The Town. Kielce was a city holy to the Poles — a seat of the Kraków bishopric, ringed by churches, a cathedral and a priests’ seminary — and for centuries it was closed to Jews. A privilege of King Zygmunt I in 1535 let the townsmen bar Jews from the gates; in 1761 the Bishop of Kraków renewed the ban; and Jews who began to settle after 1832 were expelled again in 1847. Only after the failed Polish rising of 1863, when the Russians stripped the local powers, were Jews permitted to settle freely. In 1852 barely a hundred Jews lived among some three and a half thousand Christians, registering their births and burying their dead in nearby Checiny, on which the handful of Kielce Jews depended for every matter of the kehilla. From 1868 — when Jewish births were first recorded in the city and its Pakosz beis hachaim was opened — a kehilla rose with extraordinary speed, swelled by the Warsaw–Vienna railway: lime-kilns and brickworks, sawmills and tanneries grew up around it, and Kielce became the district capital. By the eve of the war some twenty-four thousand Jews lived there, near a third of the city — among the youngest of the great kehillos of Poland, of which its own son the historian Pinchas Cytron wrote that “the early-morning dew still sparkled upon its streets.”

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The first rav, crowned with the rabbinical crown when the community was founded, was R' Tuvia Gutman HaKohen, son of the ABD of Ostrowiec — a chossid of Kotzk whose yichus ran back to the Shach and the Rema; he was niftar in תרס״ב (1902) and lies in the Kielce beis hachaim. To his seat was called R' Moshe Nochum Yerushalimsky, one of the great poskim and meishivim of the generation, revered even by the Gerrer chassidim who held the reins of the kehilla; on Shabbos at shalosh seudos all the city’s lomdim would gather to his drashos, which ranged from the poskim to the Moreh Nevuchim and the Kuzari, and in 1910 he was sent as the district rabbonim’s delegate to the convention of rabbis in Petersburg. The crown of the kehilla was its great shul — built between 1901 and 1903 on land given by the gvir R’ Moshe Pfefer, its Aron Kodesh of marble steps and gilded keser, a beis medrash in one wing and the hall of the Achiezer chesed in the other — and about it stood battei midrash, chadarim, and the shtieblach of Ger and the rest.

Torah of the Town. For all its youth, Kielce became in its last decades a gathering-place of admorim — many driven in from the smaller towns by the front of the Great War, who found in the large city both parnassah and safety, and whose ohalim sanctified the cemetery of a place once held by Jews to be “impure.” The Chentshin court of the Chozeh of Lublin’s blood settled there — R’ Chaim Shmuel Horowitz, grandfather of the Aish Kodesh of Piaseczna, niftar in Kielce in 1916 and buried in the Chentshiner ohel. R’ Motele Twersky, the Rebbe of Kuzmir — of the Trisk and Chernobyl line — held his mystic court in the city, careful in taharah, his ohel too in the Pakosz beis hachaim. The Pińczów court of the Finkler family — R’ Chaim Meir Finkler, brother of R’ Hillel of Radoshitz — came at the war’s start; his grandsons R’ Pinchas, of Agudas Yisrael, and R’ Yitzchak, of the Mizrachi, divided the kehilla’s politics and its chadarim, the Yesodei Torah and the Yavneh. The Chmielnik rebbe of the Goldman house, of the Vorka line, and the Suchedniow and Rakow rebbes of the Rabinowicz house, who traced to the Yid HaKadosh of Przysucha — all made Kielce their seat. The kehilla’s record was set down by Pinchas Cytron in the Sefer Kielce (Tel Aviv, 1957).

The Churban. On the eve of the war some twenty-four thousand Jews lived in Kielce; with refugees driven in from Łódź and the west the number rose toward thirty thousand. On 31 March 1941 the German commander ordered a ghetto into the city’s poorest quarter — sealed behind a high fence over twenty-six streets and split by the Silnica river — and through the winter of 1941–42 typhus and starvation took many; in April 1942 the Germans seized and murdered those marked as “political.” Between 20 and 24 August 1942, in the days of Operation Reinhard, the ghetto was destroyed: more than twenty-one thousand Jews were driven to the wagons and deported to Treblinka, while the sick, the aged and the children were shot where they stood, many at the beis hachaim itself — murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי״ד. A “small ghetto” labor-camp of some two thousand held on at Stolarska and Jasna streets until, in 1943, its remnant was scattered to the slave-camps of Skarżysko, Starachowice, Pionki and Bliżyn; by mid-1943 Jewish Kielce was no more. And the wound did not close with the war: on ד׳ בתמוז — 4 July 1946 — a blood-libel rumor, a Polish boy’s false tale of a child held in the cellar of the Jewish committee at 7 Planty Street, loosed a mob of townsmen, steel-workers, soldiers and policemen upon the survivors gathered there, and forty-two Jews who had outlived Treblinka were murdered, הי״ד. The Kielce pogrom drove the broken remnant of Polish Jewry into flight, and the kehilla that had risen so swiftly came to its end.

The Town. Rovno — Rovne in Yiddish, Rivne in Ukrainian, Równe in Polish — stands in Volhynia, on the Ustya. It began as a village on the estates of the princes of Ostraha and took Magdeburg rights in 1507. The first notice of Yidden in the town comes from the Polish treasury records of 1569.

It was the roads that made it. The Kiev–Brisk highway was laid in 1850, the railway followed in 1870, and the Rovno–Vilna line in 1885 — and a town on the estates of princes became a junction, and the kehilla grew with it. The district carried Koretz and the towns around it.

The Vaad and the Charters. The kehilla is in the record of the Vaad Arba Aratzos: the Vaad required Ostraha to pay compensation to Mezritch, Polonne and Rovno for having laid the weight of its taxes upon them, and in 1740 the representatives of those kehillos were still arguing the matter with the heads of the Volhynia district before the treasury court at Radom.

In 1749 Prince Lubomirski confirmed the takanon of the chevra kadisha, by which every Yid paid the chevra six zloty a year and one more for burial. In 1765 Prince Stanisław Lubomirski granted the Yidden of Rovno a charter of rights which set the manner of choosing the kahal, the five gabbaim of the chevra kadisha — and the choosing of the rabbanim.

The Rav Who Built the Kloiz Out of His Own Pocket. In the second half of the eighteenth century the chair was held by R' Aharon ben Shmuel HaKohen, born in the town and of a wealthy house. He built the Alte Kloiz with his own money in 1760, and the public bathhouse with it.

At the close of the century sat R' Todros ben Tzvi, mechaber of Halacha Pesuka; and R' Yosef — Reb Yoske — the son-in-law of R' Aharon HaKohen, who was a talmid of the Maggid of Mezritch and wrote Yesodei Yosef on kabbalah. So the chair of Rovno passed from the man who built its kloiz to his own son-in-law, and the son-in-law came home from Mezritch.

The Rotenbergs, and the Chair in Its Last Generations. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the rabbanim and dayanim of Rovno came largely of the Rotenberg family, and they held it in one form or another until the churban: R' Shmuel (1844–1919), his son R' Chaim (1862–1927), and their kinsman R' Moshe Eliezer, who was murdered in the churban. הי"ד. The Volia quarter had a rav of its own — R' Shmuel Lifer, niftar 1885, and after him his son R' Chaim Yosef Lifer, murdered with the kehilla. הי"ד

And beside them, from 1885 until his petirah in 1914, sat R' Yitzchak Shlomo Yoel Sherman — among the founders of Yeshivas Al HaChaim in the town, and mechaber in kesavim of Beis Yishai and Pischei Shearim. He is the R' Yoel, av beis din of Rovno, who gave semicha at seventeen to R' Nochum Yehoshua Pitzenik, afterward the Rebbe of Berezne-Dombrovitz — whose shver would not be satisfied until the young man had a second semicha from R' Chaim of Brisk besides.

At Sherman's petirah the chair passed to his son-in-law R' Simcha Hertz of Ma-Yafis.

The Kehilla in Its Strength. Between the wars Rovno was a working kehilla with a full apparatus of its own: trade unions and Jewish banks, two mutual-aid societies, a free-loan fund and an insurance company; and beside them a hospital, an orphanage and a home for the aged, with a branch of TOZ. The old institutions of tzedakah and the new institutions of a modern city stood in the same streets.

The Churban. The Germans came in the summer of 1941. By the end of July hundreds had been murdered, among them public men and the educated; by the end of August, thousands. Property was seized and heavy ransoms laid on the kehilla. From the beginning of August the Yidden wore a white armband with a blue Magen David; on 19 September it was replaced by two yellow patches, one on the breast and one on the back.

A Judenrat was set up under Dr. Moshe Bergman, with the advocate Leon Sucharczuk as his deputy. Both of them took their own lives. Chaim Rassner, a Bundist out of Warsaw, was put in Bergman's place.

On 1 September 1941 the army handed parts of Ukraine to the civil administration of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine under Koch, and Koch set his offices in Rovno itself. It was at a meeting of Koch with the commanders of the SS and the police, about the end of October, that the murder of the Yidden of the town was settled.

On the 6th and 7th of November 1941 some seventeen thousand five hundred Yidden of Rovno were taken out to the Sosenki forest by the town and shot. הי"ד

About five thousand were left in the ghetto. In July 1942 they were put on trains to the forest near Kostopol, shot there, and thrown into the pits. Among those murdered were the pupils and the teachers of the Hebrew gymnasium of the town, whose end is set down in the memoirs of a son of Rovno's daughters.

What Remains. Most of the Yidden of Rovno who came through went up to Eretz Yisrael by way of Poland. The last shul in the town was closed by the authorities in 1957. Some five thousand names were carried from the municipal archive of Rovno to Yad Vashem and rendered into Hebrew in 2007 for the men and women of the town and their children after them.

The record of the kehilla stands in Pinkas HaKehillos, in the Rovno memorial book of 1956, and in the testimony of those who got out. A Jewish community lives in Rivne today. The Alte Kloiz that a rav built out of his own pocket in 1760 does not.

