The earliest mention of a Jew holding permanent residence in Ełk dates back to 1707. He was soon joined by more of his coreligionists, and as early as 1715 the local Jewish community already comprised 29 people. Its size started to rapidly grow in the beginning of the 19th century, which was due to the liberalisation of the law. In 1840, the Jewish community of Ełk had 90 members, and in 1871 – 285.

In 1848, construction works began on a neo-Gothic brick synagogue, eventually coming to an end in 1851. In 1837, the Jewish community established its own cemetery. An official synagogue community was founded in Ełk in 1847. The Jewish community continued to grow in size until the beginning of the 20th century. In 1905, it comprised 367 people. However, the number of Jewish residents in the town started to decrease over the following 30 years, falling to 150 in 1932. Even with the dwindling number of members, the Ełk Jewish community was one of the largest in East Prussia.

Anti-Jewish attitudes started to spread in the town as early as the 1920s. They became even stronger after Adolf Hitler and NSDAP came to power in March 1933. Public figures of Jewish origin were arrested and Jewish shops were targeted with boycotts. Harassment and violence reached their peak during Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938), when the synagogue in Ełk was set on fire and Jewish shops were vandalised.

Some of the Jewish residents of Ełk emigrated abroad or to Berlin. During the Holocaust, almost 80 Jews from the town were killed in concentration camps and ghettos. Only a handful survived World War II.

The Description

The only remnant of the Jewish community of Ełk is the cemetery. It was established next to the mound known as Jerusalemberg (English: Mount Jerusalem), at today’s Kilińskiego Street. Human remains have been discovered under the mound, though it is not entirely clear whether it gained the name of Jerusalemberg due to its former function as an early Jewish burial site. It is possible that the mound was used to bury the victims of the plague and people who were not allowed to be buried in the church graveyard, for example representatives of other cultures and creeds.

The cemetery covered an area of 0.1 hectare. It was surrounded with a brick wall and was entered through an impressive ornamental gate. In 1916, it became the resting place of Russian Jewish soldiers killed in World War I. The necropolis was most likely vandalised in the 1930s, after the Nazi rise to power. Its area was steadily overgrowing with vegetation over the following decades and the remains of tombstones were systematically plundered. Only a single standing tombstone was supposedly left at the cemetery in the 1960s. Any remaining traces of the necropolis were removed in 1976. All that is left at the site are a couple of fieldstones which likely formed part of the defunct cemetery wall as well as a single carved stone – a fragment of a matzeva. A part of the original plot housing the cemetery currently forms part of the Jana Pawła II Square.

In 2019, a matzeva-shaped plaque commemorating the Jews buried at the cemetery was placed at the site. It was founded by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage and the Foundation for the Support of Science and Business (Polish: Fundacja Wsparcia Nauki i Biznesu).

Description copyright owner: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews