Kazimierz Dolny - Jewish Life

Jewish Life

A small Jewish community was present in the city from the time of Casimir III the Great in the 14th century. The king granted the Jews a writ of rights which caused the town to become a focal point for Jewish immigration. When John III Sobieski became King in 1674, he granted the Jews of Poland a respite from taxes. Sobieski also reconfirmed for the Jews all the rights they had been granted by previous kings. During his reign, the housing restrictions were abolished and the Jewish community began to flourish again.

In the 19th century, Yehezkel Taub, a disciple of the "Seer of Lublin", founded the Hasidic dynasty of Kuzmir in the town.

Between the First and Second World Wars, the Jewish population was about 1,400, half the total population of the town. During the Holocaust era, a Judenrat was established in the town, where the Nazi Germans forced the town's Jews to perform forced labor and to pave roads using tombstones from the local Jewish cemetery. After the Holocaust, a memorial wall was erected using the pieces that survived. In 1940, the Nazis established a ghetto, bringing all the Jews from the surrounding Puławy County to live in the ghetto. In 1942, the Jews that survived the starvation, disease and slave labor were taken to Belzec to be "exterminated". At the end of 1942, the town was officially declared "free of Jews".

One of the most famous Jewish residents of the town was the painter and sculptor Chaim Goldberg. Another was the noted journalist S. L. Shneiderman, who wrote about Kazimierz Dolny in his book The River Remembers.

• Historic well at the market square

• Tenement-houses, under St. Nicholas (left) and St. Christopher (right)

• Market square with art stalls

• St. John Baptist, Parish church

• Castle ruins, 14th century

• Old granary