Data collected during the 1774 visitation of the bishop in Myszyniec showed that there were 23 Jews living in the local parish, which constituted only 0.5% of the total population.

The partition authorities had a policy of tolerance towards Jews and encouraged their settlement in New East Prussia. In the period of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Kingdom), meanwhile, the government incentivised the Jewish population to leave the countryside and move to urban centres. As a result, the number of Jewish residents of Myszyniec and many similar localities started to rapidly increase. In 1808, Jews constituted over 7% of the population of the town. Nineteen years later, Myszyniec was inhabited by over 350 Jewish people (30% of all inhabitants). A well-organised Jewish community had been formed in the town by the mid-19th century; it was formally overseen by the synagogue supervision in Ostrołęka, where its members attended the synagogue. It was not until 1855 that the Jews of Myszyniec erected their own temple and a separate synagogue supervision was established in the town (they had been taking efforts to this effect for a quarter of a century). At that time, the local community comprised 120 families (741 people; 43% of the population) and employed a sub-rabbi, a cantor, and a shkolnik. There was also a mikveh and a Jewish school in the town. At that point, a Jewish cemetery already existed in the town. There were also two shtiebelekh, one of which was run by the Myszyniec Hasidim.

The Jews of Myszyniec played an important role in the economic life of the town since as early as the 1820s, when they owned over a quarter of local market stalls and artisan workshops (tailors, bakers, glaziers). Their position was becoming ever stronger with the growing size of the community, which at the end of the century made up the vast majority in the population of Myszyniec, deprived of town rights by the Prussian authorities.

The outbreak of World War I and the subsequent expulsion of Jews by the Russian army in August 1914 had disastrous consequences for the community of Myszyniec. A year later, when the front line was passing through the Kurpie region, the locality with its deserted Jewish quarter was almost entirely burnt to the ground. The first census in reborn Poland, carried out in 1921, showed that there were under a thousand Jews in Myszyniec, i.e. half less than in 1906. Despite the substantial decrease in the number of Jewish residents, they still constituted 49% of the town’s total population.

In the interwar years, the Jews of Myszyniec continued to make a living from crafts and trade, owning a half of all local shops and workshops. At the end of the 1920s, there were 20 Jewish shoemakers in the town, and Jews ran seven out of the town’s nine bakeries. The local steam mill was also Jewish-owned.

A charity fund operated in Myszyniec, and the sick received aid from the Linas Hatsedek society. The Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael fund was collecting money for Jewish settlement in Palestine. The local Jewish children attended traditional chadarim. Older boys studied in the local yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Yehuda Leib Analik (attended by several dozen students from the town and surrounding localities). Girls could enrol in the Beit Yaakov school.

The political scene was dominated by the Orthodox Agudath, whose members included the local rabbi and sub-rabbi. A branch of the “Mizrachi” Orthodox Zionist Organisation and its youth group HeHalutz HaMizrachi were founded in Myszyniec on the initiative of Zeev Jerushalmi (Jeruzalimski), the owner of a small oil factory. There was also a cell of the General Zionists in the town, as well as local branches of Poale Zion and Poale Zion-Left. Zionist-leaning young people were members of local units of HeHalutz and HeHalutz Hatzair. Several libraries and a drama club were established in Myszyniec by Zionist activists.

After the outbreak of World War II, a large number of local Jews fled east, to the Soviet-occupied territories (including Slonim in Nowogródzkie Province). They shared the fate of the local Jewish communities after the area was seized by the Germans in 1941. Many of the Jews who decided to remain in Myszyniec were murdered by the Germans at the very beginning of World War II. The rest were deported to ghettos in other towns.

The Description

The Jewish cemetery in Myszyniec was established in the first half of the 19th century. Beforehand, the local Jews had buried their dead in nearby Ostrołęka. The necropolis was established on the eastern side of the road to Pełty, at today’s Most Kopański Street, ca. 1.2 kilometres northwest of the Market Square. Before World War II, the cemetery was surrounded with a wooden fence. A two-room wooden building stood at the entrance to the necropolis. It probably served as the flat of the Polish caretaker and his family and was additionally used as a pre-burial house.

The cemetery was destroyed during the German occupation and continued to fall into decline in the post-war decades. In the 1960s, there were still at least several dozen tombstones preserved on the area of the necropolis. They were gradually removed from the site, and the cemetery itself started to serve as a sand mine. The extraction of sand resulted in the devastation of many graves, with human bones scattered around the area. All visible traces of the cemetery have disappeared and a forest has overgrown the site. An electricity line runs through the former premises of the necropolis. It is impossible to make out the boundaries of the burial area.

Thanks to the financial support of Aharon Shachal, a descendant of Jews from Myszyniec, a masonry monument was erected on the edge of the necropolis, bearing a plaque with the Star of David and an inscription commemorating the former Jewish inhabitants of Myszyniec. The initiative was supported by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. The unveiling ceremony, accompanied by an official rededication of the cemetery, was held in September 2016.

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