The exhibition examines the activities of Oyneg Shabes, a clandestine group of Jewish scholars, educators, journalists, religious leaders, artists and youth activists founded in the Warsaw Ghetto by historian and activist Emanuel Ringelblum.
The group was committed to documenting daily life in the ghetto, as well as the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Over three years, Oyneg Shabes gathered nearly 35,000 testimonies, diaries, letters, underground newspapers, artwork, ration cards, children's writings and documents about cultural life in the ghetto.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage writes on its website: "As deportations to concentration camps accelerated in the summer of 1942, the members of Oyneg Shabes understood that survival was increasingly unlikely.
"In a final act of moral courage, they buried the archive in metal milk containers and boxes beneath the ghetto, hoping it would be recovered after the war.
"Only three members survived, Hersh and Bluma Wasser and Rokhl Oyerbakh, who later helped locate and unearth the archive. The first cache was recovered on September 18, 1946, with additional materials found four years later."
The exhibition features numerous original artifacts, including one of the burial containers, as well as reproductions, maps, infographics, animated projections and film footage of the postwar excavation.
The exhibition was mounted by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Its deputy director, Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz, who curated the exhibition, told Poland's PAP news agency that each document included in the display is "a real treasure, which survived a total destruction and conflagration."
She added that after New York, the exhibition will travel to other venues in the United States and possibly beyond.
Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto runs in New York until February 14.
(mk/gs)