The Kehilla and its Rabbanim. Jews lived in Kutno, in central Poland between Warsaw and Łódź, from the early 1500s; by the eve of the churban the kehilla numbered some 6,400 souls. Its rabbinic seat was among the storied ones of Poland: R' Moshe Yekusiel Kaufman, son-in-law of the Magen Avraham, held it in the early 1700s; R' Moshe Yehuda Leib Zilberberg, the Zayis Raanan, held it before going up to Yerushalayim; and from תרכ"א (1861) it belonged to R' Yisrael Eliyahu Yehoshua Trunk — the Yeshuos Malko, one of the greatest poskim of Poland, whose seat passed to his son R' Moshe Pinchas and to his grandson R' Yitzchak Yehuda Trunk, the last Rav of Kutno, niftar in ניסן תרצ"ט on the very threshold of the war. In the beis hachaim of Kutno rest the Yeshuos Malko, R' Berel of Kutno — grandfather of R' Avraham of Ciechanow — and R' Berish Chassid of Kutno.

The Churban. The Germans took Kutno in September 1939; in 1940 the Jews of the town were driven into a ghetto on the grounds of the ruined Konstancja sugar factory at the town's edge, where hunger and typhus reigned; and in the spring of 1942 the kehilla was deported to the death camp of Chełmno and murdered, הי"ד. Seeded thin — for a later full pass.

The Town. Warsaw was the capital of Poland and the largest Jewish city of Europe: on the eve of the churban some 350,000 Jews and more — a third of the whole city — filled its quarters, from Nalewki and Muranów to Praga across the Vistula. Every stream of Polish Jewry ran through it: the great chasidishe courts kept their shtiblach in their hundreds, the misnagdim their botei medrash, and around them pressed everything the site's churban diaries will yet tell.

The Kehilla. Its rabbanus was first held, from תקפ"א (1821), by the Chemdas Shlomo, R' Shlomo Zalman Lipschitz, the first chief rav of the city. The kehilla of Warsaw was the metropolis of Torah-loyal Poland — its rabbanim and dayanim (among them, for some three decades, the dayan and moreh tzedek R' Pesachya Hornblass, the Pischei She'arim), its hundreds of shuls and shtiblach, its chadarim and Beis Yaakov schools, the seat of Agudas Yisrael of Poland and of the Orthodox press. To Warsaw the courts came in the wars' upheavals: the Imrei Emes of Ger held his court at its edge and moved into the city when the churban broke, and rebbes of the whole land — Aleksander, Strykov, Radomsk, Novominsk — lived, hid, or were buried within it.

Torah of the Town. The site's own cards gather in Warsaw: the Netziv was niftar in the city in תרנ"ג; Reb Chaim Brisker was buried in the Okopowa Street beis hachaim, a stop on the kever map; R' Aharon Tzvi Landa of Strykov drew fifty thousand to his levaya there; R' Yaakov Yitzchak Dan of Strykov was smuggled into the city and stood in the Ezras Torah of the ghetto rabbanim; R' Shlomo Chanoch of Radomsk הי"ד was brought in peril to kevurah in the ohel of the Novominsker Rebbe; Rav Menachem Ziemba הי"ד, the gaon of Warsaw, answered she’eilos from the ends of the earth from his house in Praga as a posek acharon, refusing every rabbanus for the counter of his iron shop; R' Dovid Bornsztain of Sochatchov הי"ד, the third Rebbe, lived hidden in the city his last two years — the first to warn the ghetto of the deportations, niftar 8 Kislev תש"ג and among the last brought to kevurah on Okopowa; and the Akeidas Yitzchok of Aleksander הי"ד stood his last two years in the ghetto, a crown in the dark. Among the chasidishe gedolim laid to rest in the Okopowa Street beis hachaim were the Sabba Kadisha of Radzymin and the Divrei Binah of Biala, beside the famed ohel of the Chemdas Shlomo, the city's first rav. And the churban diary of Warsaw — first of the Polish line — is told in full in the Churban section: the Warsaw diary ↗. And it was in this Warsaw that R' Itche Grodzinski, "the Chofetz Chaim of Warsaw," raised his network of Torah mosdos for the city's workers and baalei melacha — out of which grew the Litvish yeshiva Toras Chaim.

R' Yaakov Gesundheit, the Tiferes Yaakov was chosen rav of the city in תר"ל and removed by the government in תרל"ד, amid the quarrels between the chassidim and the misnagdim; after him no chief rav was appointed for Warsaw again.

The Churban. In November 1940 the Germans sealed the Warsaw ghetto — the largest of Europe, some 450,000 souls at its height behind the wall — eighty-three thousand dead of hunger, cold and typhus by the middle of תש"ב, per the count Yad Vashem keeps. From 22 July תש"ב (1942) the Great Deportation emptied it: some 265,000 Jews were sent in that summer to Treblinka and murdered — among them the gedolim this site mourns. On erev Pesach תש"ג the remnant rose in the ghetto revolt, and the Germans burned the ghetto to the ground house by house — Rav Menachem Ziemba, the gaon of Warsaw, fell al kiddush Hashem on its third day, and the Rebbe of Piaseczna, the Aish Kodesh, was carried to Trawniki and murdered there; the full record stands in the Warsaw churban diary. Of the largest kehilla of Europe there remained rubble and a beis hachaim — Hashem yikom damam. What remains of the kehilla in the living city — the Nożyk Shul, alone of the shuls of Warsaw left standing and still davening, the Okopowa beis hachaim with its two hundred thousand kevarim, the line of the wall set through the pavements — is recorded at the diary's close.

The Town. Lodz grew around its looms into the great industrial city of Congress Poland, and its Jews grew with it — weavers and factory hands, melamdim and magnates. On the eve of the Second World War some 223,000 Jews lived in Lodz, about a third of the whole city: one of the largest kehillos in Poland, second only to Warsaw. At the city's western edge lay the weaving town of Aleksander — seat of the Danziger court, second of the chasidishe courts of pre-war Poland.

The Kehilla. Over this roaring city of industry stood, for some forty years, a rav who belonged to the poor: R' Eliyahu Chaim Meisel, the legendary baal tzedakah, of the leaders of Polish Jewry, who drew the tzedakah of the magnates down to the cellars of the weavers and stood firmly against the maskilim and the winds of the age.

Torah of the Town. The rav’s beis din served a kehilla of hundreds of thousands; after his petirah in תרע"ב his grandson R' Eliezer Yitzchak Meisel stood among the rabbanim of the city and on its vaad harabbanim. The chasidishe shtieblach of Ger and her sisters filled the courtyards of the Jewish quarters beside the botei medrash of the misnagdim — Aleksander alone, the record tells, counting above a hundred shtiblach in the city under the Akeidas Yitzchok — and R' Dovid Bornsztain, the third Sochatchover Rebbe, held his court in the Lodz orbit, Pabianice, Kolumna and the city itself, with the Beis Avraham yeshiva in its streets, until the Germans of ת"ש broke into his house, beat him and sheared his beard, and his chassidim smuggled him in changed clothes to Warsaw.

The Churban. On 8 September 1939 the Wehrmacht took Lodz, and the recognizably Jewish were hunted first — the chassidim, and the rabbanim in their wide-brimmed hats. The Germans annexed the city to the Reich and renamed it Litzmannstadt. In the spring of 1940 some 160,000 Jews were sealed into a ghetto of four square kilometers, without electricity or water — the second ghetto established in Poland, and the last to be liquidated — joined by some 40,000 Jews deported from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Czech lands. From the first months of 1942 the deportations went to the death camp of Chelmno: twenty thousand demanded in December 1941, some fifty-five thousand more in May 1942. In August 1944 the ghetto was emptied: some 67,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most of them murdered al kiddush Hashem; the last train, on 30 August, carried the controversial Judenrat head Rumkowski himself. Of the great kehilla of Lodz only a remnant survived. השם יקום דמם. The full churban is told in the Łódź churban diary.

The Town. Józefów — Józefów Biłgorajski, in the Biłgoraj district of the Lublin region — was founded in 1715 on the estates of the Zamoyski counts and granted city rights in 1725. Jews settled there from the close of the seventeenth century; by the eve of the Second World War the town held some three thousand souls, about two thousand of them Jews, living mostly around the market square.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. A shul was raised about 1735 with a loan from the Vaad Arba Aratzos, the Council of the Four Lands, and the present shul was built in 1768, partly burned in 1830 and rebuilt. The kehilla was counted among the important communities of the region and was named more than once in the Vaad's deliberations; its rabbinic chair was held in high regard. In the last generations the town yeshiva and a Talmud Torah served the town under R' Shalom Yosef Hercsztark (until 1924) and R' Shimon Prancewski (until the war). The old beis hachaim still holds some four hundred matzeivos, the eldest from 1743 — one of the largest preserved collections in the whole Lublin region.

Torah of the Town. Above all Józefów was a town of seforim. About 1820 Szaja Waks, a leaseholder of the local papermill, brought printers from the famous Slavuta press after the Tsarist government shut it down, and founded a Hebrew printery that — using paper from its own mill — grew into one of the most important in all of Congress Poland. Gemaras, chassidishe seforim and sifrei kodesh went out from Józefów across Poland, Russia, Moldavia and Wallachia, as far as Istanbul; rebuilt time and again after floods and fires, the press ran until the close of the nineteenth century, managed from 1865 by the brothers Boruch and Shlomo Zecer. So the town's name was carried on the title-pages of seforim in battei midrash across Eastern Europe.

