Img. ID: 394589
| Szeroka Street, monument is at south end of the street where small greenspace begins
In front of the Rema Synagogue on Szeroka Street is a small fenced-in greenspace with a few trees.
In 1994, when the surrounding area was mostly derelict, still reflecting the abandoned state of the old Jewish quarter after the deportation and murder of Cracow Jews, the Nissenbaum Family Foundation installed a memorial to Krakow’s holocaust victim’s here. This site is known to have once been a Jewish cemetery, but the date of its establishment is not certain. There was a wall around it, and in the 19th-century this was removed, and the cemetery sit shortened to allow the expansion of Szeroka Street.
The Nissenbaum Family Foundation was founded in 1983 with the aim of identifying and protecting Jewish heritage and Holocaust-related sites. The Foundation was very active in the 1990s as the first non-governmental sponsors of Jewish memory and heritage projects.
Significantly, the foundation chose Szeroka Street, formerly the heart of Jewish Cracow, as the site of the monument. Other than the eviction of the Jewish population from the street beginning in the spring of 1940, however, most of the horrors inflicted upon Cracow’s Jews did not take place here, but across the river in the Podgorze Ghetto (where a major memorial monument was installed in 2005), and at Plaszow Labor Camp. Already in 1995, however, there were plans for the redevelopment of Kazimierz, and after the fall of Communism, many Jewish and other tourists were beginning to come to the area. The Jewish Cultural Festival began its annual celebrations on Szeroka Street in 1988, and the World Monuments Fund began the restoration of the nearby Tempel Synagogue in 1992. Commercial and heritage development of the area took off in the 1990s.