However, the first references to their settlement come from a privilege issued by King Władysław IV Vasa in 1635. In the 18th century, there was a Jewish community here, two cemeteries, and a wooden synagogue. In 1783, King Stanisław August Poniatowski paid a visit to the city and was welcomed by Polish and Jewish delegations. However, in 1794, the kahal began building a house for the rabbi, which was also to house a Talmudic school - a yeshiva. Until the end of the 18th century, Siedlce Jews were mainly engaged in trade and leasing.

In 1820, 3,072 Jews lived here, and in 1865, the highest percentage of the Jewish population in the history of the city was recorded - 7,094 out of 9,710 inhabitants. Siedlce was one of the centers of Hasidism; followers of tzadiks from Przysucha, Góra Kalwaria, Aleksandrów and Mszczonów lived here. A Jewish orphanage was established in 1890.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jews of Siedlce were engaged primarily in trade and small crafts: shoemaking, tailoring, hat making, and needle-making. In 1906, following the wave of pogroms in Russia, a pogrom also took place in Siedlce. Dozens of people were injured, many died; property was looted.

During the interwar period, Siedlce was an important center of Jewish life. There were, among others, Jewish printing houses, bookstores, bakeries, gold and jewelry companies, iron warehouses, mills. Jews ran most of the restaurants and confectionery shops in the city, and also owned hotels and two pharmacies. Jewish education was developing rapidly. In 1922, there were 32 houses of worship. The community had representatives in the Town Council, and numerous Jewish political parties and sports clubs associated with them operated in the town. In 1931, 14,793 Jews lived in Siedlce; then the number began to decrease due to the migration of the Jewish population to larger centers and emigration, especially to Palestine.

After the outbreak of World War II, Siedlce became part of the General Government established by the Germans. In 1940, the Germans brought here Jews from the areas incorporated into the Reich, including about 1,200 people from Kalisz. At the end of 1940, the Germans separated two open Jewish districts, and in 1941 they turned them into a closed ghetto. There was overcrowding, hunger and typhus in the ghetto; prisoners were subjected to constant repression and forced to work hard.

The ghetto was liquidated in 1942. The Germans selected the prisoners and took most of them to the German Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka. The rest were shot on the spot, including workers and patients of the Jewish hospital. Only a small group of Jews remained in Siedlce and were used for clean-up work; they also were killed by the Germans. More than a thousand Siedlce Jews survived the war, most of them in the USSR. However, only a few returned to Siedlce after the war.

The Description

A new Jewish cemetery in Siedlce was founded in 1807 at Szkolna street, and its area was gradually expanded. During the occupation during World War II, the Germans carried out mass executions in the area and used the tombstones for construction purposes. In 1944, the bodies of the murdered were dug out and burned to cover the traces of the crime.

In 1946, the Jewish Committee exhumed the bodies of people of Jewish origin who were buried in the vicinity of the town. A commemorative plaque with an inscription in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish was erected at the place of their reburial. In the years 1987–1989, the cemetery area was cleaned and the brick fence was renovated. In 2009, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and the Jewish Community in Warsaw funded a plaque on the gate commemorating the Jews of Siedlce. In 2018, the cemetery also received a plaque as part of the programme for marking Jewish cemeteries in the Republic of Poland, conducted by the National Heritage Institute.

The new Jewish cemetery in Siedlce has preserved approximately 1,000 tombstones with inscriptions in Hebrew and Yiddish. The oldest of these dates back to 1855.

Author of the note: Magda Lucima

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