The Churban. No ghetto was sealed in Józefów; the town became instead a place of slaughter. In 1940 the Germans set a labor camp there, with Jews driven to quarry work; refugees expelled from Kazimierz Dolny and Konin were brought in. German police shot some ninety Jews in April 1941 and about a hundred and eighty more that October. On 13 July 1942 a German order-police battalion trucked the town's Jews into the nearby forest and shot some twelve hundred of them — the sick, the aged and the children murdered already in the streets — while the able-bodied were taken to labor camps in the Lublin country, on the road that led the region's Jews to Bełżec. The last seventy, left to sort the property of the murdered, were killed on 21 September 1942, and the kehilla of Józefów was no more, murdered al kiddush Hashem. השם יקום דמם.

The Town. Lublin rose in the southeast of Poland as one of the oldest and most distinguished Jewish settlements in the land. From a few dozen houses in the sixteenth century it grew into a great kehilla — at times the second largest in Poland after Warsaw — with its heart in the streets around the great Maharshal Shul. By 1939 some 42,000 Jews lived in Lublin, more than a third of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Lublin’s rabbinic chair was among the most honored in Poland. R’ Shalom Shachna, who established its yeshiva, was followed by his talmid R’ Shlomo Luria, the Maharshal (d. 1574), one of the shapers of nusach Polin; and by R’ Meir of Lublin, the Maharam (d. 1616), rosh yeshiva and rav. R’ Mordechai Yaffe, the Levush, and R’ Yehoshua Falk, the Sma, also sat in Lublin, and the city was a seat of the Council of the Four Lands, the central body of Polish Jewry.

Torah of the Town. Lublin’s yeshiva, opened in the early sixteenth century, became famous across Europe — so much so that Lublin was called the Jewish Oxford, and its rosh yeshiva was granted the standing of a university rector by royal privilege in 1567. In the chassidishe era the city became the seat of the Chozeh of Lublin, R’ Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz, the Seer whose court drew the founders of Polish chassidus to his door. Centuries later, in 1930, the city’s old crown was renewed when R’ Meir Shapiro opened Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, the grandest yeshiva building of its day.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Lublin were sealed into a ghetto, and in the spring of 1942 Lublin became the first kehilla in the General Government to be destroyed in Aktion Reinhard: from March 1942 its Jews were deported to Bełżec and murdered, the selections made before the very Maharshal Shul. The great Torah city of Poland, with its shuls, its yeshiva and its centuries of learning, was wiped out al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. What remains of the kehilla in the living city — the old beis hachaim with the kevarim of the Maharshal, the Maharam and the Chozeh, the Chevra Nosim shul with its minyan, and the restored palace of Chachmei Lublin with its shul reopened in 2007 — is recorded at the diary's close. The full churban is told in the Lublin churban diary.

The Town. Żmigród — Nowy Żmigród, Zhmigrid in the mouth of its Yidden — sits south of Jasło in the low hills of the Beskid, in western Galicia, on the old trade road that runs down toward the Hungarian passes. It held town rights from the 1300s; the first record of Jews living there is from 1410 — among the older Jewish settlements of Galicia — and in the 1500s a fine shul already stood in the town. The middle of the 1600s brought the Cossack and Swedish devastations over its Jews, as over all the kehillos of the land; in 1772, with the first partition, Żmigród passed under Austria; and from the 1880s a steady stream of its Jews crossed the sea to America. After the First War, under restored Poland, the town itself was reduced to village status — but its Jews remained the heart of the place, a kehilla of well over a thousand souls, most of the town, dwelling around the market square with the Poles at the edges.

The Kehilla. Zhmigrid was a shtetl of the old Galician cut — traders, horse-dealers of the fairs, craftsmen, the shul and the batei medrash full between mincha and maariv — and it carried the smaller settlements around it: the Jews of Osiek Jasielski and the villages of the district looked to Zhmigrad, and in the last years Osiek's rav was a son of the Zhmigrader Rebbe himself. Its beis hachaim held the generations; its shul of the 1500s stood into the churban.

Torah of the Town. The crown of Zhmigrid's Torah record is a birth: in תק"ח (1748) there was born in the town, to R' Shmuel, Raavad of Neustadt, the child who would become R' Avraham Yehoshua Heshel — the Ohev Yisrael of Apta, zekan haadmorim of his generation, whose card on this site opens in this town. And a century and a half later Zhmigrid became a seat of the house of Sanz: from תרס"ז (1907) its rav was R' Sinai Halberstam — grandson of the Divrei Chaim, son of R' Boruch of Gorlitz, talmid of the Shinover — who conducted the court of Sanz-Zhmigrad in the town: a kadosh who rose at chatzos to learn Zohar until davening, a baal mofes whom chassidim from across Galicia sought out, some calling him simply "Chozeh." When his health failed in תרצ"ח he moved to Krakow, and his son R' Aharon, rav of Osiek, sat as memaleh makom on the Zhmigrad seat — the last rav the town would ever have.

The Churban. The Germans took the town in September 1939, and upon the Jews of Zhmigrid fell the decrees of all Galicia: confinement to the Jewish quarter on pain of death, forced labor, plunder, hunger. Through 1941 and the spring of 1942 the Jews of Osiek Jasielski and the surrounding villages were driven into Zhmigrid nearly empty-handed, until some two thousand souls pressed into the shtetl, the kehilla feeding its refugees as the elderly starved and typhus spread. Five days after the Jews of neighboring Frysztak were shot in the Warzyce forest, the turn of Zhmigrid came — Bloody Tuesday, כ"ב תמוז תש"ב (July 7, 1942): the whole kehilla was ordered to Bal's meadow below the town, where the Kreishauptmann of Jasło, Dr. Walter Gentz, conducted the selection in person.

The old, the women, and the children were forced onto trucks and driven south toward the Krempna pass, to the forest above Hałbów, where a pit thirty meters long stood ready: they were shot at its rim, the small children beaten to death with clubs, the layers of the dead covered with chlorine and lime — some 1,250 Jews of Zhmigrid, Osiek and the villages, and among them R' Aharon Halberstam, the last rav, with his family הי"ד. Some forty Jews found hiding that day were shot in the town's own beis hachaim; on the trucks, Jews of the town drank pharmacy poison rather than reach the pit. The head of the Judenrat, Hersh Eisenberg, was beaten before the kehilla, made to watch, squeezed for a ransom of one hundred thousand zlotys from the 450 left alive — and murdered as well.

On July 12 the young men were marched off to Płaszów, the remnant kehilla still scraping together seven hundred kilograms of food packages to send after them; and on September 3, 1942 the last Jews of Zhmigrid were assembled, the hidden shot where they were found, and the transport went by way of Przemyśl to the gas of Belzec. So ended five hundred years of the kehilla of Zhmigrid — the full arc, from the decrees of 1939 to the fenced grave in the forest, is told in the Zhmigrid churban diary. A handful of its young slipped to the forests and fought with the partisans; the mass grave at Hałbów stands fenced in the forest to this day, and the survivors' yizkor book carries the names. The churban record here is drawn from the JewishGen yizkor book of Nowy Żmigród, the Yad Vashem Ghetto Encyclopedia, and the Ansberg trial record of Walter Gentz.

The Town. Kraków, the old royal capital of Poland, held one of the most ancient and distinguished kehillos in the land, centered in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter across the river from the city. Its shuls — the Old Shul, the Rema Shul, the High Shul, the Isaac Shul — were among the oldest in Poland. By 1939 some 60,000 Jews lived in Kraków, a quarter of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The golden age of Kraków gathered a constellation of gedolim. R’ Moshe Isserles, the Rema (d. 1572), whose Mapah on the Shulchan Aruch made the halacha of Ashkenaz, led its yeshiva and is buried beside his shul, his kever a place of tefillah to this day. With him and after him sat R’ Yoel Sirkes, the Bach; R’ Yom Tov Lipman Heller, the Tosfos Yom Tov; and R’ Nosson Nota Spira, the Megaleh Amukos.

Torah of the Town. Kraków’s yeshiva, led by the Rema, drew talmidim from across Ashkenaz, and the city became one of the twin capitals of Polish Torah alongside Lublin. It was a seat of the Council of the Four Lands and a great center of Hebrew printing. In the chassidishe era Galician courts and shtieblach filled Kazimierz alongside the old battei midrash, and the city remained, into the twentieth century, a metropolis of Torah, of Agudah, and of every current of Polish-Jewish life.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Kraków were driven from Kazimierz into a sealed ghetto across the river in Podgórze. From 1942 its Jews were deported to Bełżec and murdered, and the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, its remnant sent to the Płaszów camp and to their deaths. The ancient kehilla of Kraków, the city of the Rema, was destroyed al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד — though its old shuls in Kazimierz still stand.

The Town. Przysucha — Pshischa in the mouths of its Jews — was a small town in central Poland, in the Radom region, that would leave a mark on chassidus far beyond its size. By the early twentieth century its Jews were a majority of the town. Its great baroque shul, built in the seventeen-hundreds, was the largest of its kind in Poland.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Peshischa became famous as the seat of a new derech in chassidus. R’ Yaakov Yitzchak Rabinowicz, the Yid Hakodosh (the Holy Jew, d. 1813), a talmid of the Chozeh of Lublin, settled there and gathered a circle around him; after him came R’ Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, who shaped the town into the heart of a movement.

Torah of the Town. The Peshischa derech turned chassidus inward — toward truth, depth of mind, and the avodah of the individual rather than the wonder-working court. From this small town came the spiritual line that produced Kotzk, Ger, and much of the intellectual chassidus of Poland; its talmidim carried the Peshischa fire across the land.

The Churban. The Jews of Przysucha were driven out under German occupation and deported to their deaths in Treblinka with the Jewry of the Radom region. The wellspring town of Peshischa was emptied of its Jews al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד — though its great shul still stands.

The Town. Lizhensk (Leżajsk), a town of western Galicia near the San, had a Jewish kehilla from the early sixteenth century. Small in itself, it became one of the most renowned names in all of chassidus through the tzaddik who made it his home.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Elimelech of Lizhensk, the Noam Elimelech (d. 1787), talmid of the Maggid of Mezritch, settled in Lizhensk and made it a great center of chassidus. From his beis medrash went out the masters who would carry chassidus across Galicia and Poland — the Chozeh of Lublin, R’ Mendel of Rimanov, the Maggid of Kozhnitz, R’ Yehoshua Heschel of Apta, and R’ Naftali of Ropshitz among them.

