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Jewish cemetery - Zabytek.pl

Jewish cemetery


Jewish cemetery Białystok

Address
Białystok

Location
woj. podlaskie, pow. Białystok, gm. Białystok

The village established in the first half of the 15th century, originally belonging to the royal domain, came into the hands of the Branicki family at the end of the 17th century.

The locality was chartered under the privilege granted by King John III Sobieski (1691). The presence of Jewish residents in the town was first mentioned as early as 1658. At that time, there were 75 Jews living in Białystok. They belonged to the community in Tykocin.

The Branicki family encouraged Jews to settle in their domain. In 1692, a small subkehilla operated in Białystok, subordinate to the larger Tykocin community. A separate Jewish community was established in 1745. Comprising 765 people, the community gained considerable significance after Jan Klemens Branicki, Crown Grand Hetman and Castellan of Kraków, granted the local Jews equal rights with the local townsmen. At the end of the 18th century, ca. 1,800 Jews lived in the town, which accounted for 45% of the entire population. The Jewish residents of Białystok would initially settle in the area of the southern frontage of today’s Market Square. With time, a Jewish district called Szulhof emerged around the first synagogue, in today’s Suraska Street.

Under the Russian Partition (since 1807), and especially after the November Uprising, Białystok transformed into a large economic centre (textile industry). Alongside German entrepreneurs, Jewish merchants and factory owners were the greatest contributors to its development – at the end of the 19th century, 80% of the 370 industrial plants in Białystok were Jewish-owned. Jews were also the leading force among other social and professional groups – they made up 60% of blue-collar workers and 90% of merchants and traders. At the end of the 19th century, Białystok boasted two synagogues, 16 beth midrashim, and several dozen houses of prayer. The most influential movements among the local community were the Haskalah, Orthodox Judaism, and Hasidism. In the years 1908–1913, an old beth midrash from the early 18th century was pulled down and replaced with a magnificent synagogue, later called the Great Synagogue. In 1913, Białystok had 62,000 Jewish residents. They made up 70% of the population of the city, which at the time was known as the “Jerusalem of the North.” In 1906, a bloody pogrom was carried out in Białystok by Russian policemen and soldiers (over 80 victims).

The interwar years saw a decrease in the share of the Jewish community in Białystok’s population. This was due to mass emigration of Jews from Białystok to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Palestine, as well as increasing assimilation and secularisation (especially among the Jewish intelligentsia). In 1936, Jews constituted 43% of the town’s inhabitants.

In the interwar period, all major Jewish political parties in Poland were active in the city, including the Orthodox Agudath, the Zionist Poale Zion and Mizrachi, and the socialist Bund. Jewish primary and secondary education and cultural life flourished. The year 1912 saw the foundation of the “Habima” Jewish theatre, which later gave rise to the Jewish National Theatre in Tel Aviv. The town boasted two Jewish cinemas (Apollo and Modern), as well as Jewish sports clubs, including Maccabi and Morgenstern. Several Jewish newspapers were published in Białystok.

The invasion of the city by the Wehrmacht at the end of June 1941 marked the beginning of the extermination of Białystok Jews. The Germans set fire to Chanajki (district inhabited by impoverished Jews) and the Great Synagogue (with over 1,000 people killed inside). As early as July of the same year, a ghetto was established in Białystok. Its population comprised almost 60,000 people, including many refugees and displaced people from other localities. The local Judenrat (Jewish Council) was headed by Efraim Barasz. The liquidation of the ghetto began in February 1943, and its main phase started in the summer of that year. On 16 August, upon hearing the news of the order to immediately deport 30,000 people from the Białystok Ghetto, the Jewish resistance movement called for an uprising. The five-day rebellion led by Mordechai Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz is described as the second Jewish uprising to be carried out against the German oppressors (the first was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). The rebellion was ultimately crushed and several dozen thousand Jews were sent to German extermination camps, mainly to Treblinka.

In 1945, the Jewish community of Białystok comprised just over a thousand people, the vast majority of whom left Poland after the Kielce pogrom and the events of March 1968.

Over the three centuries of their history, the Jews of Białystok buried their dead in five different cemeteries. The Jewish cemetery in Wschodnia Street was established in 1890 and located north-east of the town centre, in the area of the former village of Bagnówka. The last burial at the site took place in 1969. That year, it was closed by the State Treasury, which had taken ownership of the site four years earlier. The cemetery, fenced with a brick wall, is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Poland. It currently holds over 3,000 tombstones preserved on the area of 9.6 hectares. The oldest matzeva dates back to 1890. The tombstones are made of marble, granite, limestone, and sandstone, and bear inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, and Russian. Many richly decorated, polychrome tombstones have survived in the cemetery, especially near the main entrance; plenty more modestly decorated tombstones are located in the inner sectors of the necropolis. Among the surviving structures there is also the ohel of Rabbi Chaim Herz Halpern (died 1919) and the monument to the victims of the pogrom of 1906. In 1987, the cemetery was entered in the register of monuments.

Description copyright owner: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Category: Jewish cemetery

Protection: Register of monuments, Monuments records

Inspire id: PL.1.9.ZIPOZ.NID_N_20_CM.8466, PL.1.9.ZIPOZ.NID_E_20_CM.94707