The Jewish Cemetery
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Situated on Okopowa Street, the cemetery was established between 1799 and 1806. It was originally called the Gesia Street cemetery. The first of the 250,000 grave markers in the cemetery date from around the time of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw. Many important rabbis, writers, actors, industrialists, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers and others are buried here.
This is one of the very few Jewish cemeteries in Poland still in use today. Unlike many other Jewish cemeteries, including the Wincentego Street cemetery east of the Vistula, the Germans did not destroy the Okopowa Street cemetery because, as it was in central Warsaw, they did not need to use the tombstones to lay roads in the vicinity.
The cemetery is heavily overgrown in places. The Citizens Committee for the Protection of Jewish Cemeteries and Monuments of Culture in Poland has however looked after it since 1981, restoring a number of graves. In 1992 the Gesia Jewish Cemetery Foundation was created, "whose aim is to prevent the devastation of graves and oheles [memorial plaques] of outstanding rabbis and maintain the cemetery in the right order".
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| Entry ticket to the Okopowa Street cemetery |
The cemetery itself was not part of the ghetto for the whole period 1940-1943. When it was part of the ghetto it proved a convenient point to smuggle in food. When it was not people had to obtain a special pass to carry their dead across to it. After the first year of the war mass graves for those who had died of starvation or disease became increasingly common, both here and in the grounds of a nearby sports club. During the Great Deportation many members of youth movements who had escaped from trains to Treblinka used the cemetery to re-enter the ghetto, and during the Ghetto Uprising it was used to escape from the ghetto. Some of the graves were damaged in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
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Model of the synagogue, mortuary and office of the cemetery (right). These buildings, dating from 1877, were destroyed by the Germans on 15th May 1943, at the end of the Ghetto Uprising. The Gesia Jewish Cemetery Foundation hope to replace them
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The grave of Adam Czerniaków, head of the Judenrat. He committed suicide on 23rd July 1943 at the start of the Great Deportation (left)
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A detail from the Janusz Korczak memorial (right)
Three views of a memorial to children murdered by the Nazis (below). Nearly 1,500,000 children were killed in the Holocaust
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"Grandma Masha had twenty grandchildren Grandma Hana had eleven only I survived." Jacek Eisner |
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