Torah of the Town. The Noam Elimelech, his sefer, became one of the foundational works of chassidus, and the derech of Lizhensk — the avodah of the tzaddik on behalf of his generation — shaped whole dynasties. From the end of the eighteenth century until 1939, Jews streamed to Lizhensk on the tzaddik’s yahrzeit, כ״א אדר, to daven at his kever.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Lizhensk were expelled and murdered with the Jewry of the region in the churban — הי"ד. The tzaddik’s ohel survived, and to this day Jews come from across the world to his kever on כ״א אדר.

The Town. Kozhnitz (Kozienice), a town in the Radom region of central Poland, held a Jewish kehilla that became, through its Maggid, one of the cradles of chassidus in Congress Poland.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Yisrael, the Maggid of Kozhnitz (d. 1814), a talmid of R’ Elimelech of Lizhensk and of the Maggid of Mezritch, made Kozhnitz his seat. Frail in body but towering in avodah, he was sought out by masses of chassidim and by Polish noblemen alike, and his court became one of the founding pillars of Polish chassidus alongside Lublin and Peshischa.

Torah of the Town. The Maggid’s Torah and his Kozhnitzer line shaped the chassidus of central Poland; the dynasty he founded continued through the generations until the churban. Kozhnitz remained a chassidishe town, its shtieblach and battei midrash carrying the Maggid’s avodah.

The Churban. The Jews of Kozhnitz were sealed into a ghetto and deported to Treblinka in 1942, murdered with the Jewry of the Radom region al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Kotzk (Kock), a small town in the Lublin region of Poland, would never have been widely known but for the tzaddik who made it his seat — and through him its name became one of the most charged in all of chassidus.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (d. 1859), the Kotzker Rebbe, a talmid of R’ Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, settled in Kotzk and gathered around him a circle of the sharpest minds of Polish Jewry. Demanding, uncompromising, and famously withdrawn in his last years, the Kotzker forged a chassidus of emes — of inner truth stripped of all falsehood.

Torah of the Town. From Kotzk came two of the great rivers of Polish chassidus: after the Kotzker’s petirah the majority of his chassidim followed his brother-in-law, the Chiddushei HaRim, who founded the court of Ger, while another line continued through Sochatchov through his talmid the Avnei Nezer. The Kotzker derech — the relentless search for truth — shaped the whole intellectual chassidus of Poland.

The Churban. Under the German occupation the kehilla was made to pull down its own shul (November 1939), then sealed into a ghetto where typhus and hunger took many; in 1942, after two mass shootings, its Jews were marched through Łuków to Treblinka and murdered — as this site’s Kotzk churban diary tells in full. The town that had given chassidus its byword for truth was emptied of its Jews — הי"ד.

The Town. Góra Kalwaria — Ger in Yiddish, Gur in Hebrew — lay south of Warsaw on the Vistula. From the middle of the nineteenth century its Jews, more than half the town’s some seven thousand people, made it the capital of the largest chassidus in Poland.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The town became the seat of the Gerrer dynasty when R’ Yitzchak Meir Alter, the Chiddushei HaRim (d. 1866), a leading talmid of the Kotzker Rebbe, settled there and gathered the bulk of the Kotzker’s chassidim after his petirah. He was followed by his grandson R’ Yehuda Aryeh Leib, the Sfas Emes, and then by R’ Avraham Mordechai Alter, the Imrei Emes, under whom Ger became a power in Polish Jewry and in the Agudah.

Torah of the Town. Ger’s Torah — the seforim Chiddushei HaRim, Sfas Emes, and Imrei Emes — became foundational works of Polish chassidus, and the Gerrer court drew tens of thousands of chassidim from across the land. Ger carried the fire of Kotzk into a great and disciplined movement.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Ger were deported to the Warsaw ghetto, where many died of hunger and disease, and from there in the summer of 1942 to Treblinka, where they were murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The Imrei Emes escaped Poland and reached Eretz Yisrael; only a handful of Ger’s Jews survived.

The Town. Sochaczew, a town west of Warsaw on the Bzura, held a Jewish kehilla that became, through its rav, a great center of both deep lomdus and chassidus.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Avraham Bornstein, the Avnei Nezer (d. 1910), a talmid and son-in-law of the Kotzker Rebbe, served as rav of Sochaczew and founded the Sochatchover court there. A towering lamdan whose teshuvos and chiddushim are studied across the yeshiva world, he united the sharp analytic Torah of Kotzk with the avodah of a chassidishe rebbe.

Torah of the Town. The seforim of Sochaczew — the Avnei Nezer on halacha and the Beis Avraham, the Torah of his son R’ Shmuel — became classics of Polish lomdus. Sochaczew ran a yeshiva drawing bochurim to its derech of iyun, and the court continued through the generations until the churban.

The Churban. The Jews of Sochaczew were sealed into a ghetto and deported with the Jewry of the region to their deaths in the churban — הי"ד, the great center of Torah and chassidus destroyed al kiddush Hashem.

The Town. Tzanz — Nowy Sącz, a city in the Carpathian foothills of western Galicia where three rivers meet — held a largely Orthodox Jewish kehilla that became, through its rav, one of the most influential centers of chassidus in all of Eastern Europe.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. In 1830 R’ Chaim Halberstam, the Divrei Chaim (d. 1876) was appointed rav of Tzanz, and remained there for the rest of his life. A talmid of the Sar Shalom of Belz and of R’ Naftali of Ropshitz, he was a towering lamdan and posek whose Sanz court drew chassidim from across Galicia and beyond; his sons founded courts of their own across the region.

Torah of the Town. The Divrei Chaim, his seforim on halacha, became a classic of Galician lomdus, uniting deep analytic Torah with the avodah of a chassidishe rebbe. Tzanz ran a yeshiva and its name became a byword for the union of chassidus and learning. The Sanz dynasty he founded spread through dozens of courts numbering tens of thousands of chassidim.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Tzanz were sealed into a ghetto and deported in 1942 to their deaths; the city was declared Judenrein in July 1943, its shuls, shtieblach, and battei midrash destroyed, and the Halberstam family scattered and largely murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Belz, a town of eastern Galicia near the border of Congress Poland, held a Jewish kehilla that became one of the great centers of chassidus. Of some 6,000 residents in 1918, around 3,600 were Jews, the overwhelming majority of them Belzer chassidim.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Shalom Rokeach, the Sar Shalom (d. 1855), a talmid of the Chozeh of Lublin, became rav of Belz in 1817 and founded the Belzer dynasty. He was followed by his son R’ Yehoshua, the Maharid (here meaning the line of Belz), and by his grandson and great-grandson — a dynasty that grew into one of the largest chassidus in the world.

Torah of the Town. The Sar Shalom built in Belz a great shul, dedicated in 1843 — a fortress-like building seating thousands, among the largest in Poland, famed for its acoustics. Unlike most Polish chassidus, Belz maintained not a public yeshiva but its distinctive yoshvim program of mature scholars, which produced many great talmidei chachamim. Belz became a name known across Galicia and Poland.

The Churban. When the Germans came to Belz in 1939 they tried to destroy the great shul by fire and by dynamite and failed, and in the end conscripted Jews to take it apart brick by brick. The Jews of Belz were murdered in the churban — הי"ד — the great kehilla almost entirely destroyed; the Belzer Rebbe R’ Aharon Rokeach escaped to Eretz Yisrael and rebuilt the chassidus there.

The Town. Opatów — Apta to its Jews — was an old town of central Poland whose Jewish kehilla reached back centuries, a chassidishe town whose name was carried far by the tzaddik who served as its rav.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. R’ Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, the Ohev Yisrael — the Apter Rav (d. 1825) — a talmid of R’ Elimelech of Lizhensk, served as rav of Apta and made its name his own; he is known to chassidus by this town to this day, even after he moved on to Mezhbizh. The Apta line he founded continued through the generations.

Torah of the Town. The Ohev Yisrael, his sefer — named for his boundless love of every Jew — became a beloved work of chassidus, and the Apter Rav one of the central figures of the chassidishe world of his day. Apta remained a chassidishe town, with shtieblach of many courts, until the churban.

The Churban. The Jews of Apta were sealed into a ghetto and deported in 1942 to Treblinka, murdered with the Jewry of the region al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old chassidishe kehilla of Apta was destroyed.

The Town. Lemberg — Lwów, Lvov — was the great capital of Galicia and the soul of its Jewry, a metropolis to the hundreds of towns and shtetlach around it. One of the largest kehillos in all of Poland, ranked among the foremost after Warsaw and Lodz, it counted well over a hundred thousand Jews on the eve of the churban.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Lemberg’s rabbinic chair was among the most honored in the land. R’ David HaLevi Segal, the TaZ (the Turei Zahav), davened in its Golden Rose Shul; R’ Tzvi Ashkenazi, the Chacham Tzvi, served as its rav at the end of his life; and in the modern era R’ Yosef Shaul Nathanson, the Shoel U’Meishiv, sat in Lemberg — beside him his lifelong chavrusa, the gaon R' Mordechai Zev Ettinga. The Orthodox of Galicia organized here in the Machzikei HaDas, the movement of Belz and the Torah-loyal camp.

Torah of the Town. Lemberg was a center of Torah and of Hebrew printing for centuries, its Golden Rose Shul (Di Goldene Royz), built in the late sixteenth century, among the most famous in Poland. By the modern era the city held every current of Jewish life — chassidim of Belz, Husiatyn and other courts, misnagdim, the Machzikei HaDas, and also the Haskalah; but the Torah-loyal kehilla held its place at the city’s heart.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Lemberg were sealed into a ghetto and destroyed: through 1942 tens of thousands were deported to Bełżec, and tens of thousands more were murdered in the Janowska camp within the city and in mass shootings. By the time the city was taken in 1944 almost none of its Jews remained alive — the great kehilla of Lemberg destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד; the Golden Rose Shul was blown up.

