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This project seeks to collect all of the Jewish families from the town of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Poland also known as Kalwarja Zebrzdowska, Kalwarja Zebrzydoska, Kalwaria.
Gesher Galicia-Kalwaria Zebrzydowska
History of the Jewish Community
Background
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska (Polish: [kal%CB%88varja zɛbʐɨˈdɔfska]) is a town in southern Poland with 4,429 inhabitants (2007 estimate). As of 1999, it is situated in Lesser Poland or Małopolska. Previously, the town was administered within the Voivodeship of Bielsko-Biała (1975–1998).
The first record of Jews in Kalwaria was found in a work of a Jewish historian, Majer Bałaban: Dzieje Żydów w Galicji i Rzeczypospolitej Krakowskiej w latach 1772–1868 (History of Jews in Galicia and the Republic of Cracow in the years 1772-1868). The author mentions a Jew, Nachman (surname is unknown), delivering money and food to Jews from Cracow, imprisoned by members of the Bar Confederation. Yet, there is no verification of the fact in other sources.
The beginning of the settlement of Jews in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska is said to take place in the mid-19th century. On 20 June, 1789, Stanisław Staszic records: The town without Jews doesn’t stink, is fairly clean, but destitute, the people are impoverished and – like the Minorites – finding fault in faith.
Earlier, Jews were not allowed to settle in the town because of its role in the cult of Mary. Thus, they lived mainly in the neighbouring Lanckorona and the adjacent villages: Harbutowice, Stryszów, Zakrzew, Zebrzydowice, and Brody. There were probably some isolated cases of Jews living in Kalwaria. In 1848, they were given permission to settle permanently in the town. Since that time, a systematic growth of the Jewish population in Kalwaria is observed. In 1870, there were 219 Jews living there, in 1880 – 269, in 1890 – 428, in 1900 – 444, and in 1910 – 521[1.2] , which constituted about 28% of the whole population. The Jews were the largest minority in the town (beside Ukrainians and Hungarians).
At first, Jews settled mainly in the market square and at the adjacent roads, because only Christians were allowed to live in the vicinity of the Monastery. The first brick houses in Kalwaria, which diversified the town’s landscape of wooden buildings, were owned by the Jews. They were predominantly small traders and craftsmen. Some of them traded in the market square on market days or took their products to markets in the neighbouring localities.
Growth of Kalwaria
With the demographic and economic growth of Kalwaria, to which the appearance of furniture industry and the construction of the Cracow-Chabówka railroad (1984) greatly contributed, it started to function as a local trade and crafts centre. Jews (e.g. Icchak Natowitz) played a major role in this process, by financing local carpenters and lending them the materials needed to produce furniture, which were later transported to storehouses in Cracow. 
- They also owned carpenter’s shops, in which they employed local workers, who couldn’t make a living from agriculture in the mountainous area owning a small piece of land with infertile soil. In order to promote furniture products, every summer the Jewish merchants organised a furniture exhibition, which became very popular. Clients were coming not only from Galicia, but also from the annexed territories of the other occupants. Christian craftsmen made attempts at gaining independence from the Jewish capital, but they were usually unsuccessful. It produced tensions between local and Jewish residents.
- Anti-Semitic mood had its culmination in 1898, when, on 26th May – the 100th anniversary of the birth of Adam Mickiewicz – struggles between the emperor’s gendarmes and the enraged crowd took place. Christians were aroused by the fact that not everybody lit up their houses the evening before celebrations, to pay tribute to the bard.
- The events from Kalwaria had wide repercussions and the propaganda of a “war with Jews” spread all around the Austrian annexed territory. In many locations, crowds were smashing up Jewish shops and inns and attacking Jews. The authorities punished such acts of mob law with sentences to many years in prison.
Jewish population in Kalwaria
With the growth of Jewish population in Kalwaria and the neighbouring villages, a problem with organising a centralised religious life showed up. Pieces of information about the first rabbi, Elkanan Shmuel Wolf, date to as early as 1843.
- Jews were using establishments in the neighbouring Brody until a synagogue and a mikvah was built. Yet, up till 1919, the community from Kalwaria didn’t have a legal status, because – in order for the governor in Lviv to grant such a status – the community would have to own a cemetery, which it didn’t.
