Jewish Cemetery in Kazimierz Dolny (lapidarium)

On a wooded ravine slope on Czerniawy Street, about 950 m south-east of the Market Square, lies the new Jewish cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny. Its best-known feature is the lapidarium – a wall made of several hundred fragments of matzevot, split by a crack meant to convey the rupture of the Holocaust. It is a place of silence and remembrance for a community that helped shape the town for centuries.

Kuzmir – Jewish Kazimierz

The first records of Jews in Kazimierz date from 1406. In Yiddish the town was called Kuzmir, and in the 19th century Rebbe Yechezkiel Taub founded the Kuzmir Hasidic dynasty here. In 1921 the town had 1,382 Jewish residents, 41% of the population. In 1940 the Germans set up a ghetto holding about 2,000 people; in March 1942 it was liquidated and its inhabitants deported to the ghetto in Opole Lubelskie. Most of the Jews of Kazimierz were murdered in 1942 in the German extermination camp at Bełżec.

Two cemeteries

The older cemetery on Lubelska Street was destroyed by the Germans at the start of the war – today it is a school sports ground, and fragments of matzevot can be seen in its stone wall. The new cemetery on Czerniawy Street was founded in 1851 when the old one was full; the land was donated to the community by Motek Herzberg. The site was fenced and a funeral house was built, and before 1939 the cemetery covered about 1.5 ha. During the war the Germans carried out executions here and used the gravestones to pave squares and streets, including the courtyard of the Reformed Franciscan monastery occupied by the gendarmerie. The cemetery was formally closed in 1959.

The cracked wall

In 1984, on the initiative of the local Society for the Protection of Historic Monuments, the Vistula Museum and the heritage conservator, several hundred gravestones recovered in the town were brought back to the cemetery. In 1986 they were built into the lapidarium designed by architect Tadeusz Augustynek; the municipality notes that the first matzevot were dug out of the ground as early as the 1970s. The wall alludes to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and the fissure running through its middle symbolises the destruction of the community. According to the ESJF survey, the lapidarium holds about 600 fragments of matzevot, and 25 gravestones still stand on the slope – some probably in their original places. The oldest dates from 1851, the most recent from 1939.

What to see

• The lapidarium – the monumental cracked wall; up close you can make out Hebrew inscriptions and carved motifs.
• Individual matzevot standing among the trees on the slope.
• A stone plaque commemorating the victims of the Holocaust by the car park.
• Remains of foundations near the road – probably of a former ohel.

The cemetery is listed in the heritage register of the Lublin Province and owned by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. The site is unfenced and overgrown with forest, which is why the ESJF rates securing it as urgent.

Tripto tips

The cemetery is unfenced and free to visit. Allow 20–30 minutes; the walk from the Market Square takes about a quarter of an hour, partly uphill. The ground is wooded and sloping and the paths get slippery after rain, so pushchairs and wheelchairs may struggle. Please be quiet and respectful; following Jewish custom, visitors leave small stones on the graves rather than flowers. Combine the walk with the former synagogue in the town centre.