The Town. Tarnów, a city of western Galicia between Kraków and the Carpathians, held one of the largest Jewish kehillos in Galicia — fourth in number after Lwów, Kraków and Stanisławów, and first among the great towns in the Jewish share of its people. By 1939 some twenty-five thousand Jews lived there. The register of the town's beis hachaim counts first among its gedolim R' Menachem Mendel Lezer, the Sova Semachos — of the great talmidim of R' Menachem Mendel of Rimanov, niftar in the dever plague of תקצ"א.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Tarnów was a deeply chassidishe city, its streets filled on Simchas Torah with the dancing of chassidishe rebbes in their wide fur hats and the Jews of every beis medrash and shtiebel. Shtieblach of the Galician courts — among them Sanz and its branches — stood through the town, alongside its great shuls and battei midrash; and in its last generations the foremost posek of Galicia, R' Meir Arik, sat on its rabbinical chair and led its yeshiva.

Torah of the Town. The kehilla carried a full Torah life — chadarim, battei midrash, and shtieblach — and one of its shuls, the New Shul, was a famed landmark built of stone. Tarnów stood as a center of Galician Jewry and a gateway between the chassidus of the Carpathian foothills and the wider world.

The Churban. The Germans entered Tarnów in September 1939 and within weeks burned its forty shuls and prayer-houses, dynamiting the great stone shul. A ghetto was sealed in 1941. In the Aktion of June 1942 thousands of Jews were shot in the streets and in the cemetery and murdered in the Buczyna Forest at Zbylitowska Góra, and some twelve thousand deported to Bełżec; further deportations followed until Tarnów was declared free of Jews in 1943 — the great kehilla destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Przemyśl, an ancient town of eastern Galicia on the San, held one of the oldest Jewish kehillos in the region, a community reaching back many centuries that became a seat of Torah and a chassidishe town.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Przemyśl’s rabbinic chair was held by gedolim across the generations — among those who served as rav of Przemyśl was R’ Yaakov Yehoshua Falk, the Pnei Yehoshua, before he went on to Kraków. In its later generations its rav was R' Yitzchak Yehuda Schmelkes, the Beis Yitzchak, one of the foremost poskim of his day, succeeded by his son R' Gedalia Schmelkes. The town held shtieblach of the Galician chassidishe courts alongside its old battei midrash and the beis medrash of its rabbonim and lomdim.

Torah of the Town. Przemyśl carried a full Torah life — its battei midrash, chadarim and shtieblach — and stood as one of the established kehillos of eastern Galicia, a town of rabbonim, chassidim, and centuries of Jewish settlement on the San.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Przemyśl were sealed into a ghetto. In the summer of 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: in the Aktions of late July and early August many thousands were deported to Bełżec, and others shot in the forests outside the city. The ancient kehilla of Przemyśl was wiped out al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Częstochowa, the great industrial and pilgrimage city of southern Congress Poland, held one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish kehillos in the land. By the eve of the war some forty thousand Jews lived there, a community of every walk of Jewish life.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The chief rabbinate of Częstochowa was held in its last generations by R’ Nachum Asz, who led the kehilla into the modern era. Chassidim of Ger and other courts, misnagdim, and the full range of Torah-loyal life filled its shuls and battei midrash, alongside the modern movements that grew in a great industrial city.

Torah of the Town. Częstochowa carried a full Torah and communal life — chadarim, battei midrash, shtieblach, and chinuch institutions — and was a center of Jewish life and livelihood for the whole region. Its Jews built the kehilla into one of the foremost in Congress Poland.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Częstochowa were sealed into a ghetto. The Germans chose Yom Kippur of 1942 to begin the liquidation: from 22 Tishrei the kehilla was destroyed in mass deportations, and across September and October some forty thousand Jews were sent to Treblinka and murdered, the aged and the children killed on the spot. A remnant was held in a small ghetto and in the HASAG slave-labor camps until they too were destroyed — the great kehilla wiped out al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Piotrków Trybunalski — Petrikov to its Jews — was one of the oldest cities of central Poland, long a seat of the Polish tribunal and Sejm, with a Jewish kehilla reaching back to the sixteenth century. On the eve of the war some fifteen thousand Jews lived there.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Piotrków’s kehilla was an old and established one, a town of rabbonim and a chassidishe community, with shtieblach of Ger and other courts alongside its great shul and battei midrash. Its rabbinical chair was held by R' Menachem David Temkin and then by R' Meir Shapiro, who built Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin and gave the world the Daf Yomi, and at the last by R' Moshe Chaim Lau, who led its Torah and went with his kehilla to Treblinka. The city also became a major center of Hebrew and Torah printing, its presses sending seforim across Poland.

Torah of the Town. Piotrków carried a full Torah life — its great shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and yeshiva — and its printing houses made the city’s name known on the title pages of seforim throughout the Jewish world.

The Churban. In October 1939, only weeks after the invasion, the Germans sealed the Jews of Piotrków into a ghetto — the first ghetto they established in occupied Europe. In October 1942 the ghetto was liquidated: some twenty-two thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka and murdered, while a remnant was held in slave-labor camps and largely destroyed. The ancient kehilla of Piotrków was wiped out al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Zamość, a planned Renaissance town of the Lublin region in southeastern Poland, held an old and distinguished Jewish kehilla — a community of some thousand families renowned, in the words of its chroniclers, as a town full of wise men and writers without equal.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Zamość’s rabbinic chair was held by a line of gedolim, among them R’ Moshe Yehoshua Heschel Wahl, the Beis Moshe, and R’ Yosef Shlomo Shabtai Halevi Horowitz (1861–1943), a direct descendant of the Chozeh of Lublin and a founder of the yeshiva Yagdil Hatorah. The town held shtieblach of the chassidishe courts alongside its battei midrash.

Torah of the Town. Zamość was famed for its learning — a town of lamdanim and writers — and the yeshiva Yagdil Hatorah and its battei midrash carried its Torah into the twentieth century. The Haskalah, too, found a foothold in Zamość, but the Torah-loyal kehilla held the heart of the town, building its chinuch and its mosdos until the churban. Zamość was also the birthplace of R' Yehuda Leib Edel, the Maggid of Slonim, the baal Afikei Yehuda.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Zamość were sealed into a ghetto and, in 1942, deported to their deaths in Bełżec, murdered with the Jewry of the Lublin region al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of wise men and writers was destroyed.

The Town. Będzin — Bendin in Yiddish — was the old Jewish center of the Zagłębie region of southwestern Poland, a settlement reaching back to the thirteenth century under privilege of Casimir the Great. By the eve of the war some twenty-eight thousand Jews lived there, more than half the town.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Będzin’s kehilla was an old and well-ordered one, headed by its rav and dayanim, who oversaw its chevra kadisha, Talmud Torah, and tzedakah funds. R’ Yekusiel Zalman Graubart served as rav from 1913. A deeply chassidishe town, Będzin held shtieblach of Radomsk, Aleksander, Sochatchov and other courts alongside its great shul.

Torah of the Town. Beside its Great Shul stood chadarim and a yeshiva, and the kehilla carried a full Torah life into the twentieth century. Being near the border, Będzin often took in Jewish refugees expelled from other lands, and its mosdos bore the work of a busy and generous community.

The Churban. The Germans entered Będzin in September 1939 and within days burned the Great Shul — some sixty Jews who were inside were burned to death, and fifty houses around it went up in flames. The Jews of Będzin, in the region annexed to the Reich, were held without a ghetto for a time — and the Jews of nearby Oshpitzin (Auschwitz) were expelled here in 1941 — before being deported to Auschwitz and murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Sosnowiec was a young city, grown up in the nineteenth century around the coal and railways of the Zagłębie region beside Będzin. Its Jewish community, which began only in 1859 and at first belonged to the Będzin kehilla, grew with the city into one of some twenty-eight thousand Jews by the eve of the war.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. As the city grew, its Jews built an independent kehilla with its own rabbonim, shuls, and mosdos. Among the chassidim who settled there were those of Radomsk, Aleksander and Sochatchov, and the town held a full range of Torah-loyal life alongside the currents of a modern industrial city.

Torah of the Town. Sosnowiec carried battei midrash, shtieblach, chadarim and a yeshiva — Yeshivas Yagdil Torah, which stood until the war and was headed by R' Shlomo Stencel, the Gaon of Sosnowiec — and its shuls served a large and growing kehilla; after the First World War it became the seat of the Radomsker Rebbe's court and of the Keser Torah network's elite Kibbutz Govoha. Though a young community, it became one of the two great centers of Zagłębie Jewry together with Będzin.

The Stashover Court. Sosnowiec became a seat of the Stashover (Pardes) chasidishe court when R' Mordechai II moved its center to Zagłębie: R' Dovid HaLevi Pardes of Stashov led here and lies buried in the Sosnowiec beis hachaim; his son R' Yosef Menashe raised a great yeshiva in the city, and his son R' Yisrael Yaakov led as Admor in Sosnowiec until he was murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Churban. The Germans came to Sosnowiec in September 1939 and blew up its great shul; the Jews took bricks from the ruins as mementos and, that Chanukah, lit their licht upon them. The Jews of Sosnowiec, in the region annexed to the Reich, were deported in 1942 and 1943 to Auschwitz and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Stanisławów, a great city of eastern Galicia, held one of the largest Jewish kehillos in the region — among the foremost of Galicia after Lwów, Kraków and Tarnów. Some twenty-five thousand Jews lived there on the eve of the war, a third of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Its rabbinic chair was held for over forty years by R' Meshulam Yissachar Horowitz, the Bar Levai, one of the foremost poskim of Galicia and mechaber of the shu"t Bar Levai. Stanisławów was a center of Torah and of Galician chassidus, with shtieblach of the Husiatyn, Stratin and other courts, and its Or Chaim Yeshiva drew bochurim from across Galicia and Bukovina. The kehilla carried a full Torah and communal life into the twentieth century.