- Establishing a Jewish necropolis in the vicinity of a religious cult centre met with strong resistance from the Catholics. As no consensus was reached, the Jews from Kalwaria joined the kahal in Zator – the only independent one in the municipality of Wadowice.
- An agreement was made that the religious council would comprise the same number of Jews from Zator and Kalwaria. The sittings of the kahal were to be held alternately in the two towns, but the office of the kahal’s chairman was reserved exclusively for the residents of Zator. A specific legal situation was produced as a result of the Austrian government having created the municipality of Oświęcim.
- Kalwaria was incorporated in the Wadowice municipality and Zator – in the Oświęcim municipality. The kahal from Zator and the municipality of Kalwaria, which constituted its part, were subject to the starost of Oświęcim when faith issues were concerned, whereas in other socio-administrative matters, the Jews from Kalwaria were dependent on the starost of Wadowice . It gave rise to several complications hindering the functioning of the community.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of founding a cemetery was brought up again. A parcel of land was purchased and a fence erected around it. After the demolition of the parcel by unknown perpetrators, the idea was abandoned and the dead continued to be buried in the Wadowice cemetery, in line with the agreement to transport the dead from Kalwaria to Wadowice. The majority of Jews in Kalwaria were Hassidic, mainly the followers of the tzadik from Bobowo and Nowy Sącz. Only a few sent their children to secular schools in Cracow and Vienna .
Interwar period
During the inter-war period, the Jewish community in Kalwaria was still developing. In 1935, it constituted 25% of the whole population. Jewish houses were situated in the central parts of the town and were distinguished by their richness. Jews related to Catholics mainly as traders and artisans. The majority of them were small traders and took on such jobs as those of carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, glaziers, lawyers, and doctors. In 1939, a few Jewish representatives managed to get into the Town Council. Yet, economic and nationalistic tensions could be sensed. In the years 1920-1921, anti-Semitic acts took place in the surrounding villages, during which peasants robbed Jewish houses and shops.
Some of the Jews moved to Kalwaria following that event, but there was no peace for them in the town either. Hooligans regularly attacked stall-keepers and stole their possessions. The Jewish youth – with the approval of the authorities – organised armed patrols to fend off the offenders.
Another manifestation of anti-Semitism was in the case of the copy of a painting from the side nave of the monastery of Kalwaria. It was alleged to portray a ritual murder by Jews in Sandomierz in 1753. The painting aroused many controversies among the Jewish community, but it was very popular among the local people and pilgrims visiting the monastery during church fairs. In spite of frequent pleas from the side of the local kahal’s representatives, the controversial piece was not taken down. To substantiate the decision, the extraterritoriality status of a sacral object, based on the 1925 concordat of Poland with the Holy See, was invoked. The painting was taken down only in the sixties, on the directive of the cardinal Karol Wojtyła.
The eve of WW11
On the eve of World War II, the Jewish population in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska was about 700. On 1 September 1939, almost everybody left the town, in spite of the approaching Sabbath, and headed to the east. Eighty percent of the refugees returned after a couple of days only to find their houses entrusted to their Catholic neighbours and thoroughly plundered. On the decision of the occupying authorities, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska became part of the General Government. Soon, Jews from other Little Poland towns and villages started to appear, in hope of finding shelter. In July and August 1940, a few hundred Jews where brought in from Cracow.
Local Judenrat, established in autumn 1939, organised a kitchen for the children of the poorest displaced Jews. A tradesman, Baruch Rand, became the chair of the Judenrat.
The policy of the occupying authorities was directed towards a gradual limiting of the Jewish rights and exterminating Jewish people, who were immediately evicted from their flats overlooking the market square, Jagiellońska Street and Krakowska Street.
- The synagogue was converted to barracks and all its furniture and fittings were burnt.
- The Jews were forbidden to show themselves in the streets, except for two fixed hours of the day.
- Moreover, food coupons were introduced and Jews were banned to trade with peasants. Yet, the ban was commonly broken.
- In the summer 1940, Germans started transporting Jews, aged 16 and older, to slave labour camps.
