Tarnów’s Jewish culture

The influence of Jewish community, which lived in Tarnów for centuries, has left its mark on this town till today. It was in the city centre and the East part of town, where lives of Jewish community were concentrated and it is there, where we should look for historical evidence of their lives. 

 

The oldest Jewish temple in Tarnów was built around the second half of the XVI century and it was placed on the Rybny Square. Here is a last piece of a synagogue, which survived till this day, but not the oldest one, but the one which replaced it in the XVII century. This temple, called the Old Temple was burned by Germans along with other temples and houses of prayer in November 1939. The only thing that survived the fire was bimah, a place meant strictly for prayer and readings of sacred texts. Over the bimah in the Old Temple is an element of a stucco ceiling, which used to be based on 4 brick columns. On the remaining fragments smoke residue is still visible. In 1987 the bimah was put under a wooden roof placed on four columns in order to protect it from any further damage. 

 

The only building from that time, that has survived is the very interesting bathhouse. It used to be a mikveh - Jewish ritual baths. The building was built in 1904 in Mauritian style. Next to the bathhouse is  the monument of the first transport of the Prisoners to Auschwitz. 

 

The Jewish Cemetery on the corner of Słoneczna and Nowodąbrowska streets, holds around 3000 matzevahs, and the number of buried there, with the victims of Nazi aggression during the Second World War, is over 11 000 people. 

 

A sad place, but worth visiting, is the Buczyna forest in Zbylitowska Góra near Tarnów. It is a place of executions and mass graves murdered there by Germans, Jews and Poles during the war.

 

While walking through the Old City, an observant eye will notice, here and there old or renovated shop signboards, sighs in Hebrew on the walls of Jewish tenement houses or the information about Tarnów’s ghetto. Around 20 km from Tarnów, in Dąbrowa-Tarnowska, there is a beautifully renovated synagogue, available for tourists to visit.