Lublin Region: Jerusalem of the Kingdom and Heart of the Annihilation

Zaplanuj heritage journey Heritage Journeys

Lublin was for centuries one of the most important centres of Jewish life in Poland. From the sixteenth century, the Lublin Academy — a bet midrash — drew scholars from across Central Europe in the Renaissance period. The Council of Four Lands — the Vaad Arba Aratzot, the central organ of Jewish self-government in Poland — for two hundred years (1580–1764) met every two years in Lublin or Jarosław, establishing halacha, levying taxes and managing relations with the Polish Crown. Lublin was therefore not merely a commercial city but the juridical and intellectual centre of all Polish Jewry. The seventeenth century brought tragedy: the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648 reached the region; the community was repeatedly decimated by epidemics and fires and rebuilt each time. The nineteenth century — the Congress Kingdom under Russian control — brought gradual modernisation: Lublin's Jewish merchants traded with Odessa and Gdańsk, opened factories, sent children to universities in Berlin and Vienna. At the same time, in the countryside around Biłgoraj and Hrubieszów, shtetl life remained unchanged from one generation to the next. The interwar period was in Lublin the age of the Yeshiva. Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin — a Sejm deputy of the Polish Republic, the initiator of Daf Yomi studies (one folio of the Talmud daily across the whole community learning at the same pace) — opened on 24 June 1930 the Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin: the largest yeshiva in the world, with its own building, library, dining hall and dormitory for five hundred students. The building at 85 Lubartowska Street, erected with donations from Jews across the world, was an architectural marvel: a neo-Renaissance facade, a study hall lit by electric lamps. Shapiro designed a mode of learning that to this day shapes haredi yeshivot worldwide: Daf Yomi, the shared rhythm of study that enables Jews in Brooklyn and Bnei Brak to read the same folio of the Talmud on the same day. September 1939 ended that world. German forces entered Lublin on 18 September 1939. In 1940 the Lublin ghetto was pressed into the old town; in December 1940 it was formalised. In 1942 the Germans converted the former yeshiva building into a warehouse — after the war it was restored to academic use.

Pre-war Jewish Lublin was a city within a city. The district known as the Jewish Town gathered the streets of Szeroka, Złota and Rybna — narrow lanes surrounding a large synagogue and bet midrash. In the sixteenth century, the Maharshal — Rabbi Shlomo Luria, one of the greatest Polish poskim — taught here, composing Talmudic commentaries that are still cited in every serious halachic discussion. Twentieth-century Lublin had active secular circles: Bundists, Zionists, artists. Yiddish theatre operated on Lubartowska Street. The community ran a Jewish hospital, an orphanage, a library. The Jewish cemetery on Walecznych Street, one of the largest in Poland, holds gravestones from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Biłgoraj, a town of tanners, was where the young Isaac Singer grew up. Chełm had its own tradition: the town was famous for the folklore of the "wise men of Chelm", but behind that framework stood a real community of several thousand Jews with their own synagogue, yeshiva and Zionist movement.

Lublin became the headquarters of SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik — the commander of Aktion Reinhardt, the operation to murder all the Jews of the General Government. From his office in Lublin he coordinated the construction and operation of three death camps: Bełżec (March 1942), Sobibór (May 1942) and Treblinka (July 1942). A fourth facility on Lublin territory — Majdanek — functioned simultaneously as a concentration camp and extermination site. Together, these four places consumed between 1.7 and 1.9 million Jewish victims, primarily from the General Government. The Jews of Lublin were among the first deported: March–April 1942, to Bełżec. Of the thirty thousand Jews in Lublin in 1939, the majority were murdered within a few weeks. Sobibór, one hundred and fifty kilometres east of Lublin near the Ukrainian border, was the extermination site for Jews from Hrubieszów, Włodawa, Chełm and transports from Western Europe. On 14 October 1943 — the only successful armed uprising and mass escape from a death camp in the history of the Holocaust — eighty-seven prisoners escaped and survived the war. After the escape, the Germans immediately liquidated the camp, filling in the grounds and planting trees.

Majdanek, two kilometres from the centre of Lublin, is one of the best-preserved death camps in Poland — barracks, crematoria and gas chambers survived almost intact due to the rapid advance of the Red Army in July 1944. The domed mausoleum over the ashes of victims is a place for Kaddish. The Old Synagogue in Lublin is today home to the Grodzka Gate–NN Theatre Centre, an institution documenting Jewish Lublin. The former yeshiva building at 85 Lubartowska Street survived and today houses a higher medical school; Rabbi Shapiro's grave is preserved at the Jewish cemetery on Walecznych Street. Bełżec, eighty kilometres from Lublin, has a museum-memorial site opened in 2004. Sobibór, following the 2014 discovery and subsequent archaeological excavations, opened a new memorial pavilion in 2020.

Zamość

12,000 Żydów pre-1939

The "Aktion Reinhardt and Lublin Roots" itinerary runs six to eight days. Day one: arrival in Lublin, Old Town, Grodzka Gate Centre. Day two: deeper Lublin — former yeshiva, Jewish cemetery, Majdanek. Day three: Zamość (synagogue, cemetery, Renaissance Old Town with the former Jewish quarter). Day four: Bełżec — memorial site, time for silence. Day five: Sobibór — museum, camp grounds, time for silence. Day six: Chełm or Hrubieszów for families with roots there. Day seven: return to Lublin or Warsaw. Mercedes V-Class throughout; base in Lublin. The itinerary includes three sites of extermination — the scholar prepares a separate narrative for each.