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OSWIECIM, Poland — A center dedicated to thinking about Holocaust victims in a new way is set to open by Rosh Hashanah — outside the most notorious concentration camp of them all.

The formal ground-breaking took place late last year for the restoration of the only surviving synagogue in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland near the Auschwitz death camp. Alongside it, a Jewish study, prayer and information center will be built.

The $10 million project was conceived and sponsored by the New York-based Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, founded in 1995 by philanthropist and businessman Fred Schwartz.

The project's aim is to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and mourn their loss — not by showing how they died but how they lived, focusing on the life, culture and history of the prewar Jewish community of Oswiecim as a microcosm of destroyed European Jewry.

More importantly, perhaps, the center hopes to establish itself as a positive, living Jewish presence near the place that is the world's biggest Jewish cemetery and the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust.

"Out of more than 40 religious institutions in the Auschwitz area, there is no Jewish institution," said Daniel Eisenstadt, the foundation's executive director.

"There is neither a center dedicated to studying Jewish life nor a synagogue where Jewish visitors can pray and mourn," he said.

To this end, the Chevra Lomdei Mishnaot synagogue will be restored to its appearance in the 1930s, when the town's 7,000 Jews made up more than half of the local population and Oswiecim was widely known among Jews by its Yiddish name, Oshpitsin. Last summer the synagogue received a Torah, donated by a congregation on Long Island.

In the building next door to the synagogue, a study center will include seminar rooms, a library, a memorial wall, historic photos and an auditorium. There will also be a kosher eatery.

"We want to represent Jewish life here before the Shoah, not the anonymity of mass death," said Schwartz, who gained fame in business as "Fred the Furrier."

Michael Lewan, chairman of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, which has supported the project, echoed Schwartz.

"The synagogue is a testament to those vibrant souls who prayed, studied, sang and danced within its walls," he said.

Creating a center for Jewish life, education and prayer at Oswiecim represents a sea change in Jewish attitudes toward Auschwitz, a change that Eisenstadt says is increasingly necessary as the Shoah and the destroyed pre-war Jewish world recede into history.

At least 1.5 million people, 90 percent of them Jews, were killed at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz I camp and nearby Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, were dedicated as a museum/memorial soon after the end of the war.

Hundreds of thousands of people, Jews as well as non-Jews, visit each year, to pay homage to the dead and to learn about the Nazis' "Final Solution."

"Because of the immensity of the horror and the depth of the pain, previous generations have primarily visited Auschwitz to express grief," Eisenstadt said.

"While that process continues, current and future generations that have had less direct contact with the 'world that was' before Auschwitz want to bridge the gap of the Holocaust and understand the Jewish victims not as victims but as people — as fathers and mothers, as teachers, merchants and scholars."

Indeed, by the time the center is expected to open, World War II will have been over for more than 55 years. Eyewitnesses to the horrors, and to the prewar Jewish experience, are fading from the scene.

The planned function of the center, Eisenstadt said, will help people come to terms with past tragedy, placing it into the sweep of history and incorporating the experience into life.

"In a sense, changing attitudes make visits to Auschwitz about grief and transcending grief," he said. "As such, future visits to Auschwitz are likely to be more and more akin to a shiva call that focuses both on the profound sadness that accompanies a death and the process of sharing stories of life," he said.

Creating a center for Jewish life and education can also fulfill other positive functions, organizers hope.

While for most of the world, Auschwitz has grown to be the chief symbol of the Shoah, Poland's postwar communist regime made Auschwitz the chief symbol of Polish suffering under the Nazis and all but ignored the fact that most of its victims were Jews.

"There is a need for a Jewish presence near Auschwitz," Eisenstadt said. "First, as a place where visiting Jews and others can go to reflect, and second, for Jews and others to go to transcend grief by incorporating the life, traditions and culture of prewar Eastern Europe into their own lives."

Study will be a major emphasis, he said.

"Because the name of the synagogue means Friends of the Study of the Mishnah, we thought it appropriate to design a Mishnah study program under which visitors would be given the opportunity to respond to Auschwitz in both a defiant and affirmative way," he said. "By doing what Jews did in the synagogue before the Holocaust and studying a Mishnah, visitors could make the statement that Jewish learning continues."

The synagogue, a small, compact building with arched windows, was built around 1900 and — as one of about a dozen prewar synagogues in Oswiecim — was used until 1939.

The Nazis brought thousands of Jews to the synagogue before they deported them to ghettos in 1941. After World War II, the communists seized the synagogue, which was used for decades as a warehouse, most recently a carpet warehouse. In March 1998, it became the first building returned to the Jewish community under Poland's restitution law.

Local Polish Jews have welcomed the Auschwitz Center project.

"Everybody, from the Polish government to the U.S. ambassador, to Polish Jews to the Polish church, is happy that it is possible to do something constructive at Auschwitz," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a local Jewish leader and Warsaw consultant for the American Jewish Committee.