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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Lodz
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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Góra Kalwaria
Jew began settling in Góra Kalwaria (Calvary Mountain) in 1795, and by a century later they had attained more than 50% of the city’s population. The Tsadik Isaac Meir Rothenberg Alter, brother-in-law to Menahem Mendl of Kotzek, settled here in 1859. The Jews called Góra Kalwaria “Gur”, or the “New Jerusalem”, so well-known were the tsadik Alter and his dynasty. ...
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Warsaw
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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Mazovia
The region is rich in references to Jewish history, including Gora Kalwaria, long ago dubbed “the new Jerusalem”, the very large pre-war community of Lodz, and the capital Warsaw, where Jewish cultural life flourished until 1942 and even that year, when plays were performed in the spirit of the Resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, where Jews were walled up and starving, before being ...
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Mikulov
After Prague, until the nineteenth century the largest Jewish community in all the Czech lands lived in the city of Mikulov, south of Brno. Its yeshivoth were renowned throughout the region, even to Galicia. The ghetto extended to the west of the old city around the present-day Husova and Zameskà streets, but only a few houses dating from the ghetto’s heyday still stand. In the ...
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Boskovice
Boskovice is located nineteen miles north of Brno. This large center of Jewish culture and study of the Torah was for many years the headquarters of the chief Rabbinate of Moravia. The fifteenth-century Jewish quarter extends from the present-day Bilkova and Plackova Streets, near the large square. The original plan, with the ghetto gate always visible and the tiny streets lined with ...
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Trebíc
The city of Trebíc is located thirty-one miles north of Brno on the other side of the Jihlava River. Its Jewish quarter, near the city center, was one of the largest in the country: in the middle of the nineteenth century, it counted more than a hundred houses. The quarter grew beginning in the sixteenth century, and even today many of its residences retain some traces of their Baroque or ...
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Moravia
A less famous region than Bohemia, Moravia boasts some very old Jewish places of worship of very different kinds, depending on local and regional influences.
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Roudnice nad Labem
The large village of Roudnice nad Labem twenty-five miles from Prague was one of the first small centers of Judaism in Bohemia and merits a brief visit. The oldest Jewish quarter, destroyed in the seventeenth century, stood beside the village’s lovely Baroque castle. The “new ghetto” is to the west of the castle in what is today Havlickova Street. It contains ten or so ...
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Plzen
Plzen is the principal center and beer capital of wester Bohemia. The Jews were expelled from the city in 1504 and not permitted to return for more than two centuries. Following the industrial and urban development in the nineteenth century, a Jewish community resettled here and flourished. In 1921 more than 3000 Jews lived in Plzen. Three synagogues were built in Plzen in the nineteenth ...
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Kasejovice
There is a small Jewish quarter of about ten houses to the southwest of Kasejovice’s central square, linked to the rest of the city by a narrow, straight street. The , in the heart of the Zidovske Mesto, was built in 1762 in the rococo style and redone a century later. With its striking aron and painted decorative features, it is one of the most interesting and best preserved in the region.
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Breznice
In Breznice in western Bohemia one can still see the former Jewish quater created in 1570 by the local lord, Ferdinand of Loksany, and enlarged a century and a half later. The two streets and large square of the quarter are lined with low houses. Breznice’s Jewish quarter is located to the north of the town’s central square. Its most beautiful building is the Popper Palace, a ...
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Golcuv Jenikov
The small town of Golcuv Jenikov near Caslav had a significant Jewish quarter of some fifty homes to the south of the town’s central square. Most have kept their original appearance. Of interest is that Christian also lived in Golcuv Jenikov Jewish quarter. The oriental neo-Romanesque was constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century. The has some interesting Baroque tombs. The ...
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Cáslav
Those with a healthy curiosity should make a quick detour to the small town of Cáslav, located forty-four miles southeast of the capital. Forbidden to Jews until the middle of the nineteenth century, the communities in the neighboring villages began to settle here after the Jews’ emancipation. To the northeast of the large square on Fucikova Street one can see an unusual synagogue in a ...
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Kolín
The city of Kolín, one of the most important places of Jewish remembrance in the Czech lands, is worth a trip to see the small streets of the Jewish quarter and the magnificent cemetery. Overrun with vegetation, the cemetery’s atmosphere recalls that of Prague’s old Jewish cemetery before it became a usual stop for large tour groups. The Jews settled in this town close to the ...
