A museum dedicated to Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize for literature, opened in Poland at the end of April.

It is the first museum in the world focusing on the writer, according to Kinga Staroniewska of the Bilgoraj XXI Foundation, which built the complex.

The museum is located in Bilgoraj, near the border with Ukraine, where the writer lived as a teenager at the beginning of the 20th century.

The museum held its opening ceremony on April 23 with a conference dedicated to Singer's life and a lecture by Holocaust survivors from the Bilgoraj region.

While curators are still putting together the permanent collection, the museum is running a photo exhibition of pre-war Jewish life in Poland.

Singer wrote novels depicting Jewish life in Poland.

One of his books, which some people in Poland compare to Romeo and Juliet, is a love story involving a Polish girl and a Jewish boy.

Next to the museum, the Bilgoraj XXI Foundation has erected a sculpture depicting Singer sitting on a bench, and also rebuilt a wooden synagogue from an old photograph - an appropriate addition, since Singer's grandfather was the rabbi of Bilgoraj.

All of Poland's wooden synagogues were burned down by the Nazis during the war, and this is the first to be rebuilt.