We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of the sociologist and historian Pawel Śpiewak, the former director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (JHI), who passed away March 30 at the age of 71.
Spiewak, who was the son of the writer, poet and translator Anna Kamieńska and the poet and translator Jan Śpiewak, was an activist in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and a university professor. He served as a member of Parliament in 2005-2007.
Spiewak was director of the Jewish Historical Institute from 2011 to 2020. He made it a priority during his tenure to modernize, reorganize and upgrade the Institute and make its collections more accessible to visitors and researchers, both in person and online. Digitization and exhibition, as well as expansion of staff and publishing, were key concerns.
“[I]t was a requirement that the Institute should be technologically modernized, moving from the era of typescript to the Internet era,” he told Olga Drenda in a lengthy interview summing up his tenure published on the JHI web site in 2020.
The JHI needed a leap forward. It was not only about the website, but also – which was criticized by some JHI employees – about the digitization of materials. They had to be made available, as well as books, magazines, documents written on paper, often of the poorest kind, had to be saved. Now we have a fantastic scanning center, we have rebuilt the website once again, and many new people with great competence and amazing commitment appeared at work.
A major focus was research and publication of the Ringelblum Archive, the cache of documents collected in the Warsaw Ghetto by a group called “Oneg Shabbat” and hidden away in milk cans that were discovered after the war.
Spiewak curated a exhibit on the Ringelblum Archive, “What We’ve Been Unable to Shout Out to the World,” which opened as the JHI’s core permanent exhibit in 2017.
In a memorial article on the JHI web site, Prof. Andrzej Zbikowski, of the JHI’s Scientific Department, wrote:
Paweł changed the Institute, he hired young people with great competence in exhibition, media and technical issues. He eagerly supported the expansion of the scientific department, which enabled us to significantly speed up the editing of sources from the Ringelblum Archive. These then young doctoral students are today outstanding, world-renowned researchers. By the time Paweł took over as director, we had published four volumes, and by the time he left, there were already thirty-odd volumes on the shelves.
May his soul be bound up in the bond of life — may his memory be a blessing!
Read the lengthy interview with Pawel Spiewak about his tenure at the JHI, in English