05 The most important places
on the Jewish map of Poland Auschwitz - Birkenau

geographical reanimation of memories

We would like to invite you to a virtual tour through Poland, a country with a rich Jewish heritage. To find out any information about chosen place of Jewish interest shown on the map, please mark it and read a brief description, we prepared for you.

If the virtual journey is not enough for you, there is always a possibility to organize a real tour through Poland and take you to selected towns according to your own scenario.

All you need to prepare your individual program is to write names of places you want to visit in the form of contact below.

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Auschwitz was the first concentration camp in Poland; it opened in June 1940 at a former military garrison. The name Auschwitz has become symbolic of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews. It was at the Auschwitz main camp that Zyklon B, an insecticide, was first tested in June 1941 and then used for the first mass killing of humans in a gas chamber on Sept. 3, 1941. Birkenau was a huge Nazi concentration camp, located 3 kilometers from the Auschwitz main camp. It was here that Jews were sent from all over Europe and over a million of them died. When it was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27,1945, the Germans had abandoned the camp after blowing up the three remaining gas chambers, leaving behind 5,800 prisoners, including 611 children. The camp has been left just as it was in 1945, a vast ghost town of empty barracks and a forest of brick chimneys that are all that is left of the buildings that were burned when the camp was abandoned.

Belzec was the first of the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps which were set up to carry out the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which was planned at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Jews from the ghettos of southern Poland, including Lublin and Lvov, were killed at Belzec in three gas chambers which were first put into operation on March 17, 1942. The Belzec death camp was only in existence for nine months, after which it was completely dismantled to destroy the evidence of the murder of 600,000 Jews who were killed in gas chambers. The bodies, which had been buried, were exhumed and burned on pyres before the camp was abandoned.

Bialystok is a very large city in northeastern Poland. There are two major monuments in a public park that used to be a graveyard of the Jews: one commemorates the ghetto's dead, while the second honors Jewish partisans. There is also a monument to Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof, creator of the international language Esperanto, who was born in the city and a plaque in the old Jewish synagogue to commemorate the victims burned alive there in 1941.

Bobowa - was a major Hasidic centre and a home to the court of Shlomo Halberstamm who was a rebbe here and whose grave at the local cemetery is still an important aim for Jewish pilgrims. The 18th century synagogue was used after WWII as a weaving workshop, but it returned to Jewish ownership in 1993 and after the renovation it is again used as a place for prayers.

Kulmhof was a Nazi extermination camp located in the small Polish village 60 kilometers northwest of Lodz. The camp, which was opened by the Germans in November 1941, was in the Warthegau, a district in the part of Poland that had been annexed into the Greater German Reich after the joint conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.

Chenstchow which is a center of pilgrimage for Catholics because of the famous Black Madonna icon has also some Jewish monuments to see. There is a mass grave and a monument which honors the city's Jewish victims, as well as members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) in the Jewish cemetery.

DÄ…browa Tarnowska was once a town of the famous "Talmud-Torah" school and the synagogue which is now used as a cultural center. There is also a cemetery containing 50 matzevot and two monuments to honor the victims of the Shoah.

Danzig - in this large city in the Polish Baltic Sea, one can notice the remains of the synagogue and Jewish cemetery buildings that now are home to various institutions. The most significant testimony of the Jewish presence in this place, are tables of Izaak Van Den Blocke that adorn the city council.

Gur-Ger is a small town near Warsaw which, due to its very special Gerer Rebbe synagogue (once the headquarters of the famous dynasty of Hassidic Alter family), was called a "new Jerusalem". Now, the former synagogue houses a warehouse and there are no signs of what was once a residence of the Gerer Rebbe.

Jedwabne is a city which was a scene of Jewish pogrom in 1941. Originally attributed to the German Einsatzgruppen, which carried out many mass execution in the area, this crime was in fact carried out by local people.

Kazimierz-upon-Vistula is a small town on the River Vistula where an interesting monument of Holocaust victims can be seen. It consists of broken tombstones which were constructed in such a way to create a symbolical "wailing wall".

Keltz is a provincial capital in south-central Poland. There are: the old synagogue used as an archive today, the cemetery that occupies approx. 150 matzevot and a monument honoring the victims of so-called Kielce pogrom with a small Jewish Museum near by.

Krakow - Kazimierz was named after the Polish king who founded the town just outside Krakow in 1335 and who, coincidentally, invited the Jews to settle in Poland after they were expelled from Germany around the same time. Today Kazimierz is recognized as the best preserved old Jewish quarter in Europe. The oldest surviving Synagogue in Poland is located there.

Lesko is a small, mountainous city in which one can see beautifully restored 17th century synagogue which now serves as a regional museum.

