More than six decades after the Nazis emptied the Warsaw Ghetto — killing its remaining Jewish inhabitants or sending them to death camps — a museum about the history of Polish Jewry in the millennia leading up to the Holocaust is rising on the site of that former ghetto.

At a groundbreaking ceremony yesterday for the $65 million Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, said he hoped the institution would foster reconciliation, and a sense of common history between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the Eastern European nation.

“There’s no doubt that the history of the Polish Jews is a part of the history of my country and, in a wider sense, of my people,” Mr. Kaczynski told the crowd that gathered in Warsaw yesterday amid heavy rain.

Slated to open in 2009, the 140,000-square-foot museum will comprise eight galleries, each representing a period of Jewish life in Poland — going back to early 10th-century settlements.

The co-chairman of the museum’s North American council, Sigmund Rolat, said the museum would take its place alongside Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as one of the most significant Jewishthemed museums in the world.

On the eve of World War II, some 3 million Jews lived in what is now Poland — and all but about 300,000 of them died in the Holocaust. The most notorious concentration and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, is located in southern Poland.

Mr. Rolat, who lost his parents and a brother in the Holocaust, said the new museum would be different from those in Jerusalem and Washington in a very important way: Its focus is how Jews lived, not on how they died. “The Jews accomplished so much in Poland,” he said in a telephone interview from Warsaw. “They built up Polish industry, Polish trade, and Polish culture. Unfortunately, that is not very well known by young Jewish kids — and virtually completely unknown to young Polish kids. Now that will change.”

The museum sits on more than three acres of land, donated by the City of Warsaw. Public funds from the governments of Poland and Germany, together with private contributions from individuals and corporations — many of them in North America — have raised $45.5 million toward the construction of the museum, its permanent exhibitions, and its education center.

Earlier this year, a New Yorkbased museum benefit brought in more than $425,000, museum officials said.

Two architects from Finland, Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma, beat out more than 100 other submissions to design the museum, a square structure to be built of glass and limestone. It will rise next to a monument dedicated to the Jewish resistance fighters of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Despite its blighted past — and some strong pockets of anti-Semitism in the nation today — Poland is emerging as a place “where there is an excitement about finding out about Jewish culture,” Mr. Rolat said.

As an example, Mr. Rolat cited the popularity of Krakow’s weeklong Jewish culture festival, which runs through July 1.

During a speech at yesterday’s groundbreaking, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, Meir Lau, invited the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to visit the museum. Mr. Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a “myth.”