Seven years after being ousted by a nationalist government, Dariusz Stola is to return as director of Poland’s premier Jewish museum, reflecting the country’s wider cultural renaissance.
Sola’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw had been well received since its inception in 2014 until the newly minted right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party began purging museum leaders unwilling to accept its revisionist history. In 2023, the Law and Justice party’s eight-year rule was defeated by a centrist coalition, bringing an end to a bleak chapter in Polish artistic expression.
Related articles
Poland’s new Culture Minister Marta Cienskowska, who was appointed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk in 2025, reinstated Stolla. “In 2019, then-minister (Piotr) Gliński decided to ignore the results of the competition,” Cienkowska wrote on social media. “This appointment should have been made six years ago. Good luck to you, dear professor.”
during an interview jewish telegraphic agencyStolla, a historian of Polish-Jewish relations and a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, called his reinstatement a “triumph for justice and the rule of law.” After being blocked from re-election, he resigned in 2019, handing control to deputy director Zygmunt Stępiński. Upon his return, Stepinski will continue to serve as deputy.
“This confirms that the strategy we adopted in 2019 was the right one,” Stola said. “I only lost temporarily, despite huge political pressure, we retained the autonomy of the museum.”
Former Culture and National Heritage Minister Piotr Gliński spearheaded a purge of museum directors, many of them women, replacing them with party loyalists who often lacked institutional experience. In one famous case, Hanna Wróblewska, the respected avant-garde director of the Zacheta National Gallery, was fired and replaced by Janusz Janowski, a painter who had openly criticized “LGBT ideology” and promoted art consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Poland’s Jewish history is also a key focus of the Law and Justice agenda, which rejects criticism of the government’s historical narrative – what party members call a “pedagogy of shame”.
Research and exhibitions about Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust were suppressed. In this climate, Stolla became a prime target, especially after he hosted a 2018 exhibition documenting the Polish government-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 that forced some 13,000 Polish Jews to immigrate. Glinski, then culture minister, criticized Stolla for imposing “very radical politics” on the museum.
Speaking today, Stolla said: “In the face of dark forces distorting the memory of Poland’s Jewish past, the mission of the museum is even more important today.”
