The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw will open soon and has just revealed a preview of The Forest, an art installation in the first section of the exhibition. The piece consists of a few glass screens onto which digitally animated trees and animals are projected. The animations depict the symbolic forest in which the first Jewish settlers found themselves back in the Middle Ages when searching for a new homeland. It was where the birds chirped to greet them: Po lin! Po lin!, which supposedly meant ‘here you should rest’.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Program Director of the Core Exhibition for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, tells the legend.