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Drevikov
In the village of Drevikov, roughly sixty miles southeast of Prague, it is possible to see how Jews lived in the villages of Bohemia at the end of the nineteenth century, before their immigration to cities and industrial centers. About thirty Jewish families lived in the two-story houses on the “Jewish street” of this village. The school and small synagogue of the community, now a ...
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Prague
Stuccoed in pink, green or yellow, grand neo-Renaissance and neo-Gothic buildings line the Parizká, the Avenue of Paris. Since the fall of the wall, elegant boutiques have been flourishing on this major traffic artery, which lacks none of the cachet that it had at the beginning of the century. Here the legendary ghetto of Prague was located until the renovation of the city center between 1897 ...
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Bohemia
What if you climbed on the shoulders of the Golem or travelled between Kafka’s lines through enchanting Prague or beyond its walls to discover all the traces of Jewish presence in many towns in the Bohemian region?
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Stropkov
Approximately thirty miles northeast of Presov, the small city of Stropkov had one of the largest Jewish communities in the region and was an important center of Judaism. Many of its Jews arrived from Poland in the seventeenth century, victims of the pogroms who were in search of the relative security in lands belonging to the Hapsburg Empire. Although allowed to work in the city, they did ...
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Bardejov
Bardejov possessed a large Jewish quarter where some 5000 Jews lived before World War II. This small medieval city of 35000 inhabitants lies thirty-seven miles north of Presov near the Polish border. Most of Bardejov’s Jewish community was wiped out during the war. Despite the devastations of the war and postwar reconstruction, a few houses and an interesting eighteenth-century ...
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Presov
Not far from Kosice, Presov was also an important center of Jewish life. More than 6000 Jews from the city and surrounding villages were killed during the war. Today fewer than 100 Jews live here in Presov. The area from near the old city center with its Renaissance homes and palace to beyond the city walls once marked the extent of the Jewish quarter. Close to the Jewish community center ...
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Kosice
The capital of eastern Slovakia, Kosice is a large industrial city of 250000 inhabitants. Its sizable Jewish community was almost totally annihilated during the Second World War. The city os now home to 800 Jews. The spacious nineteenth-century is in a building adjacent to the community headquarters. The building also includes a mikvah, a kosher butcher shop, and a prayer hall. This ...
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Eastern Slovakia
In this region, you can visit ancient synagogues in Bardejov, Kosice and especially the sublime Presov synagogue. Unfortunately, there are fewer traces of Jewish life in Stropkov.
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Trencin
Trencin is a city of roughly 60000 inhabitants, and you will find on Vajanskeho Street a beautiful synagogue dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. Although now an exhibition space, its decorations remain, and a plaque recalls that the building was once the location of worship for the 1300 Jews in the city, most of whom were exterminated during World War II.
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Bratislava
Bratislava, capital of Slovakia and a large city of more than 500000 inhabitants, is located on the banks of the Danube River not far from the Hungarian and Austrian borders. Although Jews have thought to live lived here since the Roman period, the first mention of a community dates back to the second half of the thirteenth century. The Jews of Bratislava have been expelled from the city ...
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Bratislava and Surrounding Areas
Bratislava was one of the European centres of Judaism, when Rabbi Hatam Sofer lived there. Neighbouring Trencin boasts a beautiful synagogue dating from the early 20th century.
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Szeged
Half a day will suffice to see the in Szeged, one of the most interesting ones in Hungary (1903). With its Baroque dome, Roman columns, and Byzantine-inspired bellows, the monumental building is a hymn to eclecticism. At the entrance, two plaques honor rabbis Lipot, a reform pioneer who was the first to deliver his sermons in Hungarian, and Immanuel Loew, son of the former whose passion for ...
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Kecskemét
Kecskemét is worth a stop for its two synagogues. The largest is in (nineteenth-century) Romantic style. Today it houses the , where expositions and conferences are regularly held on technical subjects. The second contains a small . There’s also a in the city.
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Sátorajújhely
The region is famous for its rebbes, heads of Hasidic communities whose followers revered their thaumaturgical and magical powers. The city of Sátorajújhely, where 4000 Jews lived in 1939, houses the mausoleum of Moses Teitelbaum. Born in Poland in 1759, he founded a dynasty of rebbes in Hungary, Galicia, and Romania. Every day, legend has it, Teitelbaum dressed in rags and climbed Mount ...
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