Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (Polish: Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich) is a site-specific artwork in the form of a life-size artificial date palm. It was designed by Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska, and is located on the Charles de Gaulle Roundabout (Rondo gen. Charles’a de Gaulle’a), where Jerusalem Avenue (Aleje Jerozolimskie) intersects with New World Street (Nowy Świat) in the Polish capital of Warsaw. It was erected on December 12, 2002. The work was intended by Rajkowska to draw attention to "the absence of the Jewish community in Poland" by highlighting and challenging "the invisibility of the street’s name." The project was thus intended as a social experiment, an anti-monument that metaphorically brings the “vanished Jews back into the landscape of contemporary Poland”. Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue has become one of the most iconic art projects realised in Poland's public space after 1989 and its meaning has continuously evolved and extended. Since its inception, the palm tree location has become a prominent site for political and social activists, including women, nurses, LGBTQ+ communities, environmental activists, protesters against the war in Ukraine, and other groups.
Inspiration The palm tree was inspired by Joanna Rajkowska's and fellow artist Artur Żmijewski's visit to Israel in 2001 during the Second Intifada. During their stay in Jerusalem, they witnessed distant explosions, the sound of Israeli helicopters over Bethlehem and Rajkowska provoked an incident in the Orthodox district of Mea Shearim when she lay down across a pavement and only stood up when she was about to be hit by an enraged Hassidic Jew. These experiences left Rajkowska with “an omnipresent sense of fear and powerlessness” and a “profound sense of incomprehension.” Upon her return to Warsaw, Rajkowska researched the history of Jerusalem Avenue in Warsaw and discovered that the street was named after an 18th-century Jewish settlement which existed for two years before it was dismantled by a group of merchants and craftsmen, jealous of the settlement’s economic prosperity. The settlement was called New Jerusalem and was established at present day Plac Zawiszy (Zawisza Square), then on the outskirts of Warsaw. Rajkowska was also impacted by a postcard found by Żmijewski in the Old Town in Yerushalayim, which featured a bare hill, a single palm tree and the words “Greetings from Hebron”. To her, the postcard looked as if it had been printed in Poland in the 1980s. These connections, together with the ongoing Israeli aggression in occupied Palestine, highlighted for Rajkowska the historical and affective links between Jerusalem and Warsaw. They also produced a sense of profound anxiety linked to Rajkowska’s family history, which included her father and grandmother’s escape from a train bound for Auschwitz. Back in Warsaw, Rajkowska started to feel the acute void left by the Holocaust and experienced “a short circuit, [as if] the frames from Warsaw and Jerusalem overlapped.” Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue was therefore created both as a result of the trip to Israel and Rajkowska’s mourning over the genocide that had taken place in her country. The project is hence a comment on Polish-Jewish history and an expression of a transgenerational trauma, which tragically connects Poland and Israel. Before the Second World War, 30% of Warsaw's population was Jewish (about 370,000 people) in comparison to the current estimated population of 0.125% (less than 2,000 people). The initial concept for the project emerged when, after their return to Warsaw, Żmijewski and Rajkowska were writing a text about the situation in Israel and no conclusion seemed obvious. Struggling with expressing herself in textual form, Rajkowska suddenly had an idea of how to engage with the topic as an artist. She envisaged putting up an espalier of palm trees along Jerusalem Avenue, a street she knew very well. In her own words, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue started as “a caprice of imagination in the form of a question: what would it be like if Jerusalem Avenue in Warsaw was suddenly planted with palm trees, like the streets of Jerusalem?” Unable to carry out a project on such a scale, Rajkowska opted for a singular tree. Rajkowska considers her artistic construction to be Leftist.
Location The location of Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue is topographically, historically, politically and socially significant. It is located at the De Gaulle Roundabout at the intersection of Nowy Świat street and Jerusalem Avenue. The latter is one of the main streets in Warsaw, featuring the Central Railway Station and the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science. Nowy Świat, meanwhile, is home to many iconic city sites and governmental buildings in Warsaw, including the Old Town, the Presidential Palace, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Polish Parliament building. De Gaulle Roundabout itself is an important intersection, located by the former Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, which became Warsaw Stock Exchange following the fall of Communism in 1989. During the Second World War, there were numerous Nazi round-ups and murders of Polish civilians in the area and transports of prisoners to the Gestapo Detention Centre on Szucha Avenue. Both streets were almost completely destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Rajkowska has stated that “the name Jerusalem Avenue is a sign of our history. […] The name has grown into our culture to such an extent that nobody can hear what it means.”
Construction
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