Torah of the Town. The yeshiva, the battei midrash and the shtieblach made Stanisławów a Torah city of eastern Galicia, a community of rabbonim, chassidim and lamdanim that stood at the heart of the surrounding region.

The Churban. Under German occupation the kehilla of Stanisławów was destroyed with terrible cruelty. On a single day in October 1941 the Germans drove thousands of Jews to the city cemetery and shot them into open pits — many thousands murdered in hours. The survivors were sealed into a ghetto and, through 1942 and into 1943, deported to Bełżec and murdered or killed within the city — the great kehilla wiped out al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Radom, a city of central Poland south of Warsaw, was the seat of its district and one of the great kehillos of Congress Poland. On the eve of the war some thirty thousand Jews lived there, about a third of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Radom held an old and well-built kehilla, with its rabbonim, its great shul, and its mosdos. A chassidishe town, it held shtieblach of Ger, Radomsk and other courts alongside its battei midrash, and stood as a Torah and communal center for the many towns of its district.

Torah of the Town. The kehilla carried a full Torah life — its shuls, battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and Talmud Torah — and Radom served as the hub of Jewish life and livelihood for the whole region around it.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Radom were sealed into a ghetto in 1941. In August 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: in the Aktions of that month, some twenty thousand Jews and more were deported to Treblinka and murdered, the sick and the children killed on the spot, a remnant held for slave labor and later destroyed. The great kehilla of Radom was wiped out al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Otwock, set among the pine forests southeast of Warsaw, was famed as a health resort — a place chassidim and Jews of all kinds came to for its clean air. Its own Jewish community numbered some eleven thousand on the eve of the war, more than half the town.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Otwock was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Vurka–Otwock court of the Kalisz dynasty, an offshoot of Vurka and Amshinov. Its battei midrash and shtieblach, and the rebbes who held court among its pines, made Otwock a place of Torah and chassidus as well as of healing.

Torah of the Town. Beyond the local kehilla, Otwock’s air and quiet drew mosdos to it: yeshivos and battei midrash relocated to the town for its setting, and it became a center of learning in the pine forests near the capital. The town carried a full chassidishe and communal life until the churban.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Otwock were sealed into a ghetto, the second largest in the Warsaw district. In the summer of 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and its Jews deported to Treblinka and murdered, those who fled hunted in the forests — the kehilla of Otwock destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Staszów, an old town of the Sandomierz region of central Poland, held a Jewish kehilla reaching back centuries, a chassidishe community that made the town’s name its own through the court that sat there.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Staszów was the seat of the Staszów court, and a chassidishe town through and through, with shtieblach of its own rebbe and of other courts alongside its great shul and battei midrash. Its rabbonim and its kehilla carried the town’s Torah life across the generations.

Torah of the Town. The kehilla held a full Torah life — its shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and Talmud Torah — and Staszów stood as one of the established chassidishe kehillos of the Sandomierz region.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Staszów were sealed into a ghetto and, in the autumn of 1942, deported to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old chassidishe kehilla of Staszów was destroyed.

The Town. Chełm, an old town of the Lublin region, held one of the most ancient Jewish kehillos in Poland — a community some hold to reach back to the twelfth century, its oldest matzeivah dated to 1442 and its Great Shul built in the early Polish style of stone. By 1939 some fifteen thousand Jews lived there, near half the town, the second kehilla of the Lublin province after Lublin itself.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Chełm’s rabbinic chair was among the oldest in Poland. R’ Yehuda Aharon of Chelm headed the kehillos of the Lublin, Chelm and Belz districts in the early sixteenth century, and his son R’ Eliyahu Ba’al Shem of Chelm (niftar 1583) was the famed kabbalist of the Golem tradition. The Maharsha — R’ Shmuel Eidels — held his first rabbanus in Chełm before going on to Lublin. From the early nineteenth century the town’s rabbonim were chassidim, and shtieblach of Kotzk, Kuzmir, Radzin and Belz stood through it.

Torah of the Town. Chełm carried a full Torah life across the centuries — its ancient Great Shul, its yeshiva and battei midrash, its Talmud Torah, its chassidishe shtieblach — and its line of rabbonim made the town a Torah center of the Lublin region from the earliest generations of Polish Jewry.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Chełm were driven into a ghetto and, in 1942, deported to their deaths in Sobibor, which lay not far off, murdered with the Jewry of the Lublin region al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. Of the great and ancient kehilla of Chełm only a handful lived to see liberation.

The Town. Chęciny — Chentshin in Yiddish — was an old town of Lesser Poland beneath its royal castle, one of the early urban centers of the region, with a Jewish kehilla reaching back centuries.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Chentshin was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Chentshin court founded by Reb Chaim Shmuel Szternfeld, a great-grandson of the Chozeh of Lublin. The Chentshiner Rebbe was known for his longing for Eretz Yisrael — the record tells that he kept a clock in his home set to the hours of the Holy Land — and his court gave the town its name in the chassidishe world.

Torah of the Town. Beside its great shul and battei midrash, Chentshin held the shtieblach of its own rebbe and of other courts, and carried a full chassidishe and communal life. The town’s name lived on in the Chentshin dynasty long after.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Chęciny were sealed into a ghetto and, in 1942, deported to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of Chentshin was destroyed.

The Town. Łęczna — Lentshna in Yiddish — was an old market town of the Lublin region, its Jewish community recorded from the early sixteenth century. So central was it that the Council of Four Lands, the governing body of Polish Jewry, gathered there in the seventeenth century.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Łęczna was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Lentshna court, and its old shul — built in the seventeenth century and standing to this day — anchored a kehilla of rabbonim, chassidim and craftsmen. Its shtieblach and battei midrash carried the town’s Torah life across the generations.

Torah of the Town. From its days as a seat of the Council of Four Lands through the rise of its own chassidishe court, Łęczna held a full Torah and communal life — its great shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach — one of the established kehillos of the Lublin region.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Łęczna were driven from their homes and, in 1942, deported to their deaths in Sobibor, murdered with the Jewry of the Lublin region al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of Lentshna was destroyed.

The Town. Modrzyce — Modzhitz to the chassidim — was a small town on the Vistula beside Dęblin, in the Lublin region of central Poland. Small as it was, it gave its name to one of the best-loved of the chassidishe courts.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Modzhitz was the seat of the Modzhitz court, founded when Reb Yisrael Taub settled there in the 1890s and became known as the Modzhitzer Rebbe. The court of Modzhitz became famous above all for its niggunim — the Rebbe composed melodies of great beauty and length that are sung by chassidim and beyond to this day, so that Modzhitz became a byword for the avodah of song.

Torah of the Town. Around the Rebbe’s court gathered the shtiebel, the beis medrash and the chassidim of Modzhitz, and the town carried a full chassidishe life. Its melodies traveled far beyond it, carrying the name of the small Vistula town across the chassidishe world.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of the Modrzyce and Dęblin area were driven from their homes and, in 1942 and 1943, deported to their deaths in the death camps of the Lublin region and held in the local labor camps until they too were destroyed — murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Mińsk Mazowiecki — Novominsk to its Jews, after the town’s older name of Nowomińsk — lay east of Warsaw in the Mazovia region. Its Jewish kehilla, settled from the eighteenth century, numbered some five thousand on the eve of the war.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Novominsk was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Novominsk court of the Perlow dynasty, whose rebbes drew chassidim from the towns around. Its shtieblach and battei midrash, gathered about the court, carried the Torah and chassidus of the town across the generations.

Torah of the Town. Beside the Novominsk court stood the great shul, the battei midrash and the chadarim of the kehilla, and the town held a full chassidishe and communal life. The name of Novominsk lived on in its dynasty long after the town itself was destroyed.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Novominsk were sealed into a ghetto in 1940, into which Jews of the neighboring towns were also driven. In August 1942 the ghetto was liquidated: about a thousand Jews were shot, and the rest — some seven thousand souls — were deported to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד. Of the whole kehilla only a small remnant survived.

The Town. Tarnobrzeg — Dzikov to the chassidim, after the Dzików estate beside it — was a town of western Galicia near the San, with an old and chassidishe Jewish kehilla.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Dzikov was the seat of the Dzikov court of the Horowitz dynasty, a branch of the house of Ropshitz and Sanz. Its rebbes, the Dzikover Horowitzes, served as rabbonim of Tarnobrzeg and led their chassidim there, the last of them, Reb Chaim Menachem David Horowitz, perishing in the churban.

Torah of the Town. Around the Dzikov court gathered the shtieblach and battei midrash of the kehilla, and the town carried a full chassidishe life in the western Galician style, its rebbes’ Torah preserved in their seforim.

The Churban. The Jews of Tarnobrzeg were among the first to be uprooted: in the autumn of 1939 the Germans drove the whole kehilla from the town, expelling them across the San, and in the years that followed its Jews shared the fate of Galician Jewry, deported to Bełżec and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of Dzikov was destroyed.

The Town. Ożarów — Ozharov to its Jews — was a small town of the Opatów region in central Poland, its Jews about two-thirds of its people. Some thirty-two hundred Jews lived there on the eve of the war, earning their bread in its small trades — its glassworks, its mills and its tanneries.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Ozharov was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Ozharov court of the Epstein Levi’im, whose rebbes led their chassidim there. Its shtieblach and battei midrash, gathered about the court and the town’s great shul, carried the Torah and chassidus of the kehilla across the generations.

