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Minsk, the capital of Belarus, first welcomed Jews in the fifteenth century. They settled here to engage in the trade between Poland and Russia. After Poland was divided, the Jewish community began to grow: it consisted of 47560 members at the time of the 1897 census, or 52% of the population. The Germans arrived in Minsk on 28 June 1941, only six days after launching their offensive, and the ...
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Subotica’s synagogue, built in 1903, was converted into a theater after the war. The building was renovated in 2005. It is located in the city center a few steps from city hall. In the , a monument commemorates the victims of the Shoah.
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The Jewish community of Voivodina’s capital was, until World War II, one of the most prosperous in all Yugoslavia. Present since the city was founded in the late seventeenth century and 4000 members strong before its extermination, the community was keen on building structures to rival those of other ethnic groups in this majority-Hungarian Catholic city (it belonged to the ...
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A monument dedicated to the victims of the Shoah has been put up on Bubanj Hill. The former synagogue today serves as an art gallery and the Jewish cemetery was rehabilitated in 2004.
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After the conquest of Belgrade by the Turks in 1521, Sephardic Jews quickly supplanted in number the Ashkenazic community that had arrived before them, from Hungary in particular. Loyal Turkish subjects, Belgrade’s Jews enjoyed an initial phase of relative prosperity, transforming the city into one of the premier Sephardic centers in the Balkans. The Belgrade yeshiva was known ...
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The Jews have a unique and turbulent history on Crete, one of the most important islands in the Mediterranean. Under the Byzantine Empire, Cretan Jews believed the hour of the final redemption had rung: in 430 C.E., a false messiah, the rabbi Moses, promised to lead them all to Jerusalem; they then threw themselves en masse into the raging sea and drowned. Several centuries later, the hand of ...
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When David Ben Gurion moved to Thessaloníki to learn Turkish in 1910, he was surprised to discover a city like none found in “Eretz Israel”: The Shabbat marked the day of rest here, and even the dockworkers were Jewish. He was advised not to admit he was Ashkenazic (all the procurers were). Jewish and Sephardic, Thessaloníki had been called “Mother of ...
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Sumptuous and decadent, immense and frenetic, Istanbul is “the world in one city”, as it is often described by Western travelers overwhelmed by the city’s splendor. The skyline of Istanbul is punctuated by hundreds of minarets, majestic onion domes, and bell towers. “An aged hand covered with rings held out toward Europe”, according to Jean Cocteau, the great ...
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At the foot of huge Postavarul Mountain and the Poiana Brasov ski station, Brasoc unquestionably remains Transylvania’s most fascinating city, with its citadel, ramparts, and medieval center, the latter today closed to cars. The late-nineteenth-century synagogue here was sacked during the Second World War by pro-Nazis locals. It was rebuilt in 1944 but seriously damaged again in a 1977 ...
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The spirit of Austro-Hungarian Cacania still breathes within the medieval cities that lie on the Transylvanian side of the Carpathians, populated until recently by Swabians and Saxons. Lynxes and bears still haunt the high valleys surrounding Timisoara, the capital of Banat, and the neighboring towns of Sibiu, Sihisoara, Brasov, and Rasnov, characterized by their stocky, Baroque houses of ...
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At the northern border of Transylvania lies Sighet Marmatiei, unquestionably the region’s most original and charming little city, where Romanian, Hungarian, Roma and Ruthenian populations all coexist. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born in this Hasidic township. Jews settled in this town, located in the region of Maramures, in the 17th century. The Jewish population grew from ...
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The community of Oradea, exterminated during the war, dates back to the 15th century. Today, a still works for the few Jews in the city. was inaugurated at the end of 2018 in the recently restored synagogue and reconsecrated Hinech Neorim. The museum, which presents the history of the local Jewish community and that of the Holocaust, is a branch of the Municipal Museum. On the ground floor ...
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Cluj is today Transylvania’s most important city. The Jewish presence became significant here only starting in the late eighteenth century. The community, divided between those of Orthodox faith and Reformists, was uniformly annihilated in Auschwitz following imprisonment within the city’s ghetto. Only a few dozen Jews live in Cluj today, the rare survivors of the Shoah here ...
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North of Wallachia and west of Moldavia, at the center of the Carpathian arc, stretches Transylvania -the land “beyond the mountains”, also called Erdely in Hungarian and Siebenburggen (The Seven Cities) in German. Dacian warriors resided here until the year 107, when they were subdued by Trajan’s Roman legions, including the Thirteenth Gemina recruited in Judaea. In 217, ...
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The city of Galati has been a major Romanian trade hub since the seventeenth century. In 1868, it was the theater for acts of vandalism against Jews following accusations of their having committed ritual murders. The imposing “Synagogue of Artisans” was the only temple to remain standing out of the twenty-nine that were active here during the 1930s. Built in 1875, the synagogue ...
