Legend
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Partitions of Poland.
Boundaries shown are ca. 1795.
Congress Poland
The Polish Republic in the interwar period
ca. 1930s
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Poznań
city in Wielkopolska province, Poland; known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Pozna and in German as Posen. Poznań’s Jewish community was one of the earliest to be established on Polish soil; the first reference to Jews living in the town comes from 1379. While tradition dates ...
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Opatów
(Apt), a town between Kraków and Lublin in Małopolska (Little Poland) dating back to the twelfth century. In 1502, Opatów was sold by the Lubusz bishops to noble owners, who permitted Jewish residence from 1538. Eighty Jews paid a poll tax in 1578, making Opatów one of ...
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Zamość
(Yid., Zamoch, Zamoshtsh), city in Lublin province. Founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, Zamość became the principal town of his family estate. The first mention of Jews in Zamość dates from 1583; Zamoyski granted them a privilege of settlement in 1588. This privilege was ...
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Chełm
former Polish royal town, now in the province of Lublin. According to local tradition, the Jews of Chełm (Yid., Khelem) were granted their first privilege by King Władisław Jagiełło, though tombstones once thought to be from the fifteenth century are now considered of a was ...
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Sandomierz
town in the Świętokrzyskie province on the Vistula River, and one of the oldest Jewish communities in Little Poland. In the period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sandomierz (Yid., Tsuzmir) played an important role as a trade center on a river route to Gdańsk and ...
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Kraków
[To trace the history of Jewish presence in the city of Kraków, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first treating the period through the Polish partitions and the second from 1795 until 2000 ...
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Przemyśl
(Ukr., Peremyshl; Yid., Pshemishel), city in southeastern Poland. It is presumed that at the beginning of the eleventh century a Jewish trading post existed in Przemyśl. Larger groups of Jews settled in the town in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and ...
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L’viv
(Yid., Lemberg; Ger., Lemberg; Pol., Lwów; Rus., Lvov; Latin, Leopolis), city in contemporary western Ukraine, about 65 km (40 miles) from the border with Poland. Jews lived in the city from the time of its establishment in the mid-thirteenth century; some, mostly ...
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Ternopil’
(Pol. and Rus., Tarnopol), city in western Ukraine (previously in eastern Galicia). Tarnopol was founded in 1540 by the Polish governor, Grand Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski. Jews settled there soon after its founding.In a privilege granted in 1550 and renewed in 1740 ...
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Hrodna
city now in Belarus; also known in Polish and Russian as Grodno and in Yiddish as Horodno or Grodne. Grodno's Jewish community, one of the oldest in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, existed as early as the fourteenth century. Its privilege, allegedly obtained in 1389 from ...
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Vilnius
(Pol., Wilno; Rus., Vilna; Yid., Vilne), capital of the republic of Lithuania. In 1323, Gediminas made Vilnius the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The city became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. It fell under the domination of the Russian ...
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Radom
Founded by Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) in 1703, Saint Petersburg is located at the northwest periphery of Russia, on the Gulf of Finland. In 1712, it replaced Moscow as the capital of the Russian Empire. Over the course of the next two centuries, Saint Petersburg was ...
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Pinsk
city in southern Belarus. Pinsk’s Jewish community was founded in 1506 (and from ca. 1690 Pinsk was twinned with the town of Karlin) and was one of the five chief communities of “Lite” (Jewish Lithuania), extending its authority over at least 26 smaller Jewish settlement ...
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Warsaw
capital of Poland from 1596 to 1794 and again since 1918. Warsaw’s importance in Polish and Jewish history is a relatively late phenomenon. For much of the Middle Ages, the Duchy of Mazovia, in which Warsaw was located, was a sparsely populated region, only loosely ...
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Kalisz
town in Wielkopolska province, Poland. Kalisz (Yid., Kulish) is considered to be the oldest town in Poland. Jews first settled there as early as the twelfth century, where they minted coins for the prince. In 1264, Prince Bolesław the Pious issued a privilege or charter ...
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Lublin
[To treat the history of Jewish settlement in Lublin, this entry is divided into two articles, the first on the pre-Partition period and the second on the post-Partition period until the present ...
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Luts’k
A city on the Styr’ River (a tributary of the Pripiat’), Luts’k (Pol., Łuck; Rus., Lutsk) is the administrative center of Ukraine’s Volyn’ oblast. Mentioned in the Ruthenian Chronicles of 1085, from 1320 it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from 1569 to 1795 ...
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Brody
a town in present-day Ukraine, about 80 kilometers northeast of L’viv (Pol., Lwów). Brody (Yid., Brod) was founded at the ford over the Styr River (bród is Polish for ford) in 1586 by Stefan Żółkiewski. Jewish settlement began at the end of the sixteenth century and ...
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Zabłudów
(Yid., Zabludove), town on the Meletina River (in the Western Bug basin) in the Białystok district and province of Poland. Zabłudów is first mentioned in archival sources in 1525. From 1569, the town was in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; from 1795 it was belonged ...
