Located in the historic building of the pre-war Institute of Judaic Studies, directly adjacent to Warsaw's Great Synagogue, this beautiful building managed to survive WWII, but still bears the scars. Today it hosts rotating temporary exhibits about the history and culture of Polish Jewry, an excellent bookstore, and - most importantly - it houses the Oneg Shabbat Archive, also known as the Ringelblum Archive. Subject of the Institute's very moving and absolutely essential permanent exhibit titled, "What we've been unable to shout out to the world," the Archive is amongst the largest and most significant testimonies of the Holocaust - a secret collection of documents, reports, essays, letters and other materials recording exactly what life was like in the Warsaw Ghetto, by those who were experiencing it, as it happened. First initiated by Emanuel Ringelblum, the Archive grew to have many participants and collaborators, to whom the exhibit is dedicated. As the Ghetto came under siege in 1943, the archive was secretly buried in three containers in three separate locations. Sadly, only the first two containers have been recovered, but they represent such an extraordinary wealth of information that they were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World List in 1999. On display here you will see the original documents of the archive, the authentic containers and much more. Incredibly powerful and important, if you don't have the time for POLIN, this is a great alternative.

Average visiting time: 90mins.