Seven years after being ousted by the nationalist government, Dariusz Stola will return as director of Poland’s premier Jewish museum, reflecting a broader cultural renaissance in the country.
Sola led the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw from its founding in 2014 to steady acclaim, until the newly ascendant right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party began a purge of museum leaders unwilling to accept their revisionist history. Law and Justice’s eight-year rule was defeated by a centrist coalition in 2023, closing a bleak chapter for artistic expression in Poland.
Stola has been reinstated by Poland’s new culture minister, Marta Cienskowska, who was appointed in 2025 by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “In 2019, the then-minister [Piotr] Gliński decided to ignore the results of the competition,” Cienkowska wrote on social media. “That appointment should have taken place six years ago. Dear Professor, good luck.”
In an interview with Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stola, a historian of Polish-Jewish relations and professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, called his reinstatement “a victory of justice and rule of law.” He had stepped down in 2019 after his reappointment was blocked, ceding control to his deputy director, Zygmunt Stępiński. With his return, Stępiński will resume his role as deputy.
“This confirms that the strategy we took in 2019 was right,” Stola said. “I lost only temporarily, and we have preserved the autonomy of the museum despite heavy political pressure.”
The former minister of culture and national heritage, Piotr Gliński, spearheaded a purge of museum directors—many of them women—replacing them with party loyalists who often lacked institutional experience. In one notable case, Hanna Wróblewska, the respected head of the avant-garde Zachęta National Gallery of Art, was dismissed in favor of Janusz Janowski, a painter who had publicly criticized “LGBT ideology” and advocated for art aligned with Judeo-Christian tradition.
Poland’s Jewish history was also a key focus of the Law and Justice agenda, which rejected historical narratives critical of the government—what party members called a “pedagogy of shame.”
Research and exhibitions examining Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust were suppressed. In this climate, Stola became a prime target, particularly after a 2018 exhibition he oversaw documenting Poland’s government-sponsored antisemitic campaign of 1968, which forced roughly 13,000 Polish Jews to emigrate. Then-culture minister Gliński criticized Stola as forcing “very aggressive politics” on the museum.
Speaking today, Stola said, “The mission of the museum is even more important today, in the face of the dark forces distorting the memory of the Polish-Jewish past.”
