In the 16th and the 17th century, the Jewish community consisted of several dozen families at most. It was not until the Saxon era that the local Jews gained a stable economic and financial status, partially thanks to the privilege granted by King Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki (1670). The Ciechanów kehilla became one of the largest in northern Mazovia and, by the 1850s, had gained jurisdiction over the communities of Makowa, Mława, and Płońsk.

After the Third Partition of Poland, the new Prussian authorities abolished the feudal privileges of towns and guilds. As a result, Jews were given the right to freely settle in towns, buy property, and engage in all crafts. The new regulations kickstarted mass migration of Jews from villages to towns, a phenomenon encouraged by the government of the Duchy of Warsaw and later the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland). In 1790, only 240 Jews lived in Ciechanów. By 1808, this number had grown to 1,200, and by 1857 – to as many as 3,300 people (67% of the total population). The local Jewish population was concentrated in the area of the Market Square and the Green Square, as well as the streets Żydowska, Warszawska, Zakroczymska (where the synagogue was located), Pułtuska, and Tylna. The Jews of Ciechanów worked mainly in trade and crafts (shoemakers, tailors, bakers, furriers, butchers).

In the second half of the 19th century, Ciechanów became an important centre of Hasidism. In the years 1819–1875, it housed the court of rabbi and tzaddik Abraham Landau, known as Czechanower. He founded a yeshiva attended by the poor youth from the surrounding towns. Ciechanów also boasted around a dozen chadarim. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of first Zionist groups in the town. They collected money to support Jewish settlement in Palestine and sponsored an amateur theatre.

In the late 19th century, Jews started to constitute a gradually smaller percentage in the population of Ciechanów, which was partially due to the growing rate of migration of the Polish population from the countryside to towns. The first census held in reborn Poland, carried out in 1921, showed that Jews constituted 37% (4,400) of the 12,000 inhabitants of Ciechanów. On the eve of World War II, the share of Jews in the population decreased to 28% (4,700). During the interwar period, they continued to engage in their traditional professions. The town boasted the Jewish Merchants’ Association with 100 members, but most people working in trade were small shopkeepers and market sellers. Crafts played an equally significant role in the local economy. Most Jewish workshops were located in Żydowska Street, which was home to a whole host of small tailors, shoemakers, and boot makers. Petty craftsmen who did not have the means to pay for patents ran cottage businesses. Ciechanów boasted the entire gamut of Jewish political parties and associated cultural and educational organisations. The most popular of these were the Zionists (Mizrachi, Poale Zion), the socialist Bund, and the Orthodox Agudath.

After the outbreak of World War II, in October 1939, Ciechanów was incorporated into the Reich (East Prussia). The Jewish community suffered extreme repressions at the hand of the Germans. As in other towns in the region, some Jews were expelled to the General Government. A Judenrat (Jewish Council) was formed, Jews were forbidden to run businesses and obliged to work for the occupier. The autumn of 1940 saw the establishment of an open ghetto guarded by the Jewish police. The Germans embarked on a large-scale redevelopment of Ciechanów, which was to become the capital of the regency. In the process, they would gradually demolish the Jewish quarter and the destroy cemeteries. The liquidation of the Ciechanów Ghetto, whose population at one point reached 7,000 people, began in December 1941 with the deportation of 1,200 people. Their place was taken by Jews expelled from smaller centres in northern Mazovia (Dobrzyń, Raciąż, Żuromin, and Sierpc). The Jewish community was ultimately annihilated in November of the following year, when 1,500 Jews fit for work were deported to Upper Silesia and the rest were shot on the spot or transported first to the ghetto in Mława and then to the death camps in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The oldest Jewish cemetery in Ciechanów was probably founded in the 17th century near today’s intersection of 17 Stycznia, Tatarska, and Jesionowa streets. No trace of the necropolis has been preserved.

The second burial site, the so-called old Jewish cemetery in Ciechanów, was located around today’s Tylna and Zagumienna streets, northeast of the Market Square. It was established in 1771 on land ceded to the Jewish community by the town of Ciechanów. The elongated plot covered an area of over 0.3 hectare (for unknown reasons, it was not until 1797 that the first burial took place at the site). The cemetery filled up relatively quickly due the large size of the community. Following many months of efforts, ca. 1860 the Jewish community managed to purchase the square adjacent to the existing necropolis. In 1940, Jews secretly exhumed the remains of Tzaddik Abraham Rafael Landau (d. 1875) from the site and buried them in the new cemetery in Pułtuska Street. The Germans destroyed the old cemetery and used fragments of broken matzevot and soil from the necropolis to build pavements and raise the level of newly delineated streets. After the war, the area of the former cemetery was developed with residential buildings.

The Description

The new Jewish cemetery in Ciechanów was established in the late 19th century in today’s Gwardii Ludowej WRN Street, in the Aleksandrówka district, east of the city centre. This cemetery was also destroyed by the Germans during World War II. In the years 1939–1942, victims of the Holocaust were buried at the cemetery in unmarked graves. No tombstones have survived to the present day. In 1956, a stone monument in the shape of a stepped pyramid was erected in the cemetery. It is topped with the few surviving tombstones and bears an inscription in Polish and Yiddish.

Właściciel praw autorskich do opisu: Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN.