Zielona Góra probably held the de non tolerandis Judaeis privilege and did not have any Jewish residents. Jewish people wishing to temporarily stay in the locality needed to pay a fee, wear a red patch on their clothes, and comply with the prohibition on approaching Christian temples. Transgression of these rules was punishable by pillory or even death on the gallows, which was erected on the outskirts of the town in 1724.

More Jews appeared in Zielona Góra in 1740, when it came under the Prussian rule. After the Second Partition of Poland (1793), many Jews from Greater Poland arrived in the town. The newcomers were mainly traders in wool imported from Greater Poland. A watershed moment in the life of the Jewish population was the proclamation of the 1812 Edict on Civic Relations, known as the Emancipation Edict. Jews were granted the right to freely settle in towns and acquire land. This contributed to the establishment of new communities. One of them was the Jewish community in Zielona Góra, probably founded in 1814. However, the kehilla did not immediately receive a permission to build a synagogue. In 1816, the local Jews organised a house of prayer on Fleischerstraβe (nowadays Masarska Street), and when it turned out to be too small, a larger prayer room was officially opened in 1848 at Niederstraβe (nowadays Kupiecka Street).

Thanks to the Edict of 1812 and subsequent legal regulations which ultimately granted Jews full civic and political rights, they began to achieve significant economic successes in the second half of the 19th century. One of the outstanding Zielona Góra inhabitants of this era was Wilhelm Levysohn, born in Głogów, editor and publisher of the first local newspaper – Grünberger Wochenblatt. In 2007, a plaque dedicated to him was unveiled at the former site of his printing house on today's Pocztowy Square. Wealthy members of the community began to build imposing townhouses and shops; a few of them have survived in the western frontage of the Market Square.

The first synagogue in the town was only erected in 1883, at today's Powstańców Wielkopolskich Square. It existed until the Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938, when it was set on fire and then pulled down. Today, the site holds the edifice of the Zielona Góra Philharmonic. In 2008, an obelisk was unveiled with the inscription: "Here once stood a synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis on 9/10 November 1938."

At the end of the 1880s, the number of Jewish inhabitants of Zielona Góra decreased to 153. This was due to migration to large cities in the west. The decline continued after World War I. During the aforementioned Kristallnacht, Jewish shops were devastated, and the entire property of the community was confiscated. However, the community formally continued to exist until 1942.

The Description

The Jewish cemetery in Zielona Góra is located on the former Breslauestraβe (today the corner of Wrocławska and Chmielna streets). The cemetery plot had an area of 1.5 ha, but all graves were located in a section measuring no more than 0.6 ha. The remaining part was allocated for future use. The cemetery was founded by the community in 1814. The part actively used for burials was surrounded with a red brick wall, fragments of which have survived to this day. A Neo-Classical funeral home and the guardian-gardener's house were built on the premises. The tombstones of wealthy Jews were mainly made of granite and marble. Imposing family tombs made of black Swedish marble were erected by the cemetery wall. According to Hugo Schmidt, a pre-war historian of Zielona Góra, the cemetery was one of the most beautiful Jewish burial sites in the region, distinguished by its robust greenery. Sources do not indicate that the cemetery was destroyed during the Kristallnacht or immediately afterwards. According to the accounts of pre-war and post-war residents, it survived the war but became largely overgrown. It was gradually falling into decay in the post-war period. A forester set up a cowshed in the funeral home. In 1965, the building’s subsequent owner converted it into a car repair shop: he knocked out an additional door opening and dug a car repair pit. At that point, there was still a 3,500-litre brick tub in the funeral home as well as wall paintings depicting Jewish funeral rites. In the successive years, the funeral home was used by scouts from Zielona Góra as a repository. Nowadays, the entire cemetery area is administered by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. Intensive works on liquidating the necropolis began in the spring of 1969, despite the fact that the newly adopted Act on Cemeteries and Burying the Dead of 1959 stipulated that liquidation of cemeteries was allowed no earlier than 40 years after the last burial. The regulations were violated in the case of the cemetery in Zielona Góra, as at least three Jewish female prisoners working in a textile factory were buried at the site in 1944, followed by a 1.5-year-old Jewish girl at the turn of the 1950s. After the liquidation of the cemetery, a car wash and several sheet metal garages were built on the premises. Some of the tombstones were taken to Batorego Street and then used to pave the area around the garages of the Citizens' Militia. Slabs made of precious materials were sanded in the local stone workshops; most of them are now located in the so-called Honour Lane in the municipal cemetery.

Since 2012, social campaigns have been organised every few years by the city's residents to clean the cemetery area. In 2014, a granite obelisk with a plaque informing about the Jews in Zielona Góra was unveiled at the site from the side of Wrocławska Street.

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