Muranow Post Film Discussion with film director Chen Shelach in conversation with Natalia Aleksiun

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, and Liberation75 is excited to offer the opportunity to watch the film “Muranow” and engage in a post-film discussion with the documentary Film Director Chen Shelach and CWB Scholar Natalia Aleksiun The Muranow neighborhood in Warsaw was a flourishing and important Jewish center. During World War II the neighborhood was turned into the ”Warsaw Ghetto” When the war ended the neighborhood was rebuilt with the rubble of its own destruction. Today thousands of Polish people live in the green and spacious Muranow neighborhood, yet its dark past keeps haunting it. Polish residents claim that Jewish ghosts live in the neighborhood.

Jews’ ghosts live In Muranow neighborhood in Warsaw. At night, they shake off the dust and ashes that cover them and start wonder the streets that used to belong to them before the Second World War during which the neighborhood turned into the biggest ghetto in history. The neighborhood was ruined as a result of Germans’ bombarding and thousands of Jews were buried underneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Their bodies, as well as the ruins of the buildings, were never removed. The remains of life served as raw materials for the building of the new neighborhood built on the ruins. The new neighborhood has the same name as the old one: “Muranow”. The streets of the new neighborhood bear the names of the streets prior to the devastation, but other than that, there is total disconnection between past and present. The distance between the physical, spacious and green appearance and the human tragedy hidden under the ground is almost endless. Perhaps this is the reason why the ghosts go out at night, to reclaim what used to be theirs in the past. Some of the Polish residents of Muranow claim they have met the ghosts. Others think that the ghosts are only a metaphor for the implications of the lives, culture and memory that were buried.

Natalia Aleksiun

Natalia Aleksiun, professor of modern Jewish history at Touro College, New York is the incoming Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida-Gainesville. She studied Polish and Jewish history at the Warsaw University, the Graduate School of Social Studies in Warsaw and Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University. She received her doctorates from Warsaw University and New York University. She is the author of Where To? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950) (Warsaw, 2002), co-editor of several volumes, including Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 29: Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (2017), and European Holocaust Studies, vol. 3: (Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust). She is co-editor of East European Jewish Affairs. In 2019, she published a critical edition of Gerszon Taffet’s Destruction of Żółkiew Jews. Her most recent book, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust, was published in 2021 with Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. She is co-editor of East European Jewish Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the so-called cadaver affair at European universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.

Chen Shelach

Chen Shelach Director, Editor, Script writer
Graduate of the School of Television Professions – GivatHaviva Professional Filmography 2017 – One of the writers and content editor of “Cover Story” – the story of Israeli “Mossad” 2016 – Scriptwriter and director of “Pig in the Holy Land” – the story of the pork industry in Israel

2014 – Scriptwriter and director (in cooperation with DokiDror) of “My Enemy, My Partner” – the story of an Israeli and a Palestinian who build a business together

2012 – Scriptwriter, director and shooting of “Photo-Novella” – a private journey to the cycle of secrets and silences in the family

2008 – Scriptwriter and director of “When Jabel Fell” – the story of combat soldiers in an elite unit who deal with the failure of a military campaign

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