Jul 1, 2007 -- In a dog-eared black-and-white photo, three glamorous young Jewish women stride confidently down Gleboka Street in the Polish town of Cieszyn, sometime during the 1930s. They are wearing the fashions of the day: two-piece suits, fur stoles, and dainty gloves. We know only the name of the woman on the right, Hilda Glanz, who demurely clutches her purse while her friends smile at the photographer. It is one of many casual moments caught on camera in Poland before World War II, and which now stand as evidence to the world of a lost era. The image is one of about 450 photographs on display in “And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews,” an exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum. “These photographs open our eyes to the varied lives and activities of Polish Jews—not merely the world of the yeshivas or the shtetl, but a rich, acculturated society whose images of daily lives, vacations, and celebrations enlarge and deepen our understanding of the enormous tragedy we sustained,” said Sylvia Herskowitz, director of the museum. The exhibit, which was organized by the Shalom Foundation in Warsaw and cosponsored by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, North American Council and the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University, was featured in a large article in The New York Times. About 400 people attended the opening of the exhibit March 1, which featured a performance of Yiddish songs from pre-war Warsaw by Yiddish music expert Zalmen Mlotek and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene Ensemble, and included speeches by Golda Tencer, Shalom Foundation founder and director; Rabbi Joseph Polak, director of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House; and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, head of the Core Exhibition Planning Team, Museum of the History of Polish Jews. In 1994, the Shalom Foundation made a public request for photographs of Polish Jews and has since built an archive of some 9,000 photographs. Drawn primarily from nameless family albums, many of these photographs were abandoned by their owners or hidden for safe-keeping during the war. Most were submitted by non-Jews, and the remainder from survivors and their children from all around the world. Once collected, they were digitized for reproduction. The 450 images selected for this exhibition have been published as a hard-cover and online catalogue, accessible at www.shalom.org.pl. The exhibit has been shown in Europe, South America, Canada, and Israel as well in the American cities of Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Lancaster, PA. The photographs date from the late 19th through the first decades of the 20th century, providing an intimate view of the everyday activities of Polish Jews prior to the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. Rather than focusing on the devastation that ensued in the coming years, the exhibition offers insight into the rich pre-war life enjoyed by the Jewish community. Recorded Jewish presence in Poland dates back to the 11th century. By 1939, more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland, the largest Jewish population in Europe at the time. In 1946, the Jewish community of Poland numbered around 250,000; of these, most spent the war years in Soviet Russia. Today, Poland’s Jewish population is estimated at less than 40,000. “And I Still See Their Faces” has been extended until September 2, 2007.