Obj. ID: 50743
Jewish Funerary Art Jewish cemetery in Wodzisław, Poland
According to ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, the Jewish cemetery was established in 1692 in the village of Świątniki, south of the city, next to the road to Kraków. In the records of the community from 1928, a fenced area of 4 morgas is mentioned. There was also a morgue and a caretaker’s house. In the years 1942–1943, mass executions took place in the cemetery and over 300 people were murdered there. By order of the Germans, the bodies of those executed in the Wierdonki meadows were moved to the cemetery. Mass graves are located in the new, western part of the cemetery. The cemetery was partially destroyed during World War II. The tombstones were used for construction purposes and for hardening roads. In the 1970s, during the construction of the Wodzisław detour on the Warsaw-Krakow route, a road was built through the area which divided the cemetery into two parts. In 1988, the Nissenbaum Family Foundation applied for funds to fence the remains of the cemetery. In 1990, A monument commemorating Jews, the residents of Wodzisław and its vicinity murdered by the Nazis during World War II, was erected. At that time, only the eastern part of the cemetery was fenced. The western part, which is devoid of tombstones, and covered with grass and bushes, remains unfenced. The road leading through the cemetery is no longer used owing to changes in the national route S7. In the fenced part of the cemetery, next to the monument, there are about two hundred fragments of tombstones recovered from the town area.
The southern part is fenced with a metal fence about 2 m high. The northern part of the cemetery is unfenced. There are 317 gravestones. There are 17 intact tombstones (10 inside the cemetery and 7 in front of the entrance), about 100 fragments of tombstones in the grass of the cemetery area and about 200 fragments placed in the lapidarium. The lapidarium is built around the Holocaust Memorial.
