The regulation was confirmed for the town itself in 1768 by its erstwhile owner, Czersk Alderman Onufry Bieliński. Despite the official ban, first Jews started to settle in Karczew as early as during the reign of King Stanisław August Poniatowski. The local Jewish community was established in the final years of the existence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, before 1794. The policy of the Duchy of Warsaw and later the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland) was aimed at encouraging followers of Judaism to leave the countryside and settle in towns and trading settlements. In 1819, there were almost 400 Jews living in Karczew, which constituted 40% of the total population. The local synagogue supervision also had jurisdiction over a number of smaller Jewish centres, including Wiązowna, Minsk, Parysów, Osieck, and Sobienie (1822). The community of Jews in Karczew was quickly growing in size – a quarter of a century later, the town already boasted 800 Jewish residents (47%). However, the share of Jews in the total population started to decrease the second half of the 19th century – in 1900, they made up only 27% of all 4,000 residents. This may have been due to their migration to nearby Otwock, which was experiencing a period of rapid development and was much better connected with Warsaw. Around that time, the Karczew community already owned a synagogue located in today’s Warszawska Street, a mikveh, a yeshiva, and a cemetery.

In the reborn Polish state, Jews constituted around a fourth of the whole population of Karczew. The Hasidic movement had begun to gain ground in the town even before the establishment of the Second Republic of Poland. In the interwar period, the town was the seat of the Modzitzer Rebbe (who was also a well-known and respected author of nigunim – religious songs without lyrics). Trade and craft remained the traditional occupations of the majority of Karczew Jews, most of whom lived in the town centre.

The final chapter in the history of the Karczew Jewish community opened with the invasion of the town by the Wehrmacht in mid-September 1939. In October 1940, the Germans established a ghetto in the town. Its population comprised ca. 700 Jews. In January of the same year, the occupation authorities started to enforce the policy of the Warsaw District of the General Government, according to which the Jewish population was to be concentrated in a smaller number of larger ghettos. The prisoners of the Jewish quarter in Karczew were therefore deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, where they shared the fate of its remaining residents – most of them were killed in the Nazi German death camp in Treblinka. Those who were not transported to Warsaw were imprisoned in the forced labour camp in Karczew, established in July 1941. They performed dredging works on the Jagodzianka riverbed. The labour camp was finally liquidated by the Germans in 1943.

The Description

The Jewish cemetery in Karczew was probably founded in the 19th century. It was located on a large, sandy hill (dune) at today’s Otwocka Street. Even before World War II, the necropolis was located outside built-up area. During the occupation, the cemetery became a site of mass executions carried out by the Germans, who also used it to bury the bodies of people who died or were killed in the ghetto and in the local labour camp. The necropolis itself was vandalised, with the occupier pulling out matzevot and using them to reinforce riverbanks. The cemetery continued to fall into decline in the post-war period. It remained unused since the end of the armed conflict and was eventually formally closed by the resolution of the provincial administration in 1964. Three years after WWII, ca. 200 victims murdered in the Marpe sanatorium in Otwock were exhumed and buried in Karczew. In 1999, in the process of property restitution, ownership of the 1.7-hectare plot (its original area used to amount to 1.86 ha) was taken by the Jewish Religious Community in Warsaw.

The year 2002 saw the foundation of the Committee for the Remembrance of the Jews of Otwock and Karczew (Polish: Komitet Pamięci Żydów Otwockich i Karczewskich). It was a social initiative whose activities focused on various activities helping protect the Jewish cemeteries in Otwock and Karczew from further devastation. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Karczew necropolis was fenced thanks to the efforts of the Warsaw Religious Community and the municipal authorities. Funds for the purpose were donated, among others, by the US Commission for American Heritage Abroad. The fence – which in part consists of steel slats on a concrete base and partly of a stone wall – was designed by Jan Fudala, an architect from Sandomierz. A plaque commemorating Holocaust victims from Karczew was placed at the entrance gate. In addition, an ohel was built over the grave of Avraham Yehoshua Heshel, son of Mordechai Twersky, tzaddik in Loyew and Chudniv (died in 1914).

In 2010, approximately 430 tombstones were recorded in the cemetery, including fragments of matzevot, supporting stones, and grave copings. The oldest tombstone dates back to 1876 and commemorates Pinchas, son of Shmuel. There are ca. 100 stones with legible inscriptions. An unspecified number of matzevot has been covered by the moving dune. Most of the tombstones at the site have the shape of a typical matzeva with a semi-circular top, but there are also monuments in the form of obelisks, stelae, columns, or broken tree trunks. The majority of the stones bear Hebrew inscriptions. There are also some epitaphs in Polish and Russian, though they usually appear alongside the Hebrew version.

It is possible that the cemetery in Karczew was also the burial site of patients from the sanatoriums in Otwock and for Jewish migrants from Russia. Among the epitaphs indicating the provenance of the deceased, there are slabs mentioning Baku, Brest, Kyiv, Lublin, Otwock, Pinsk, Warsaw, Vinnytsia, and Żelechów. The cemetery is the resting place of rabbis and members of Hasidic dynasties: Pinchas, son of Shmuel – a dayan from Karczew; Yitzhak Yaakov, son of Moshe – rabbi from Nadarzyn; Shlomo Zalman Kronen […] – son of Mordechai, a rabbi. The matzeva of Sara Bejla, daughter of Simcha Bunem, should also probably be included in this group, as her father was most likely a rabbi in Otwock.

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