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Łomża
town in northeastern Poland in the Mazovia region. By the fourteenth century, Jews had settled in Łomża, engaging mainly in trade in timber, salt, raw materials and in various crafts. In 1566 the town received the right de non tolerandis Judaeis (nontoleration of Jews) ...
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Łódź
(Yid., Lodzh), Polish city and industrial center about 100 km west of Warsaw. From a hamlet of 767 people, including 259 Jews, in 1820, Łódź grew over the next century to a city of 670,000, with a Jewish community of more than 230,000, the second largest in Poland. At ...
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Tykocin
town in the Podlasie province of Poland; known in Yiddish as Tiktin. The first Jews settled in Tykocin in 1522 when the town’s owner, Olbracht Gasztołd, brought in 10 families from Grodno (Hrodna) and permitted them to build a synagogue, establish a cemetery, and ...
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Biała
town in southern Poland, from 1945 in the province of Silesia. The development of Biała was closely tied to that of neighboring Bielsko (situated in what was the Austrian part of Silesia), and was mainly related to textile production and cross-border trade. The presence ...
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Piotrków
city roughly 16 miles (25 km) southeast of Łódź in central Poland, Piotrków was the capital of the Piotrków guberniia from 1867 to 1915. Founded in the twelfth century, the town was the site of the Polish Crown Tribunal between 1578 and 1792. Although Piotrków was grant ...
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Białystok
industrial city in northeastern Poland, Białystok (Rus., Belostok) sits nestled in a heavily wooded area that divides central Poland from Belarus and Lithuania. The town, originally founded in 1320, remained part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795, after ...
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Bielsko
section of the urban area of Bielsko-Biała, Silesia, in southern Poland. Bielsko (Ger., Bielitz) was a Bohemian town until about 990, then Polish until 1327, when it was once more under Bohemian rule. Beginning in 1526 it was ruled by the Habsburgs; after World War I ...
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Katowice
A Prussian town until 1921, Katowice (Ger., Kattowitz) is now the capital city of the southern Polish province of Silesia. Although Jews were noted in the region as far back as 1733, the first Jews to settle in the village itself arrived in 1825. In 1840, 12 Jewish ...
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Jedwabne
(Yedvabneh) is situated in the Mazowsze region of Poland, 20 kilometers northeast of Łomża and 45 kilometers west of Tykocin (Tiktin). Jews first came to Jedwabne from Tykocin and were initially subject to that town’s Jewish communal authority. In 1770, when the wooden ...
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Konin
city in central Poland about two-thirds of the way on the east–west route from Warsaw to Poznań. The Jews of Konin probably arrived from Poznań and Kalisz (about 50 km due south of Konin) and are first mentioned in a Polish court record of 1397. The community gained ...
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Zbąszyń
town 70 kilometers west of Poznań, on the Polish–German border of 1919–1939; population (1938) 5,400, including 360 Germans and 52 Jews. From November 1938 to August 1939 Zbąszyń housed a transit camp for Jews expelled from Germany during the so-called Polenaktion ...
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Włocławek
town in Kujawy-Pomorze province in northern Poland. Jews were not allowed to live in Włocławek, a bishop-owned town, until the early nineteenth century, though the town was never granted an official privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. In the sixteenth and seventeenth ...
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Tarnów
town in southern Poland, 72 kilometers east of Kraków. Tarnów was founded in 1330, and in the century that followed, Jews were allowed to settle there by its owner, the nobleman Jan Amor. The first privilege authorizing the establishment of a Jewish community was ...
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Rzeszów
(Yid., Rayshe, Reyshe), city in southeastern Poland. Founded in 1354, Rzeszów was a privately owned town until 1845. The first mention of Jews residing there dates from 1550. Rzeszów’s owners supported Jewish settlement, and by 1592, six Jews owned houses. Local Jews ...
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Drogobych
(Pol., Drohobycz), medium-sized city in the district of L’viv in western Ukraine. In early modern times, Drogobych belonged to the Polish Commonwealth, but in 1772, as a result of the first partition of Poland, it was awarded to Austria (later Austria-Hungary) and ...
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Ivano-Frankivs’k
(formerly Stanyslaviv; Pol., Stanisławów; Ger., Stanislau; Rus., Stanislav), city in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Stanisławów just after its establishment in 1654; provisions for the community’s autonomy were guaranteed by the town’s owner in 1662. By 1736, Jews ...
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Buchach
city in Ukraine. The first mention of Jews in Buchach (Pol., Buczacz) is from 1500; the population grew steadily thereafter, reaching a recorded total of 1,358 Jews in 1765. The town and much of its Jewish population survived the 1648 Ukrainian uprising relatively ...
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Kolomyia
(or Kolomyya; Pol., Kołomyja; Ger., Kolomea), city on the Prut River in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Kołomyja, then part of Poland, at about the turn of the sixteenth century. Although many were murdered and the community was destroyed during the Khmel’nyts’kyi ...
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Map
The Polish Republic in the Interwar Period, ca. 1930s.