- Transports took place during the following year and did not include women and children. The slave workers were directed to the camp in Pustkowie, near Dębica and to the work camp “Julag No. 1” in Kraków-Płaszów.
The date of the final annihilation of the Jewish community in Kalwaria was 22 August, 1942, when, at 5 a.m., on the order of the town’s occupying commander, all the Jews were to show up in the market square with hand baggage.
Escorted by soldiers and administrators of the neighbouring villages, they were displaced to a temporary camp in Skawina, 14 miles away from Kalwaria. There was an assembly point in a local school where Germans made a selection.
Old people, children and the ill were executed in the nearby woods, Podbory, and the bodies buried on the spot. They were exhumed after the war and transported to a Jewish cemetery in Cracow. The rest was transported to the extermination camp in Bełżec. The only survivor was Lea Petzenbaum. The last record of the Jews from Kalwaria comes from 3 September, 1942, when they were seen transported through Płaszów.
After the removal of Jews from the town, their personal chattels were sold for a song in great quantities, and the houses – regarded as “deserted” – were handed over to the administration of the municipality.
Only 10 Jews from Kalwaria survived the war (1.5%), of which the majority emigrated. The Jewish community did not regenerate in the town after the war.
After World War II
The town's economic development largely relied on the expansion of its furniture manufacturing and woodcraft industry, shoemaking, as well as a growing number of pilgrims to its religious complex.
Pope John Paul II made several visits to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska on the pilgrimages he made to his homeland Poland. It was at the monastery of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska that Pope John Paul II repeated the words of his motto:
"Totus tuus ego sum, et omnia mea tua sunt. Accipio te in mea omnia. Praebe mihi cor tuum, Maria." ("I belong entirely to you, and all that I have is yours. I take you for my all. O Mary, give me your heart").
According to his Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae he borrowed the motto from the Marian consecrating prayer found in the book True Devotion to Mary by Saint Louis de Montfort.
Pope John Paul II once recalled how as a young seminarian he "read and reread many times and with great spiritual profit" some writings of Saint Louis de Montfort and that:
"Then I understood that I could not exclude the Lord's Mother from my life without neglecting the will of God-Trinity"
In 1987, Henryk Górecki composed a choral piece (Totus Tuus Op. 60) to celebrate Pope John Paul II's third pilgrimage to his native Poland that summer.[3] While the motet opens with the same words as the apostolic motto, the piece actually uses a poem by Maria Boguslawska for its text.
Monastry
With a vision while viewing the neighbouring hills and valleys from the Castle of Lanckorona, on 1 December 1602, Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, the Voivode of Kraków commissioned the construction of a calvary, i.e. Roman Catholic monastery and the trails of the Passion of Christ modeled on the Calvary outside the city walls of Jerusalem.
The town takes its name from the monastery that was constructed on the hills neighbouring Lanckorona and the last name of its founder Zebrzydowski. The town of Zebrzydów was established in 1617 in order to house the growing number of pilgrims visiting the Roman Catholic site of worship. The town rights were expanded and the town remapped by Jan Zebrzydowski in 1640, gaining the name Nowy Zebrzydów (New Zebrzydów).
In 1715, the town suffered the effects of a large fire and was subsequently rebuilt by Józef Czartoryski, its owner. The Czartoryski family Palace was built in 1729–1731. In the 1980s, it was rebuilt and remastered into the current seminary.
The Habsburg Austrian Empire annexed the town as part of its invasion of Poland during the First Partition of Poland in 1772. The Austrian administration changed the name to "Kalwaria". In 1887, Jan Kanty Brandys became the owner of the town and at around 1890 the name Kalwaria Zebrzydowska was adopted.
In 1896, the town lost its town rights due to a decision by the governing Austrian authorities. The construction of St. Joseph's Church began in 1905. The town returned to Poland in 1919 with the end of World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles by Roman Dmowski on behalf of the Polish Republic on 28 June 1919 in Paris. The town rights were restored in 1934 by a decision of the Polish government.
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska is twinned with:
- Lithuania Kalvarija in Lithuania
- Germany Hamelin in Germany