The Jewish Historical Institute was created in 1947 as a continuation of the , founded in 1944. The Jewish Historical Institute Association is the corporate body responsible for the building and the institute's holdings. The Institute falls under the jurisdiction of the
Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In 2009 it was named after
Emanuel Ringelblum and became a public cultural institution. The institute is a repository of documentary materials relating to the Jewish historical presence in Poland. It is also a centre for academic research, study and the dissemination of knowledge about the history and culture of
Polish Jewry. The most valuable part of the collection is the
Warsaw Ghetto Archive, known as the
Ringelblum Archive (collected by the
Oyneg Shabbos). It contains some 6,000 documents (some 30,000 pages). Also, for over 60 years now, the institute has been publishing an academic journal renamed in 2001 as the '''' (), registered on the Master Journal List of outstanding academic journals in 2011. In 2021, Monika Krawczyk, a lawyer and the managing director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in the years 2004–2019, was appointed the Director of the Jewish Historical Institute by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. In 2024, a group of Institute employees sent a letter to the new Minister of Culture and National Heritage, calling the director "authoritarian and incompetent". ==Directors==