Location
Vilnius
The capital of Vilnius, once known as the “Jerusalem of the east” has few Jewish monuments today. However, in the last few years, the Museum of the Gaon of Vilnius has made ...
Location
Gomel
In 1897, 20,385 Jews lived in Gomel (54.8% of the population), as compared with 37,475 (43.7%) in 1926. Today, little remains of their life here. The Jewish quarter was located on the right bank ...
Location
Brest (Brest-Litovsk)
The first city across the Polish border, Brest is located on the right bank of the Bug River. Its name evokes the famous Brest-Litovsk Treaty of April 1918, whereby Trotsky’s Red Army put ...
Location
Bobruysk
The city of Bobruysk was once a typical Belarusian shtetl. In 1897, 20,759 Jews lived here (60.5% of the population), while in 1926, the Jewish community had a population of 21,558 (42%). To form ...
Location
Minsk
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 ...
Location
Subotica
The Jewish presence in Subotica probably dates back to the 18th century, when the town was founded. There was a synagogue at the end of that century. Many of Subotica’s Jews took part in ...
Location
Novi Sad
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 ...
Location
Nis
The Jewish presence probably dates back to Roman times. However, administrative records show a Jewish presence in Nis from the 17th century onwards. 800 Jews lived in Nis at the turn of the 20th ...
Location
Belgrade
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 ...
Location
Crete
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 ...
Location
Thessaloníki
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 ...
Location
Istanbul and Surrounding Areas
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 ...
Location
Brasov
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 ...
Location
Southern Transylvania
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 ...
Location
Sighet Marmatiei
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 ...
Location
Oradea
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 ...
Location
Cluj
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 ...
Location
Transylvania
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 ...
Location
Galati
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 ...
Location
Wallachia
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 ...
Location
Sobibór
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 ...
Location
Wlodawa
Jews began settling in Wlodawa in the seventeenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, they numbered 3,670 (66% of the population), then 4,200 (67%) in 1921, and 5,650 (75%) in 1939. ...
Location
Przemysl
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 ...
Location
Rymanów
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 ...
Location
Rzeszów
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, ...
Location
Tarnów
In Tarnów, half of the population was Jewish: between 20,000 and 25,000 people worked principally in the clothing and hat industries (sixty or so businesses), arts and crafts, and trade. Some ...
Location
Kraków
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 ...
Location
Tykocin
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 ...
Location
Chelmno
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 ...
Location
Lower Vistula
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.