Torah of the Town. Small as it was, Ozharov held a full chassidishe and communal life — its shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim — and the name of the town lived on in the Ozharov court and its seforim long after.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Ozharov were confined to a quarter of the town. At the end of October 1942 the ghetto was liquidated: the kehilla was marched to the train, the old and the children shot along the way, and some forty-five hundred Jews deported to Treblinka and murdered; the remnant left to clear the town was later marched toward Sandomierz and shot — the kehilla of Ozharov destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Lelów — Lelov to the chassidim — was a small old town of central Poland near Częstochowa. Small as it was, it gave its name to one of the foundational courts of Polish chassidus and remains a place of pilgrimage to this day.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Lelov was the seat and resting place of Reb Dovid Biderman of Lelov (niftar 1814), founder of the Lelov court and a foremost talmid of the Chozeh of Lublin — of whom the Chozeh said that he was the foundation of all the tzaddikim. Reb Dovid was beloved above all for his boundless ahavas Yisroel; his talmid was Reb Yitzchak of Vorki, of the line of Vurka and Amshinov, and his son Reb Moshe married the daughter of the Yid Hakodosh of Peshischa and later brought the Lelov dynasty up to Eretz Yisrael.

Torah of the Town. Around the memory and the kever of Reb Dovid, Lelov held a chassidishe kehilla — its shul, its beis medrash and shtiebel — and his ohel drew chassidim to the small town across the generations, the well-spring of a chassidus that lived on far beyond it.

The Churban. Under German occupation the small kehilla of Lelów was uprooted and, in 1942, its Jews were deported with the Jewry of the region to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of Lelov was destroyed, though the kever of Reb Dovid remains a place of tefillah to this day.

The Town. Wolbrom, a town of Lesser Poland near the old Austrian border northwest of Kraków, held a Jewish kehilla settled from the late seventeenth century, long under the wing of the Kraków community. Some five thousand Jews lived there on the eve of the war, more than half the town, among them — unusually for Polish Jewry — not a few who worked the land.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Wolbrom was a chassidishe town from the nineteenth century, the seat of the Wolbrom court, with shtieblach of its own rebbe and of other courts alongside the shul of the misnagdishe “regular Jews.” Its rabbonim, shul and battei midrash anchored a kehilla that grew with the town across the generations.

Torah of the Town. Wolbrom held a full Torah and communal life — its great shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and Talmud Torah — one of the established chassidishe kehillos of the Kraków region.

The Churban. In the autumn of 1941 the Jews of Wolbrom were sealed into a ghetto, into which thousands of refugees were also driven. The liquidation came in September 1942: the kehilla was marched to the railway station, some two thousand of the old and weak shot in the forest over ready-dug graves, and the rest — six to seven thousand souls — deported to Bełżec and murdered, the able-bodied sent to the camps; a remnant was killed in a second Aktion that November. The kehilla of Wolbrom was destroyed al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Kalisz — Kulish to its Jews — is held to be the oldest town in Poland, and its Jewish kehilla among the very oldest, reaching back to the twelfth century, when Jews minted the prince’s coins. It was here, in 1264, that Duke Bolesław the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz — the first charter of Jewish rights in the Polish lands, later extended by Casimir the Great over the whole kingdom, the legal foundation on which the great Jewry of Poland was built. By 1939 some twenty-five thousand Jews lived there, near a third of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Kalisz was an important Torah center from the earliest generations. R’ Avraham Avele Gombiner, the Magen Avraham — whose commentary on the Shulchan Aruch is learned wherever halacha is studied — sat as dayan in Kalisz in the seventeenth century, and R’ Yehuda b. Nissan, the Beis Yehuda, and other gedolim served there. Among its later ravs was R' Meir Auerbach, the Imrei Binah, who led Kalisz before his aliyah to Yerushalayim. Its kehilla, led in the modern era by the Agudah, ran its yeshivos Magen Avraham and Eitz Chaim, its Talmud Torah, its hospital and its welfare mosdos; chassidim of Kotzk, Ger and Aleksander filled its shtieblach.

Torah of the Town. From its medieval yeshiva through its two yeshivos of the last generation, Kalisz carried a full Torah life across the centuries — its two great shuls and its many battei midrash, its chadarim and Talmud Torah — a spiritual center of Polish Jewry from the days of the Statute that bears the town’s name. For twenty-seven years the Magen Avraham himself sat as dayan on its beis din (תט"ז–תמ"ג); in the last century its seat ran from R' Meir Auerbach, the Imrei Binah — who went up to the rabbanus of Yerushalayim — to his successor R' Chaim Elazar Wax, the Nefesh Chaya, and down to R' Yechezkel Lipschitz of the HaMidrash V'HaMaaseh (niftar תרצ"ב).

The Auerbach line sat in this district for generations: R' Meir Auerbach, the baal Imrei Binah was av beis din here before his aliyah, born in Dobre in the Kalisz district — an einikel of R' Chaim Auerbach, the baal Divrei Mishpat, at the head of that line.

The Churban. Kalisz lay in the region annexed to the Reich as the Warthegau. Late in 1939 most of its Jews were driven out — expelled to the towns of central Poland and Galicia — and those who remained, with the Jewry of the Warthegau, were murdered at Chelmno, the first of the death camps. The most ancient of Poland’s kehillos was destroyed al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Białystok, the great city of the Podlasie region in northeastern Poland, was a Jewish metropolis — the textile capital of the land, where Jews built the mills and the trade that made the city. Its Jewish kehilla, settled from the seventeenth century, grew to some fifty thousand souls, for generations a majority of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Białystok was a Torah center of every current — misnagdim and chassidim alike — with two great shuls and close to a hundred battei midrash and shtieblach, many with their own libraries, and a Talmud Torah and yeshiva under the kehilla’s hand. Standing on the edge of the Lithuanian Torah world, the city held a full and varied Jewish life into the twentieth century.

Torah of the Town. Around its great shuls and its many battei midrash, its chadarim, its Talmud Torah and its yeshiva, Białystok carried a Torah and communal life worthy of a metropolis — a city of rabbonim, of lamdanim, and of a hundred houses of tefillah.

The Churban. Białystok fell to the Soviets in 1939 and to the Germans in June 1941. In the first days the Germans drove the Jews into the Great Shul and burned it down with hundreds of Jews inside, and shot thousands more in the fields around. The survivors were sealed into a ghetto; in February 1943 some ten thousand were deported to Treblinka, and in August 1943 the ghetto rose in armed revolt as it was destroyed, its Jews sent to Treblinka and Majdanek — the great kehilla of Białystok murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Rzeszów — Reisha to its Jews — was a great city of western Galicia east of Kraków, the seat of its district and a hub for the many small towns around it. Some fourteen thousand Jews lived there on the eve of the war, a large share of the city.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Reisha held an old and established kehilla — a town of rabbonim, of chassidim of the Galician courts, and of battei midrash and shtieblach gathered about its great shuls. It stood as a Torah and communal center for the western Galician region, between the courts of Sanz and the cities of the plain; in its last generations its rav was R' Aharon Lewin, the Reisha Rav, who led its yeshiva and was murdered al kiddush Hashem with his kehilla. Among the rabbonim who held the city's beis din was R' Menashe Eichenstein, the Alfei Menashe — Ra'avad of Riesha from around the turn of the century, who divided his year between Riesha in winter and his Veretzky rabbanus in summer, and printed his Toras Ha'asham here.

Torah of the Town. Reisha carried a full Torah life — its great shuls, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim — and as the seat of its district drew the Jews of the towns around it for trade, for tefillah, and for din Torah.

The Churban. Under German occupation Reisha was sealed into a ghetto, into which the Jews of the whole region around — Lancut, Tyczyn, Kolbuszowa and many more — were driven, swelling it to some twenty thousand. In the summer of 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: the old and the sick were shot in the Rudna forest, and the rest deported to Bełżec and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Sandomierz — Tzoizmir to its Jews — was an ancient town on the Vistula near its meeting with the San, one of the oldest Jewish kehillos in Poland, settled from the thirteenth century, with a shul first built in 1255. By the sixteenth century it was among the largest Jewish communities in the land.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Tzoizmir’s was a kehilla of the earliest generations of Polish Jewry. Together with the Jews of Kraków and Lemberg its leaders appealed to Casimir the Great, who in 1367 extended to them the protections first granted to Kalisz in 1264. Through the centuries it held its rabbonim, its great shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, a chassidishe town whose Jews bore the name Tzoizmir across the Jewish world.

Torah of the Town. Around its old shul — rebuilt in stone and standing to this day — and its battei midrash, Sandomierz carried a full Torah life across the centuries, its chadarim and shtieblach anchoring a kehilla that reached back to the dawn of Jewish Poland.

The Churban. Under German occupation Tzoizmir became a place of refuge, Jews expelled from Kalisz, Sieradz and Vienna driven into it. In 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: its Jews, with those they had sheltered, were deported to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד, and by the war’s end not a Jew was left in the ancient town.

The Town. Płock — Plotzk to its Jews — was an ancient city on the Vistula northwest of Warsaw, and one of the most ancient Jewish kehillos in all of Poland, reaching back to the medieval beginnings of Jewish settlement in the land.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Plotzk’s rabbinic chair was among the oldest and most honored in Poland, held in its time by R' Yehuda Leib Margolios (until 1804) and then by Reb Aryeh Leib Tzintz, the Maharal Tzintz, known as the Plotzker Gaon, one of the great poskim and darshanim of his age. The kehilla’s Great Shul and Little Shul, its Beis Medrash and its yeshiva anchored a full Torah and communal life of misnagdim and chassidim alike.

Torah of the Town. From the Maharal Tzintz through its yeshiva and battei midrash of the last generation, Plotzk carried the Torah of one of Poland’s most ancient kehillos — its Great Shul, its chadarim and Talmud Torah — across the centuries.

The Churban. Płock lay in the region annexed to the Reich. The Germans desecrated its shuls — the Great Shul turned to a garage, the Little Shul demolished — and early in 1941 expelled the whole kehilla to the towns of central Poland; from the ghettos into which they were driven its Jews were later deported to Treblinka and the death camps and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The ancient kehilla of Plotzk was destroyed.

