Galicia: The Shtetls of Mitteleuropa

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In 1772, the first partition of Poland placed the Jews of Galicia inside a paradox that would define the following hundred and forty-six years of their history. Emperor Joseph II, whose Edict of Toleration in 1781 granted Jews civil equality with other Habsburg subjects, simultaneously imposed Germanisation: the 1787 surname patent required all Jews to adopt permanent German family names. This is how the Galician lineages of Silberman, Goldberg and Weiss came into being — names that today help genealogists trace family lines through imperial archives. Habsburg tolerance had clear limits: Galician Jewry was at once emancipated and classified, protected by law and measured by its economic utility to the Crown. The first half of the nineteenth century brought gradual urbanisation. Jews moved from shtetls to Lwów, Kraków, Tarnów and Rzeszów, opened counting houses, printing presses and schools. In parallel, Hasidism took root and flourished in the Galician countryside with an intensity found nowhere else in Europe. Elimelech of Leżajsk gave the Galician dynasties a distinct theology — the Rebbe as intermediary between the human and the divine, the gravitational centre of shtetl life. His disciples and their disciples founded successive courts: Bobov in Bobowa, Belz by the river Biała, Sanz in Nowy Sącz, Ropshitz in Ropczyce. By the early twentieth century, western Galicia was home to dozens of active Hasidic dynasties, each with its own liturgical tradition, dress, melodies and theology. The year 1918 — the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the incorporation of Galicia into reborn Poland — brought a new political reality. The interwar period saw a flowering of Jewish cultural institutions in Kraków: Yiddish theatres, newspapers, sports clubs, secular and religious schools operating side by side. Jewish Kazimierz, Stradom and Szeroka Street were a centre of urban Jewish life recognised across Central Europe. Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought that world to an abrupt end. Western Galicia came under German occupation; the east was initially Soviet, then German from 1941. In 1942, Aktion Reinhardt swept across the whole of Galicia. Bełżec, a death camp constructed specifically to murder the Jews of the Lublin district and Galicia, received transport after transport. Estimates place the number of victims at Bełżec above four hundred and eighty thousand — the vast majority Galician Jews. Local communities that had numbered thousands were destroyed within one or two weeks of each deportation action. Fewer than five per cent of Galicia's pre-war Jewish population survived.

Galicia was, in its essence, the country of Hasidism. No other part of Europe generated in so short a time so many parallel dynasties with their own durable traditions. Bobov — the dynasty founded in Bobowa in the mid-nineteenth century by Shlomo Halberstam — became known for its liturgical music and for making Torah accessible to ordinary people. The Bobov community today numbers more than a hundred thousand families in New York and Antwerp; each carries a prayer tradition that took its form on the Galician plains. Belz — one of the foremost Galician courts — was for decades synonymous with conservative halachic rigour combined with a profound emphasis on prayer. The Rebbe of Belz drew pilgrims from across Galicia and the Congress Kingdom; the town of Bełz became the axis around which religious life in the region turned. Sanz, that is to say Nowy Sącz, was the seat of the Halberstam dynasty — a separate branch from Bobov — whose Rebbe Chaim Halberstam authored the Divrei Chaim, one of the foundational halachic texts of the nineteenth century. Before the war, Nowy Sącz had numerous houses of prayer, several cheder schools and a yeshiva. Ropshitz — from Ropczyce — was a dynasty famous for mystical humour and the teaching that laughter serves to illuminate the divine countenance. The Rebbe Nafula of Ropshitz became in Jewish folklore an almost trickster figure, quoted in hundreds of anecdotes. Alongside Hasidism, secular and Mitnaggedic life thrived. Kraków's Jewish community ran an academy, organised theatre, published a press. Galician Zionists were active participants in the pan-European movement. Bundists in Tarnów had their own structures, cooperatives and libraries. This was not one world — it was a dozen parallel Jewish universes that in 1939 all existed simultaneously on the same soil.

When in September 1939 the Wehrmacht entered Kraków and Tarnów, Galician Jews found themselves under General Government administration. The first months brought the seizure of property, forced labour, eviction from their homes. Ghettos — in Kraków, Tarnów, Rzeszów and dozens of smaller towns — were established gradually: fences, Kennkarten, movement restricted to those with passes. In 1942, the machinery of Aktion Reinhardt ran at full capacity. Bełżec, opened in March 1942, was the first destination. The initial transports took Lublin Jews; from spring to autumn 1942, the railway delivered Jews from across Galicia — Lwów, Kraków, Tarnów, Przemyśl, hundreds of small towns. In Tarnów alone, the deportation action of June 1942 seized more than twenty thousand people; most were murdered at Bełżec within days. The Kraków Judenrat attempted to negotiate quotas, to postpone deportations — without success. The Kraków ghetto was liquidated in March 1943; those who passed selection for the camp at Płaszów faced another selection a year later. Auschwitz-Birkenau, forty kilometres from Kraków, received Galician Jews in the final phase of extermination. It is estimated that of the eight hundred thousand Jews living in Galicia within the borders of the Second Polish Republic, between thirty and forty thousand survived — fewer than five per cent.

Today, fragments of Galician Jewish life survive. Kraków's Kazimierz has the Old Synagogue, the Remu Synagogue with its pre-Reformation cemetery and the grave of Moses Isserles. Tarnów retains a reconstructed bimah interior and memorial plaques at every address that still stands. Bobowa has a synagogue restored by the Jewish community in the 1990s and the ohel of the Rebbes at the cemetery — a destination for Bobover Hasidim from New York and Antwerp, chiefly on the yahrzeit of the Rebbes. Leżajsk, where Elimelech of Leżajsk is buried, is a pilgrimage site of a particular kind: several thousand Hasidim arrive each year at Purim to pray at the ohel. Bełżec — the former death camp, today the Museum-Memorial Site — opened a new exhibition in 2004. The camp grounds are covered by a landscape sculpture of thousands of furrows symbolising mass graves. Entry to the museum requires composure — this is not a conventional exhibition building but a space designed to impose silence.

Tarnów

25,000 Żydów pre-1939

Bobowa

700 Żydów pre-1939

Łańcut

3,000 Żydów pre-1939

Leżajsk

3,000 Żydów pre-1939

Sandomierz

2,500 Żydów pre-1939

The "Roots of Galicia" itinerary runs eight days across two voivodeships. Day one: arrival in Kraków, orientation in Kazimierz, evening walk through the Jewish quarter. Days two and three: Kraków — Old Synagogue, Remu, the Judenrat, Eagle Pharmacy, Płaszów, Schindler. Day four: Bobowa — synagogue, cemetery, dynastic ohel; Nowy Sącz — kirkut, former Jewish district. Day five: Tarnów — kirkut with surviving matzevot, bimah, ghetto streets, museum. Day six: Rzeszów and Leżajsk — ohel of Elimelech, cemetery. Day seven: Bełżec — museum and memorial site, time for prayer and silence. Day eight: return via Przemyśl or Rzeszów to the airport. Mercedes V-Class throughout; accommodation in Kraków (nights 1–3) and Tarnów or Rzeszów (nights 4–7). The itinerary involves four to five hours of driving daily, arranged so that elderly family members have time to rest at the hotel before evening.