Lublin was once a main population center for Hasidic Jews, but during World War II, the Jewish community was completely destroyed. The Jewish New Cemetery in Lublin has been reconstructed with a symbolic wall and a stunning memorial building called the Chamber of Memory. During World War II, Lublin was the headquarters for the Operation Reinhard extermination camps on the eastern border of German-occupied Poland.

Lancut still houses a magnificent synagogue from 1761 in which one can visit an interesting Jewish museum.

Lodz before the WW II had a numerous population of Jewish merchants. Now there are not many signs of Jewish life in the city although one can visit there the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe which also contains the biggest Jewish mausoleum (to Israel Poznanski) in the world.The oldest synagogue in the city was built between 1895 and 1900 by the Reigher family foundation and only survived the Second World War because it was used for storing salt. The war did unfortunately destroy in the interior as well as an allegedly lovely Star of David stained-glass window. A plaque on the east wall commemorates the synagogue's founder who starved to death in the Lodz ghetto. The Nissenbaum and Lauder foundations renovated the shrine in 1989.

Majdanek is the nickname of a former Nazi Prisoner of War camp and forced labor camp, which was built in a suburb of Lublin. After 1942, it also had the dual purpose of being an extermination camp for the Jews. It was the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated in the final days of World War II, and had the only completely intact workable gas chambers to be found by the Allies.

Neisantz In this mountainous town which is located south of Krakow, one can see an ancient synagogue, which now houses a small Jewish museum and a plaque in the Jewish cemetery indicating the locations of mass executions and honors 25000 people buried there.

Sobibor was a Nazi death camp established in March 1942, mainly for the purpose of killing the Jews in the Lublin ghetto and surrounding area. Deportations to the Sobibor killing center from Lublin, Czechoslovakia, and the Greater German Reich began in early May 1942. During the first phase of the extermination at Sobibor, which lasted until July 1942, around 100,000 Jews were gassed to death. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, then later dug up and burned. An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor.

Stutthof is a small city on the Baltic Sea, where Nazis made a concentration camp (Stutthof) at the very beginning of their invasion of Poland. Before the place was released in 1945, about 85000 people lost their lives there. Now, at the place where the Germans burned the bodies of their victims, one can see a monument designed by Wiktor Tolkin.

Tarnow was once an important center of religious life, maintaining a few synagogues and a dozen small prayer houses. Although the population of Jewish people has severely decreased since the time before WWII, their community has left a permanent and esteemed mark on the Polish culture. The most interesting Judaica collections are in the Regional Museum in Tarnow and the museums in Dabrowa Tarnowska and Bochnia. The synagogue in Dabrowa Tarnowska is especially interesting as the last private prayer home in the region, preserved as museum after its last user's death.

Treblinka is the name of a remote village in northeastern Poland. It is also the name of a Nazi death camp to which the Jews from Poland and other countries were sent after the Nazis began to implement their plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry. It is now the site of a monument surrounded by 17,000 stones which simulate a graveyard.

Tiktin is an example of one of the many former Jewish shtetls or villages in the days before Polish Jewry and this way of life were completely obliterated by the Nazis. A Baroque Synagogue, which was built there in 1642 and is considered one of the finest in Poland, has been preserved and is open to visitors, along with a museum with displays of Jewish artifacts.

Warsaw (the capital of Poland) before the WW II was the home of 375,000 Jews, one third of the population of the city. The former Ghetto in which all the Jews of Warsaw were imprisoned in November 1940 behind high brick walls is now only a memory. The Ghetto buildings were 100% leveled by the Germans and the area has now been rebuilt with modern buildings. Today there are only monuments, and a short section of the original wall, which are painful reminders of what happened there. The spot where the Jews were assembled for deportation and the site of Mila 18 where on April 19, 1943 a handful of Jewish rebels fought the German SS troops are now commemorated by memorials.

Breslau is a big city near the German border where there are still many interesting Jewish monuments. Especially important are: the White Stork Synagogue built in 1829 by Karl Langhans, which is in the process of restoration, the Hall of Prayer (Beit Midrash) where services are still conducted, the Kristalnacht Memorial at the site of a large new synagogue for Progressive Jews who was burned during Kristalnacht, the Old Cemetery now preserved under the auspices of the Museum of Wroclaw and the new cemetery, which has about 12000 graves, a monument to Jews killed in the city during the World War II and a monument commemorating the victims of the concentration camp Gross Rosen which was near by.

On the old Jewish cemetery in Zamosc there were buried Sephardic Jews who arrived to town from Spain and Portugal. The cemetery was surrounded by a wall with wooden gate and nearby was the caretaker’s house. During World War II the Nazis used the matzevot to build pavements and after the war the fence was taken away, on the terrain of the cemetery a playground and Culture Centre were built. New Jewish cemetery was also devastated during the occupation and after the war the terrain was built over. From regained matzevot a lapidarium was erected.