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Holocaust and WW II

Jewish Warsaw

 

Warsaw Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Warsaw is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world. Founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it occupies an area of 33 hectares and has 200,000 headstones, making it one of the most valuable complexes of small-scale architecture in Warsaw and throughout Poland.
When the ghetto was in existence, the cemetery was directly adjacent to the ghetto boundary. It is the site of mass graves of Jews who died in the ghetto due to disease and starvation,  or were shot in mass executions. The Jewish cemetery is also the final resting-place of the last leader of the ghetto uprising, Marek Edelman (d. 2009). There are many symbolic graves commemorating Holocaust victims, as well as a number of other monuments, such as the Janusz Korczak memorial and the Memorial to the Child Victims of the Holocaust.

 

The Nożyk Synagogue

The Nożyk Synagogue in Warsaw is the only prewar synagogue still functioning in Warsaw – indeed, the only one of the city’s more than four hundred synagogues and prayer houses to have survived World War II. It is also the main synagogue of today’s Jewish community in Warsaw, and the home synagogue of the Chief Rabbi of Poland. Its immediate surroundings are the beating heart of Jewish community life in the Polish capital.
The Nożyk Synagogue is in the centre of Warsaw, at 7 Twarda Street, and is open to visitors.

 

Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, opened in 2013, occupies a huge, architecturally impressive new building on the same square as the Ghetto Heroes Monument.  Its main, permanent exhibition profiles a millennium of the Jewish presence in Poland in all its historical incarnations, which cover contemporary countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Of particular interest are those parts of the exhibition that illustrate the unique character of the culture of the East European Jews, the culture of the shtetls – small towns in which the majority of residents were Jews – and the socio-economic context of Jewish life in Poland, which was for several centuries home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world.

 

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