Obj. ID: 50518
Jewish Funerary Art  Site of the Jewish cemetery in Wyszków, Poland

According to ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, until the establishment of the cemetery in the 1820s, the Jews of Wyszków and its vicinity were buried in the cemeteries of whichever Jewish community they were subject to at the time. The cemetery was eventually established 1.5 km north-east of the city centre, among fields. It was shaped liked an irregular polygon (like a triangle) with an area of about 4 hectares (ha). In the interwar period, it was enclosed with a brick wall, and it was not covered with trees.

There was a caretaker’s house next to the cemetery. During World War II, the cemetery was totally devastated. The fence was torn down, and the tombstones were taken away for construction purposes. After the Soviet occupation in 1944, the area was plowed, then used as a pasture, farmland, sand mine, and partially built over with residential houses. From the 1990s, tombstones found in the city were gathered and, in 1997, were placed in the lapidary monument in the recovered area of the cemetery (1.5 ha). The wall-shaped lapidarium contains 82 fragments of tombstones. They are traditional stelae made of sandstone, granite, and marble. There is a memorial for the cohen’s section.

Holocaust memorial plaques on the site of the Jewish cemetery in Wyszków, Poland