Windows of Memory

This exhibition, translated and adapted from the museum’s Polish-language copy (the Wiktor Ambroziewicz Museum of the Chełm Land has no dedicated English version of this page), commemorates the city’s pre-war Jewish community through portrait photography displayed in a townhouse’s windows.

Museum of the Chełm Land on the exhibition:

“Windows of Memory” is a project born of the need to remember and to retell the history of Chełm’s Jewish community - a history that was brutally interrupted but must never be forgotten. The exhibition’s main purpose is to commemorate the city’s former residents through the art of photography.

What to expect

The exhibition, by Dorota Bida, can be viewed in the windows of a townhouse at 1 Kopernika Street (the former Wesoła Street) in Chełm, from 25 July to 31 December 2026 - no need to enter the building. The townhouse sits on the town’s Jewish-heritage trail, a few minutes’ walk from the Market Square, the Small Synagogue and the Orthodox church of St John the Theologian, so it is worth combining with a short walk along that route. The portraits come from ten named descendants of Chełm’s Jewish residents, now living in Israel, Brazil and the United States; you can read each person’s biography on site by scanning a QR code, or online. Allow fifteen to twenty minutes to walk the facade and read the biographies - this is a small, outdoor display, not a gallery room.

Context

Jews made up close to half of Chełm’s prewar population - the craftspeople, shopkeepers, officials and families photographed in local studios, the same people pictured in these windows. The war broke that history brutally: deportation to the Sobibór death camp, executions on the spot, forced labour in Soviet territory. Fewer than 200 survivors remained in Chełm after the war, and most later emigrated to Israel, the United States, Brazil and Canada - which is why the photographs had to be tracked down among descendants scattered across three continents.

The display did not start life in its current year-round form. It opened to the public at 17:00 on 25 July 2025, during the two-day festival “Spotkania z Kulturą Żydowską” (Meetings with Jewish Culture, 25-26 July 2025) - the same evening brought a klezmer concert by the ensemble Street Whispers, after an afternoon Jewish paper-cutting workshop, “Papierowe światy”. The project was co-financed by the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland with EU funds, through the Shtetl Routes Network Incubator training programme run by the “Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN” Centre in Lublin.

Tickets and time

The window display is free and open at any time - it is an outdoor exhibition on a public street, not a museum interior, so no ticket and no opening hours apply. For comparison, the museum’s other branches are open Tuesday to Friday 10:00-16:00 and weekends 12:00-16:00 (closed Mondays), with free admission every Thursday - but that schedule has nothing to do with the windows on Kopernika Street.

Who it’s for: anyone walking Chełm’s Jewish-heritage trail with fifteen minutes to spare - no booking, no purchase needed. If you want the fuller museum experience with galleries and a guide, pair the walk with a visit to the main building at 55 Lubelska Street.

English on site: the museum has no dedicated English-language website (mzch.pl/en/ returns a 404); no English labels or audio guide are stated for this display, so the biographies reached via the on-site QR code are most likely Polish-only.

What the press says

Dziennik Wschodni (20 August 2025, Kamil Pomorski): calls the exhibition a project “born of the need to remember” and a convincing reminder of the city’s multicultural past - link .

Museum profile: Wiktor Ambroziewicz Museum of the Chełm Land .