Jews returned to Bielsk Podlaski at the end of the 18^th century, though their influx was hampered by protests of the burghers. Jewish people were granted an official permit to settle in the town at the turn of 1803, when the area formed part of the Prussian Partition. The Jewish community was re-established in 1807 and comprised 31 people. Following the annexation of the region by Russia, Bielsk saw a slow but systematic influx of Jews into the city. In 1847, the Bielsk Synagogue District had jurisdiction over less than 300 believers. Yet in 1861, there were already over 1,200 Jews in the town, which boasted three synagogues and houses of prayer. In 1878, Bielsk had a total population of 5,800 people, 68% of whom were Jews. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the Jewish community started to shrink in size, but as of 1938, it still accounted for 38% of the total population of Bielsk Podlaski.

The largest concentration of Jewish shops and flats was located at the Market Square and near the Town Hall. Jews also lived in the main streets of the town: Mickiewicza, Szkolna, Bóżnicza, Wąska, Widowska, Ogrodowa. The early synagogue was pulled down and replaced with a new wooden temple in 1898. Named “Yafe Einana” (Beautiful Eyes), the synagogue was demolished during World War II. The Hasidic synagogue was located nearby. The Sha’arei Zion (Towers of Zion) Synagogue was located on Bóżnicza Street. Adjacent to it were a bathhouse, a Talmud Torah school, a yeshiva, and an orphanage. Another synagogue was located at the junction of Rynkowa Street and Puszkina Street; it was founded in 1889 by Jowel Landau and Tanchiel Grodziński.

Bielsk boasted numerous Jewish kindergartens, schools, orphanages, charitable organisations, a theatre troupe, amateur sports teams (Maccabi, Morgenstern, and Ha-Poel), and a fire brigade. There were many Zionist organisations in the town, such as HeHalutz, HeHalutz HaTzair, HaShomer HaTzair. They brought together young people preparing for emigration to Palestine. A branch of the “Betar” Revisionist Zionist organisation was probably founded in Bielsk in the 1930s. There were also local cells of Poale Zion and the socialist Bund in the town.

During the Soviet occupation following the outbreak of World War II, there were ca. 6,000 Jews in the town, many of them refugees from the territories seized by the Third Reich. The Germans took control of Bielsk at the turn of September 1941 and established a ghetto in the town. Its population comprised Jews from Bielsk and other towns in Podlasie, including Narew and Orla. The local Judenrat (Jewish Council) was formed in mid-July. Its president was Szlomo Epstein.

The Germans subjected local Jews to constant harassment. They imposed high contributions on the community, forced people to perform slave labour (peat digging, logging), introduced a ban on engaging in religious practices, and burnt religious objects in public. The area of the ghetto, which encompassed today’s streets of Mickiewicza, Jagiellońska, Kopernika, and Kazimierzowska, was surrounded with a fence erected by the Jews themselves. The number of prisoners confined in the Bielsk Ghetto is estimated at 3,000–6,000.

The ghetto in Bielsk Podlaski was liquidated in early November 1942, after Jews from Boćki, Brańsk, and Orla had been brought to the town. Every day, the Germans would send a transport of about a thousand people to the Treblinka extermination camp; a group of 200 Jews was deported to the Białystok Ghetto. A group of 78 hospital patients was murdered on the spot. Only ca. 50 shoemakers and their families were left in the town. In January 1943, the Germans resettled them to Pietrasza near Białystok. They were eventually murdered in the extermination camps in Majdanek or Auschwitz.

The Jewish cemetery in Bielsk Podlaski is located south-west of the city centre, in Brańska Street, by the exit road from the town towards Zambrów. The present necropolis, established in 1807, was probably not the first burial site of Jewish residents in Bielsk Podlaski; an older cemetery, existing in the 16^th–17^th century, was likely located closer to the Market Square. The last recorded burial at the newer necropolis took place in 1941. The cemetery was also used by Jews from Czyżów, Hajnówka, and Augustów. During World War II, it was vandalised by the Germans, who stole most of the sandstone matzevot from the site in 1942. The cemetery continued to fall into decline for many years after the end of the war. Nowadays, there are ca. 70 tombstones preserved on an area of 1.5 hectares (before the war, the cemetery had an area of 3 hectares); the oldest dates back to 1850. The matzevot are made of marble, sandstone, and concrete and bear inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. The site holding mass graves of Holocaust victims is commemorated with a monument erected in the memory of more than 200 people executed between 1941 and 1944 by the German military police and the Gestapo. In 2019, thanks to the efforts of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Heritage of Bielsk Land, a wall-shaped monument was unveiled at the edge of the cemetery, with recovered fragments of several matzevot embedded in its structure.

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