At the beginning of the 17th century, Jews began to settle down in Bytom again.

On 6 January 1656, Prince Georg Friedrich regulated Jewish settlement in Bytom from a legal point of view and granted Jews a permission to trade freely in the city. Until the second half of the 18th century, the Jews in Bytom were subordinated to the Będzin Municipality.

In the 18th century, many Jews arriving from Poland settled down in Bytom. This caused concern among the residents as it caused competition in trade. For that reason, in 1708, Emperor Charles VI issued a decree ordering all Jews who were not entitled to stay in Silesia to leave the land within four weeks.

As a consequence of the First Silesian War and the Treaty of Breslau signed on 11 June 1742, most of Silesia, including Bytom, became part of the Kingdom of Prussia.

In 1750, there were approximately 50 Jews living in Bytom. By 1784, their number increased to 132 (8% of the total population), while by 1790, it declined to reach 115 people.

In the period from 1809 to 1810, the first free-standing synagogue was erected in Bytom.

The driving force behind the development of the Jewish community was the “Civic Relations Edict” issued by King Frederick William on 11 March 1812. The document, commonly known as the “Emancipation Edict”, introduced a fundamental change in the situation of Jews in the Kingdom of Prussia, making them partly equal to Christian citizens in legal terms. At the time the edict was issued, there were 68 Jewish families living in Bytom.

In 1846, 922 Jews lived in Bytom (17% of the total population).

On 1847, passed the "Jewish Relations Edict". In the autumn of 1867, the old synagogue building was demolished. In its place, the construction of a new larger synagogue began and the opening ceremony took place on 2 December 1869.

In 1885, there were 2,290 Jews living in Bytom.

After the end of the First World War and the rebirth of the Polish state, the majority of Upper Silesian Jews supported the Germans. As a result of the plebiscite of 20 March 1921, Bytom remained in Germany.

Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 significantly changed the situation of the Jewish population in Germany. Following the decision of the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva, legal protection was granted to the Jewish minority in Upper Silesia, in accordance with the German–Polish Convention on Upper Silesia of 1922, and the Third Reich was obliged to refrain from taking any action against the Jews staying there. The expiry of the Convention on 15 July 1937 extended all anti-Semitic laws, which were passed in the Third Reich after 1933, to the area of German Upper Silesia, including the so-called Nuremberg Laws.

In the autumn of 1938, there were 1,843 German Jews and 270 Jews with foreign citizenship living in Bytom.

During the so-called Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, organised pogroms against the Jewish population took place in Germany. This was also the case for Bytom, where the synagogue was burnt down and many properties that belonged to Jews were demolished.

In 1939, there were 1,362 Jews living in Bytom.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 intensified the restrictive measures against Jews in German Upper Silesia. However, they were not subject to isolation from the rest of society, nor did the organisation of their lives change. It was not until the spring of 1942 that their deportations to ghettos, transit-camps or directly to extermination camps began. Those actions continued – but on a smaller scale - also in 1943.

After World War II, a large group of Polish Jews settled down in Bytom. Many organisations were established, which united the population. From 1950, only the Congregation of the Mosaic Faith (Polish: Kongregacja Wyznania Mojżeszowego) and a branch of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews (Polish: Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów) in Poland were active in the city. Today, the Jewish community of Bytom is subordinate to the Jewish Religious Community in Katowice.

The Description

The first Jewish cemetery in Bytom has been referred to as the "old" cemetery since the second half of 1867. Before that time, local Jews buried their dead in Będzin.

To this day, the actual year of the establishment of the cemetery is not known. According to a local legend, the cemetery was established in connection with a cattle plague in Bytom in the 1820s, during which two Jewish criminals - while digging pits near the city ramparts at the south-western end of the ramparts - found a skull, a prayer shawl with a tzitzit and a padlock, which led to the conclusion that the remains belonged to a Jew. The unusual discovery was used by Israel Böhm, the court Jew and leaseholder of the estate of Count Karl Josef Erdmann Henckel von Donnersmarck, who asked him to sell the land for the purpose of establishing a Jewish cemetery. He obtained the permission.

For the next decades, the necropolis was considered by the Böhm family to be their private property, which triggered a legal dispute between its members and the authorities of the local Jewish community, which ended on 13 March 1789 in favour of the latter.

The cemetery, presently located in the area of Katowicka, Antoniego Józefczaka and Piastów Bytomskich streets (ul. Katowicka, Antoniego JJózefczaka, Piastów Bytomskich) and the Tadeusz Kościuszko Square, was expanded several times to eventually reach the area of approximately 2,500 square metres.

In October 1866, the old two-and-a-half-metre wall was renovated and a new entrance gate was constructed on the east side. On the right side of the gate, there was a small funeral home in a shape of a rectangle.

An inventory of the cemetery, performed in the 1930s, revealed approximately 800 tombstones with 777 legible personal details of the deceased. The oldest of the tombstones was found on the grave of Esther, the daughter of Shloma Zalman of Halemba, who died on 8 May 1750.

For decades, the cemetery in Bytom, due to the large territorial size of the local Jewish community, was the resting place for Jews living in the entire Bytom County, which had existed since 1742. Until the establishment of their own necropolis in the early 1820s, it was used by co-religionists from Tarnowskie Góry and Miasteczko Śląskie.

An intensively growing Jewish community, not only in Bytom but also in the neighbouring towns such as Królewska Huta, Wirek and Zabrze, the inconvenient location of the cemetery, which became tightly surrounded by residential buildings over time, as well as the unfavourable spatial conditions at the cemetery, made it necessary to establish a completely new burial ground. After six years of efforts, the desired result was achieved and a new cemetery was opened in September 1867. It was located in the Piekarskie Suburb and the existing cemetery was no longer regularly used. From then on, only those who had booked a place in advance at the cemetery could be buried there. It is known that the last funeral took place in 1897.

There is no information if there was any the damage to the cemetery in the period from 1938 to 1945. At the beginning of 1939, the entire site was transferred to the city as compensation for the demolition costs of the burnt synagogue, amounting to 55,000 marks, which were charged to the Jewish community. Despite the approval of the sale by the supervisory authorities, there was still no takeover of the cemetery by the city in August 1940. With a high degree of probability, it survived in good condition until 1945.

In 1965, the cemetery was "liquidated" by decision of the municipal authorities. At that time, only the elements found above ground were removed (the bodies were not exhumed), including all existing tombstones, which were stored in the municipal cemetery in Bytom until 1991. In the years 1989–1995, they were used to create a lapidarium in the new Jewish cemetery.

Nowadays, the area of the cemetery is a garden square surrounded by multi-family buildings on all sides. There are no visible tombstones. There is a memorial plaque on the site.

Author of the note: Sławomir Pastuszka

Właściciel praw autorskich do opisu: Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN.