Its subsequent owners were the families Korczewski, Radziwiłł, and Ciecierski. The first Jews settled in Mordy in the second half of the 17th century, when the town belonged to the Ciecierski family. Jewish settlement was not limited by any major restrictions. The 19th century saw dynamic growth of the number of Jewish residents in Mordy. In 1827, the town was inhabited by over 500 Jews (45% of the total population), with their population tripling in size by the end of the century (61%). Most local Jews worked in traditional commercial professions, such as door-to-door trade or selling foodstuffs purchased in the area. Many were also involved in crafts, especially in tailoring and shoemaking.

The Jewish social life in Mordy revolved around the synagogues and the beth midrash. The community was predominantly Hasidic. There were several shtibelekh in the town, belonging to the followers of the tzaddikim of Góra Kalwaria (Ger), Radzyń (Radzin), and Międzyrzec Podlaski (Mezrich). The Radzyń Hasidic Association (Polish: Stowarzyszenie Chasydów Radzyńskich) was active in the town and ran a house of prayer founded in 1890.

During World War I, in the autumn of 1915, the town was occupied by the German army. The previous Russian restrictions on public and political life were lifted. As a result, a public library was established in Mordy in 1916, followed by cells of the Bund and Zionist groups founded a year later. In 1920, during the Polish-Bolshevik war, the Red Army seized control of Mordy for a fortnight. The town was recaptured by the Polish Army in mid-September, with the soldiers carrying out a pogrom of the Jewish population. One of its victims was the local leader of the Bund, Izrael Lederman. Four other Bundists were put on trial and sentenced to death for allegedly supporting the Bolsheviks.

In reborn Poland, the share of Jews in the population of Mordy was systematically falling. The first census carried out in the Second Polish Republic showed that there were more than 1,700 Jews living in the town, constituting 53% of the total population (1921). The interwar period was a time of vibrant political activity among the Jews of Mordy. The most popular party was Poale Zion. There were also Zionist youth organisations in the town – HaShomer HaTzair and Tseirei Zion. In the early 1930s, the Revisionist Zionists founded the local branch of Brit HaChayal – an organisation uniting Jewish veterans of the Polish Army. In the last pre-war elections to the community board held in 1937, the conservative Agudath received the greatest number of votes, winning three seats on the seven-member board. Two seats each went to the Revisionist Zionists and the Union of Craftsmen. In 1922, the Tarbut association opened a Jewish community centre in Mordy. A dispute over the local library broke out in the mid-1920s, with the local young communists claiming that the institution was too heavily promoting Zionist ideas. In 1925, the community filed a petition to the state authorities to open a Jewish school in Mordy. The application was ultimately rejected, and the local schoolchildren had to commute to Siedlce.

In September 1939, Mordy was bombed by the German Luftwaffe. Most of the houses in the town burnt down. Mordy was first seized by the Werhmacht, then intermittently taken over by the Red Army, and eventually once again occupied by the Germans. Due to the town’s proximity to the Bug River, it became a transit point for thousands of refugees from Warsaw headed east. A well-organised network of Polish traffickers became active in Mordy, smuggling Jews into Soviet-controlled areas for a fee.

The Judenrat (Jewish Council) was formed in Mordy on the German order. Its members were the last president of the community, Mosze Gerszon Lewenberg, and three Revisionist Zionists: Arie Fajnzilber, Aron Fajnzilber, and Mordechaj Furman. In 1940, the Jewish community was forced to pay several high contributions to the occupier. Apart from the 2,000 local residents, the Jewish population of Mordy soon came to include Jewish refugees continuously pouring into the town. In May 1940, more than 170 Jews arrived from Łódź, Siedlce, and Mława, followed in June of the same year by over 250 people from Łódź, Kalisz, Poznań, and Kraków. A forced labour camp was established in the vicinity of the town. Its prisoners – Jews from Mordy, Siedlce, Sokołów, and Węgrów – worked at draining swamps. In the spring of 1941, 500 Jewish workers from Warsaw arrived in the town (they received regular aid from the Warsaw Judenrat – parcels with food and cigarettes).

In June 1941, after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, the Germans established a ghetto in Mordy. By May of the following year, its population comprised 3,800 Jews. It was an open quarter, with the ghetto inhabitants maintaining commercial links with their Polish neighbours. The person in charge of the district was a Volksdeutscher by the name of Eckhardt, commonly considered as fairly liberal. On several occasions, he approved the requests from the Judenrat to exempt Jews from compulsory labour. On the other hand, the ghetto was not free from violence – a number of Jews was executed for smuggling food into the quarter.

The Germans liquidated the ghetto in Mordy on the day of Sabbath, on 22 August 1942. All the prisoners, about 3,500 people in total, were driven on foot to Siedlce and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp in a joint transport with the Jews from Siedlce, Łosice, and other nearby localities. Only ca. 20 Jews returned to Mordy after the war. In May 1945, twelve of them were murdered by local “partisans,” and the remaining Jews left for Warsaw.

The Jewish cemetery in Mordy was established in the 19th century east of the town centre. The triangular cemetery plot (registration number 2302) covers an area of 0.95 ha and is located in the woods north of today’s 11 Listopada Street, to the left of the road to Głuchów. The historic boundaries of the necropolis are still visible, marked partially by a modern wire mesh fence and partially by embankments preserved since the foundation of the burial site. The cemetery grounds are overgrown with old trees and hold ca. 156 fragments of matzevot, including several dozen fully preserved tombstones made of granite slabs or sandstone. The oldest matzevot date back to the first half of the 19th century. Hebrew inscriptions have been preserved on some of the stones. After the war, a number of matzevot was presumably used in the construction of a ramp at the local train station. Since 2006, the premises of the cemetery have been cleaned up several times by local schoolchildren on Earth Day.

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