Obj. ID: 50361
Jewish Funerary Art Jewish cemetery in Grójec, Poland
According to ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, the cemetery is located approximately 750 metres southwest of the town centre, between Mogielnicka and Wilczogórska Streets, on an irregularly shaped plot of approximately 1.75 hectares, near the Catholic cemetery. The cemetery was established after 1794, as the Jewish community was beginning to develop in Grójec. In 1847, the area of the cemetery was expanded when an adjacent plot of land was purchased. In 1948, the bodies of Jews who were murdered by the Germans on July 14, 1943, near Góra Kalwaria were exhumed and buried at the cemetery.
The cemetery has sustained significant damage. During World War II, by order of the Germans, some tombstones were used to pave the road leading to Werner Zimmermann’s Staroste Manor in Kobylin. In the years of the Polish People’s Republic, the cemetery was used for gravel excavation and, later, as a shooting range for militiamen and soldiers. In the 1985 cemetery charter, it is written that:
“The object is ruined, overgrown with grass, […] it is not treated as a cemetery, it functions as a pasture and a garbage dump. […] Only fragments of 28 tombstones and the monument commemorating the Jews murdered in Chynów have been found.”
Only a few tombstones have survived, including several dozen tombstones transported to the cemetery in 2019 from private property. The northern part of the plot is covered with dense bushes. In 2002, a matzevah-style monument dedicated to the memory of Holocaust victims, funded by Mosze Kielmanzon from Haifa, was erected at the cemetery. In 2003-2004, the Nissenbaum Family Foundation, in cooperation with the Grójec Landsmanschaft, cleaned up the cemetery, built a gate, and a 230-metre-long fence. The cemetery is listed in the Register of Immovable Monuments of the Masovian Voivodeship (entry no. 407 / A / 89, May 8, 1989). There is no information on its ownership status.
The cemetery wall contains different types of fencing: there is an iron fence (2 m high) at the entrance, a mesh wire fence(1-1.5 m) with concrete posts along the eastern border, a concrete wall (1.5 m high) along the western border and an iron fence (1.5 m high) along Wilczogórska Street. There is one tombstone dated 1933. A few concrete foundations and fragments of tombstones have been preserved.
