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Poland's new museum commemorating 800 years of Polish Jewry should open in 2009, two years after building begins next summer, the head of a German association supporting the project said on Wednesday.
Josef Thesing said the museum will aim to be a "narrative history museum" which seeks to educate people about the long and often painful history of Poland's Jews from the Middle Ages to World War II.
The museum will be build in the heart of Warsaw's former Jewish quarter, which was razed by the Nazis during the war.
The ghetto in 1943 saw the first Jewish uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe, triggered by the Nazis' drive to deport the remainder of its population to death camps after tens of thousands had already suffered that fate or died of hunger or illness.
The agreement to build the museum came in January last year, days before the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The museum, which will be funded by the Polish state, is being designed by two Finnish architects, Rainer Mahlamaeki and Ilmani Lahdelma.
Some 52,000 documents and objects have been catalogued on a digital database and will be shown at the museum in a permanent exhibition.
Before World War II, around 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland, and Yiddish was the tongue and culture of 10 percent of the country's population.
The Nazis exterminated six million of Europe's 11 million Jews in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.
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AFP 141838 GMT 06 06
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