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Although its underground petroleum resources are today largely exhausted, Wallachia remains the country’s economic center. This region was first dominated by Hungary, but in 1330 it fell under Ottoman influence. A number of Jews expelled from Hungary in the mid-fifteenth century settled on the Wallachian slopes of the Carpathians, and were followed, after 1492, by those expelled from ...
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For the purposes of this tourist and cultural guidebook, we will not linger on the extermination camps, which are “documents to barbarity”, as Walter Benjamin put it, and not to culture. Yet we must mention some of them at least, as we seek to comprehend the incomprehensible, to grasp through their images that which ultimately cannot be grasped. In Sobibór, there are in a sense ...
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Jews began settling in Wlodawa in the seventeenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, they numbered 3670 (66% of the population), then 4200 (67%) in 1921, and 5650 (75%) in 1939. The Germans created a ghetto to which they deported 800 Jews from Kraków and 1000 from Vienna, before exterminating them all in the camp near Sobibór, a mile or two from here in the forest, beside the Bug ...
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The last Polish city before the Ukrainian border and former Austrian Fortress that fell to the Russians in the first World War, Przemysl is also a city with a strong Jewish community dating going as far back as the twelfth century, perhaps even the eleventh century. Before the Second World War, 20000 Jews lived here, or 40% of the population. In September 1939, after several days of German ...
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Jews settled in Rymanów so long ago that there exists no document mentioning their arrival. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the inhabitants of the city lived mainly from the cultivation of the vines and the wine trade, activity in which the Jewish community held a preponderant place. In 1765, a thousand Jews lived in Rymanów, or 43% of the population. In the eighteenth century, ...
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Jews began to settle in Rzeszów in the fifteenth century and, in the seventeenth century, built two synagogues, both of which remain, almost side by side. They are fairly easy to find, located right in the city center. , dating from the first years of the seventeenth century, today houses the city archives. It is rather small, but well restored on the outside. A Star of David can still be ...
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In Tarnów, half of the population was Jewish: between 20000 and 25000 people worked principally in the clothing and hat industries (sixty or so businesses), arts and crafts, and trade. Some were rich merchants, lawyers, and doctors who owned beautiful houses still dominating Walowa Street. The others, poorer, were concentrated mostly in the populated districts around Zydowska, Warynskiego, ...
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In 1335, King Casimir the Great founded an independent city near Kraków, Kazimierz, in which he permitted Jews to settle around Sukiernikow (Clothier) Street (now called Jozefa Street), next to the Christian quarter. They built the Stara Synagogue, a mikvah, hotel, and wedding chapel on the main street called Szeroka (Wide) Street. In the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews arrived here ...
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From Bialystok, a detour toward Tykocin is imperative: it has effectively preserved the structure and architecture of an old shtetl. This town, tiny today, was in times past more important than Bialystok, with a larger and older Jewish community. The community dates back to 1522 and was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most prominent in Poland. Like Bialystok, in ...
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Located on the bank of the Ner, a tributary of the Warta in the region the Germans called Wartheland, Chelmno is where “gas trucks” were tested beginning 1941, an early form of what later became the gas chambers. Jews were assembled in the Catholic church and from there sealed in trucks, with the exhaust pipe turned inward. The number of miles between the village and forest and ...
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The Lower Vistula region is infamous in Jewish history for the many massacres perpetrated during the Holocaust, particularly in Chelmno. It is in this town that Claude Lanzmann’s film begins.
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Arriving in Treblinka by train recalls the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants’ final trip from the Umschlagplatz to the gaz chambers. To reach Treblinka from Malkinia, the railway line follows hairpin switches: the train must therefore stop and travel in reverse, with the locomotive pushing the cars toward the camp, as explained by railroad worker Henryk Galkowski in Shoah, a train ...
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Lodz is a large Polish industrial city where a significant Jewish working class, along with merchants and rich industrialists, were concentrated in the nineteenth century. A fine representation of the reality of life in nineteenth-century Lodz can be seen in Andrezej Wajda’s 1974 film Ziemia Obiecana (Promised Land). Under the occupation, the Lodz ghetto (with more than 150000 people) ...
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Warsaw: the name alone evokes the martyrdom of the ghetto following the April 1943 insurrection. Events here shall remain firmly fixed in the conscience of humanity. Jews settled in Warsaw beginning in 1414, the year their presence was first mentioned. In 1792, on the eve of Russian domination, they numbered 6750 here, or 9,7% of the population. Their population increased considerably during ...
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The lovely little garrison town of Terezín in the same region was created at the end of the eighteenth century during the reign of Joseph II. In 1942, the Nazis totally emptied the city of its 7000 inhabitants -with the exception of Jewish families- and transformed in into a ghetto and transit center for Czech Jews of the capital and surrounding lands. Some 57000 Jews were held ...
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