of the Diaspora, they too have become an important element of Jewish heritage and identity. As languages ​​of everyday speech, they have evolved alongside the community, reflecting the local flavor and customs of Jewish communities scattered throughout the world.

PAP: You begin your story at the source – with the Hebrew alphabet and the ancient history of this language. Why is this language called holy? What is the basis of its holiness?

TS: In ancient times, Judaism’s sacred texts were written in Hebrew – the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), and parts of the Talmud. When, due to changing socio-political circumstances, Jews began to use other languages ​​in their daily speech, Hebrew came to be known as lashon ha-kodesh, or the holy language, reserved for the sacred sphere. Regardless of the languages ​​they spoke, Jews studied, prayed, and recited blessings in Hebrew. Hebrew texts adorned synagogue walls and ritual objects, and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were attributed special power.

It could be said that the sacredness of Hebrew is one of the foundations of Judaism. In Jewish tradition, it is considered the language in which God addressed the Israelites. The Bible recounts how, through Moses, God gave the Jews the Torah, containing the Law, a set of rules they were to follow. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile from Jerusalem, Jews, settling in new places, continually analyzed, commented on, and interpreted the commandments contained in the Torah, seeking to understand how they should be observed in a changing world. Studying and commenting on the Hebrew text of the Torah became the most important religious practice, next to prayer. It was a source of continuity and, at the same time, evolution in Judaism.

PAP: The exhibition will present the history of the “rebirth” of the Hebrew language – how did this process come about?

TS: The traditional multilingual system within which Jewish communities had operated for centuries began to change as a result of the emancipation of Jews and their greater integration with their non-Jewish surroundings, which began at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Haskalah movement, born in Germany and meaning “Enlightenment” in Hebrew, was at the forefront of the modernization of European Jewry. Its proponents advocated, among other things, the abandonment of distinct Jewish languages ​​and an opening to the languages ​​of the surrounding region. At the same time, however, they believed that Hebrew was a special language for Jews and desired to open it to new, non-religious areas.

In the 19th century, the first secular literature and press in Hebrew began to emerge. This wasn’t easy, however. Hebrew, while never a dead language, was archaic, bound up with ritual and religious tradition, and difficult to convey modern, everyday life. These initial steps, however, were important for the later “rebirth” that occurred with the development of the Zionist movement, at which time Hebrew was recognized as the national language of the Jews.

At the turn of the 20th century, so-called language revivalists were active, establishing the Hebrew Language Committee. They were engaged in modernizing grammar and coining new words. One of them was Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who edited a multi-volume dictionary. However, Hebrew would never have been reborn as a language of everyday speech if not for the thousands of Jews who, due to the difficult socio-political situation in their homelands, migrated to Palestine and formed the nucleus of a new society. In Tel Aviv, founded in 1909, Hebrew was the official language from the very beginning, and the first Hebrew high school was opened there. After the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, Hebrew became one of the three official languages, alongside English and Arabic.

However, in the 20th century, not all Jews considered Hebrew their national language. Among those living in Central and Eastern Europe, another form of Jewish national consciousness, known as Diaspora nationalism, also developed. Its proponents believed that Jews, as a nation, could live in the Diaspora and build their modern culture on the basis of Yiddish.

PAP: Today, when we say “Jewish language” in Poland, we most often think of Hebrew or Yiddish. Yet, there are many Jewish languages. How does this diversity affect cultural continuity – does it weaken it, or, on the contrary, nourish and strengthen it?

TS: Settling in the Diaspora, Jews developed a strategy of adapting to new conditions while maintaining their own culture. They adopted the local languages ​​spoken by their non-Jewish neighbors and gave them a Jewish character through the use of Hebrew words and sometimes grammatical forms. This gave rise to languages ​​such as Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Yedeo-Persian, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian, and many others. These new Jewish languages ​​were generally written in the Hebrew alphabet and incorporated elements of the previous, “inherited” languages—Hebrew and Aramaic—as well as other languages ​​with which Jewish communities had encountered throughout their history.

The histories of Ladino and Yiddish are particularly interesting. Jews “took” both languages ​​with them when settling elsewhere: Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century, settled in the vast Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and North Africa, and Ashkenazi Jews, migrating from German lands in the late Middle Ages, settled in Eastern Europe. Why? Because these languages ​​already had a strongly established tradition in everyday life, migration was mass, and in the new countries of settlement, Jewish communities enjoyed considerable internal autonomy.

However, Yiddish and Ladino changed significantly in their new surroundings – Yiddish acquired a significant Slavic component, and Ladino – Turkish, Greek, Italian, and French influences.

PAP: What objects will be on display at the exhibition “The Power of Words. On Jewish Languages”?

TS: We wanted the exhibition to have a visual impact. This turned out to be easy, because the story of Jewish languages ​​is also a story of the Jewish visual sphere. In traditional Jewish art, text and the Hebrew alphabet played an important role: Hebrew texts adorned the walls of synagogues and ritual objects. Traditional religious symbols, such as the Temple Portal, the Tablets of the Ten Commandments, and symbolic images of animals and plants, rarely existed in isolation; they were usually intertwined with the text, commenting on each other. Therefore, the exhibition features primarily beautiful ritual objects: parochets (richly decorated curtains – PAP) covering the Ark of the Torah in which the Torah scrolls were kept, veils (a type of decorative cover, a lid, placed over the Torah scroll – PAP), crowns and shields decorating the Torah scrolls, mezuzot, tefillin (black leather boxes with scrolls of parchment with quotations from the Torah inside them – PAP), amulets and other items.

Particularly valuable and unusual are a 17th-century Sephardic Torah robes and accessories, which we have borrowed from the Jewish Museum in Rome, as well as a Hebrew illuminated prayer book from 1290 from the collections of the University Library in Wrocław. We also have objects illustrating ancient history – a magic bowl with Aramaic inscriptions dating from the 2nd century CE, borrowed from the Berlin Municipal Museums, and tombstones with epitaphs in Greek from the 1st century BC, from a Jewish colony in Egypt, borrowed from the National Museum in Warsaw.

PAP: Contemporary art is an important part of the exhibition. The connection between words and images and the idea of ​​the power of words and letters, which have been crucial to Jewish visuality for centuries, are still present in the work of Jewish artists. How does contemporary art utilize these motifs?

TS: In the exhibition, we’re showcasing works by three artists from Warsaw – Monika Krajewska, Ewa Gordon, and Helena Czernek. Although each works in a different technique, they all draw inspiration from Jewish tradition and religion – they draw on traditional symbols and motifs, which they interpret in a modern way. Above all, however, the most important element of their works is the use of Hebrew text, which is woven into the image. For example, in Monika Krajewska’s cutout “Menorah of Flames,” the traditional seven-branched candlestick is created from the repeated Hebrew word “aish” – fire.

We have also invited artists to participate in the exhibition who work with techniques that depart from traditional techniques, yet still explore themes of the alphabet and language. You will be able to see the work of Israeli artist Oded Ezer, whose creative medium is Hebrew typography. He creates various graphic designs of Hebrew letters, and through these designs, he creates paintings and installations that touch on themes that interest him.

We will also present a video by the artistic duo Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson from Berlin and Anna Elena Torres from Chicago, documenting their work “Pseudo-Territory,” presented three years ago at the Venice Biennale as part of the Yiddishland Pavilion. The film addresses the concept of language as an autonomous territory in which culture can flourish. In this way, it serves as a kind of punch line, highlighting one of the exhibition’s most important themes.