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When former Milwaukeean Lori Sherman decided in 2006 to shift her career focus away from theater administration and toward the Jewish community, she began a personal journey to unexpected Jewish places.
For the past year, since she was hired by the North American Council for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Sherman, a New Yorker since 1980, has immersed herself in the 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland that preceded the Holocaust.
Her role at the council is to raise funds for the new museum and get “the word out that [it] has an important message,” Sherman said in a recent telephone interview with The Chronicle.
Sherman was in Warsaw last week with more than 140 Americans and more than 600 international guests for the museum’s official groundbreaking on Tuesday, June 26.
The museum’s message, Sherman said, is that Jews lived in Poland for 1,000 years and they contributed to Polish culture, the founding of Israel and Western civilization.”
The Jews of Poland were an important piece of the mosaic of Jewish civilization, Sherman said. “And a majority of the world’s Jews living today have ties to Polish Jewry.”
Though both sides of Sherman’s own family came from Russia, “the lands were, in my view, so integrated. [The history told by the museum] is the history of the Jewish people. To me it’s a connected history,” she said.
For Sherman this project has taken on great personal significance. Strongly influenced by her late father, Ralph Sherman, longtime director of Milwaukee’s Jewish Family Services, Lori Sherman said her work on behalf of the museum feels like a responsibility.
Paraphrasing the words of a colleague, Sherman said, “As parents and as Jews, we have a responsibility to remember, and to tell our children the story of the Jewish people. But the story must not only recall the horrors, it must also celebrate the lives, the accomplishments, the culture.
“That is the purpose of the museum, to tell the 1,000-year story of the Polish Jews. And so I am working to see this museum built — that is my responsibility as a Jew and a parent.
“I believe [my father] would be very pleased that I am helping to build this museum,” she said.
Jewish revival
Expected to cost some $65 million, not including the value of the land in central Warsaw on the site of the World War II era Warsaw Ghetto, the museum will be funded through a partnership of public and private support.
The government of Poland and the city of Warsaw each contributed $13 million. The city also donated the land, which is of considerable value, Sherman said.
The planning began in 1996 when Yeshayahu “Shaike” Weinberg, a founding director of Tel Aviv’s Diaspora Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., created an international team of experts to establish the museum in Warsaw. It is slated to open in 2009.
After attending the groundbreaking, Sherman and her mother, Doje Sherman of Glendale, daughter Natalie, 14, and son, Aaron, 11, went to Krakow, the historical capital of Polish Jewry, to the Jewish Culture Festival.
Held for some 15 years, the weeklong festival showcases Jewish culture in Krakow’s downtown Kazimierz district, the former Jewish quarter.
Sherman attended the festival for the first time on one of her earlier trips to Poland and was moved by the interest and respect of the thousands of Poles she saw there.
“I sat in a synagogue with 800 mostly non-Jewish people, all wearing kippot out of respect. We all listened to a concert of Jewish music, and they sat listening … and loving it and embracing it,” Sherman said.
Of the final concert attended by some 10,000 people, Sherman said, “It was like a mini-Woodstock. They put up a stage and cantors from the U.S., Shlomo Barr and other bands and performers from Israel and all over the world” all performed from 6 p.m. to midnight.
The event, Sherman feels, illuminates the possibilities of good relations between Jews and Poles in the future.
While acknowledging that “of course there is still anti-Semitism” in Poland, Sherman pointed out that there is also a great interest in Jewish history and culture especially among younger Polish non-Jews.
Many are finding out they have Jewish roots, Sherman said and estimates available on the Internet range from 30,000 such Poles.
Sherman pointed to a revival of Jewish life in Poland. “There’s a real interest in rebuilding the Jewish community” there. There is an Orthodox shul in Warsaw.
And a Reform organization, Beit Warszawa, established in 1999 and supported by U.S. Jews, installed an American Reform rabbi, Rabbi Burt Schuman, in October 2006.
The other part of the story
Sherman is sensitive to the fact that the lives of millions of Polish Jews “were extinguished in a horrible way” and that many Holocaust survivors do not want to return to Poland.
But, she said, she has met many Jews who want to “celebrate the lives of their parents and grandparents [who had] good lives [in Poland] and the other part of the story really hasn’t been told.”
The museum will tell that part of the story of Polish Jewry in eight galleries with eight core exhibits and just one of them will focus on the Holocaust, Sherman said.
“So many [American Jews] go over there and have the worst experience. They go on the ‘March of the Living,’ to Auschwitz — only to Holocaust sites. And they leave [Poland] feeling it’s a horrible place.”
But when she goes there, Sherman said, she meets people who are trying to teach about Jewish culture. One of the most interesting things about her work so far, she said, is that she has met “some of the most wonderful and passionate people” she has ever worked with.
Born in Chicago and raised in Shorewood, where she and her family belonged to Congregation Sinai, Sherman graduated from Shorewood High School in 1975.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with majors in dance performance and dance therapy, she moved to New York where she worked as a dancer and sometimes as a waitress.
She earned a master’s degree in arts administration from New York University and then worked at WPA, the acclaimed off-Broadway theater, for 10 years. Sherman is married to Gregory Coppa.
Sherman anticipates that her work on behalf of the museum will continue indefinitely. “There’s lots more work to be done and the more money we raise, the more programs we can have,” she said.