The Town. Siedlce, a city east of Warsaw on the road to the Bug, held a great Jewish kehilla — some fifteen thousand Jews, about half the people of the town — a center of Jewish life and trade for the region of Podlasie around it.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Siedlce held an old and well-built kehilla, with its rabbonim, its great shul and its battei midrash, and the shtieblach of the chassidishe courts. A town of every current of Jewish life, it carried a full Torah and communal life into the twentieth century and served as a hub for the smaller kehillos around it.

Torah of the Town. Around its great shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and Talmud Torah, Siedlce held the Torah life of a regional center — a city of rabbonim and chassidim drawing the Jews of the towns around it.

The Churban. Under German occupation the Jews of Siedlce were sealed into a ghetto in 1941, into which the Jews of the towns around — Łosice, Mordy and more — were also driven. Beginning on 22 August 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: some ten thousand Jews were gathered at the Umschlagplatz and deported to nearby Treblinka, and Siedlce became a way-station through which the Jews of the whole region were sent to their deaths al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד.

The Town. Pińczów, an old town south of Kielce, held a Jewish kehilla settled from the sixteenth century, granted its rights in 1594. So old was it that its shul, built between 1594 and 1609 in stone, was among the most ancient in all of Poland, its seventeenth-century wall-paintings preserved to this day.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Around its venerable shul Pińczów built a full kehilla of rabbonim, dayanim and chassidim, its battei midrash and shtieblach gathered about the old beis haknesses. From the earliest generations of Polish Jewry the town held a place of Torah and learning in the Kielce region. And the town's own crown of the chassidus era was R' Avraham Mordechai Horowitz, the Pintshever — the hidden tzaddik who refused the admorus pressed on him by the Chozeh and the Ohev Yisrael, shver and rebbe of the Komarno, resting in the town's beis hachaim. Beside the hidden tzaddik's memory stood a court in the open: R' Chaim Meir Finkler, grandson of the Saba Kadisha's house, planted the Finkler court of Pintshev here and led it until the First War carried it to Kielce. The chain of the rabbanus reaches back to the early generations — the record names R' Menachem Mendel Margolios on its chair in the years שע"ה–שצ"ה — and in the chassidus era the town drew the Keser Kehuna, R' Naftali HaKohen Katz's line's heir of Stavnitz, who left Stavnitz for the rabbanus of Pintshev; at his word the kehilla of Stavnitz set the young R' Meir of Apta, the Ohr LaShamayim in his place. And of the town's daughters, Frumet, daughter of R' Shlomo of Pintshev, became the mother of the Tiferes Shlomo of Radomsk — the Radomsker's root runs through this town — while R' Fishel of Pintshev, of the Chozeh's chassidim, gave his daughter to R' Yankele of Melitz, the Ropshitzer's son.

Torah of the Town. The old shul, the battei midrash and the chadarim of Pińczów carried its Torah life across the centuries — a small but ancient kehilla whose stone beis haknesses still stands as a witness to the Jewish generations who davened in it.

Between the Wars. After the First War Pińczów counted some 4,300 Yidden — more than half the town — and stood, in the record's words, a well-known rabbinic center of the region, with three great shuls and its battei midrash beside them. Its Yidden lived by small trade, peddling and craft, with great merchants, factory owners and professionals among them; a Jewish bank stood with the Joint's support, and a gemach beside it. In the 1930s the rising antisemitism of the years drove many of the town's Yidden across the sea, and some up to Eretz Yisrael.

The Churban. The Germans took the town in September 1939, seized the property of its Yidden, bound them under movement decrees and drove them into forced labor. In May 1941 an open ghetto was set in the poor quarter — its Yidden needing permits to leave — and typhus broke out in the crowding, taking many, above all the old and the children; refugees were driven in from other towns, yet the ghetto did not grow, for the dying and the labor transports emptied it as fast. In the summer of 1942 word of the liquidations around began to reach the ghetto — Yidden dug hiding places and sought forged Polish papers. Then, on a day between 2 and 6 October 1942, SS men and German gendarmerie surrounded the ghetto: some 3,300 Yidden were driven out to Sandomierz, beaten fiercely as they went, the weak and the old shot on the road — and the Germans fell above all upon the children and the young girls, murdering them before their mothers' eyes — and from Sandomierz the kehilla was deported to Treblinka and murdered al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד. Pińczów was declared free of Jews. The few who fled to the forests were hunted by the Germans and by Polish peasants; those who lived joined the partisans, where most of them fell before the war's end. The ancient kehilla of Pińczów was destroyed.

What Remains. The stone shul of 1594–1609 stood through the churban and stands today — among the most ancient shuls of Poland, its seventeenth-century wall-paintings preserved, a witness over the emptied town. And in the beis hachaim rests the Pintshever tzaddik, his kever in the beis hachaim — the hidden one keeping his watch where the kehilla once davened.

The Town. Bardiov — Bardejov, Bartfeld in the mouths of its Yidden — was a walled royal town of the Sharish country of eastern Slovakia, on the old wine road from Tokay to Brody. Yidden are recorded passing through from early centuries, but the kehilla itself rose from תק"ז (1747), when Yidden of Galicia settled by the marketplace — and they brought Galicia with them: Bardiov grew into a chassidishe town in the heart of the Oberland, its men in long kapotes and shtreimlech, its tongue Yiddish, its chadarim full. The chevra kadisha stood from 1808; in the schism of Hungarian Jewry of תרכ"ט (1869) the kehilla went whole with the Orthodox. Its Yidden lived by the wine trade to Poland, by craft and by commerce, and built up the famous spa at the town's edge — to which the Empress Elisabeth herself once came; two Hebrew presses printed in the town.

The Suburbia and the Old Shul. Outside the city walls the kehilla raised its own quarter — and at its heart, in תק"צ (1830), the stone Old Shul, renovated and widened as the kehilla grew, with the beis medrash, the mikveh and the shechitah-house built beside it: the Jewish Suburbia of Bardiov, a compound of kedushah at the town's edge. In all, five shuls stood in Bardiov.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The first rav of Bardiov was R' Dov Ber Spira, and after his short tenure R' Mordechai Friedmann held the chair forty years, with the dayan R' Nosson Neta Landau, mechaber of Kanaf Renanah (niftar תרס"ז), beside him. From תרט"ז (1856) to תרל"א (1871) the rav was R' Chaim Avraham Orenstein, mechaber of Divrei Avraham, a talmid of the Chasam Sofer. And from תרל"ד (1874) began the era that gave the town its name in the chassidishe world: R' Moshe Halberstam, grandson of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz and son of the Divrei Baruch of Gorlitz, took the rabbanus — a Halberstam dynasty of seven decades whose authority ran over some forty villages of the countryside. On his petirah in תרס"ה (1905) his son R' Yechiel Nosson Halberstam succeeded him, the dayan R' Yitzchak Teitelbaum at his side. Into this house married R' Naftali Tzvi Unger of the Dombrova line — son-in-law of the raavad R' Moshe — who rose to be admor, av beis din, and rosh yeshiva of the town: the court and the rabbanus joined in one house.

The Yeshiva. The records of the town's yeshiva meet from two sides: the Keren LeDovid gave five of his years to founding Torah in Bardiov, and R' Naftali Tzvi Unger founded and led the first yeshiva the town had ever had — and the yeshiva ran in a chassidishe ruach, some sixty bochurim learning in it through the 1930s, until the deportation itself. The town kept no Jewish day school: its children learned in the cheder and the Talmud Torah, and the bochurim went up into the yeshiva — some five hundred Torah-true families around them. By 1919 the kehilla counted 2,119 souls with forty settlements bound to its rabbanus; by 1930, 2,264.

The Churban. Under the Slovak state the decrees came from 1940: Yidden driven from their businesses, and the Yidden of the villages pressed into the town — the census of 1942 counted 2,498 in Bardiov and near 3,600 in its district. In Adar תש"ב (March 1942) the Hlinka Guard drummed through the town with the work orders — and then the order that every Jewish girl report for "work in the East": the first official transport of Jewish daughters to Auschwitz. The record preserves the daring of those days: Rafael Lowy, a wine merchant and head of the kehilla, with the community's leaders, had the town's daughters injected to feign a typhus epidemic — the quarantine was declared, and the girls of Bardiov were kept off that first transport. The reprieve was short. On 15 May 1942 the deportation officers arrived from Bratislava; all who held no exception papers were concentrated in the Old Shul and the smaller shuls, and on 16–17 May hundreds of peasant wagons carried the families to the station — pressed eighty to a cattle car, without food or water, a backpack each — and the transports ran to the Lublin district: of some 2,700 souls, about 2,400 were deported, most to their deaths at Majdanek and the camps of Lublin, הי"ד. And on Tisha B'Av of that year the town's admor and rosh yeshiva, R' Naftali Tzvi Unger, gravely ill, was taken from his home wrapped in tallis and tefillin — murdered al kiddush Hashem days later, הי"ד. The kehilla of Bardiov was destroyed.

What Remains. After the war Bardiov became a rehabilitation town for the survivors of the camps and a way-station of the Bericha toward Eretz Yisrael; 384 Yidden stood in it in 1947 — and were attacked in the streets that June with no protection — and by 1965 one family remained. But the Jewish Suburbia stands: the Old Shul of 1830, the beis medrash and the mikveh, preserved and restored in our own days — and the klei kodesh of Bardiov are kept in the Divrei Chaim shul of Yerushalayim, named for the zeide of the town's rabbanim: the vessels of the Sharish kehilla serving in the city of Yerushalayim to this day.

The Town. Ostrowiec — Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski — was a town of the Kielce region whose Jews, settled from the seventeenth century, at first belonged to the kehilla of Opatów (Apta) nearby. With the growth of its steelworks the kehilla grew to some ten thousand and, with refugees, to over fifteen thousand by the war.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Ostrowiec was a chassidishe town, the seat of the Ostrovtzer Rebbe, Reb Meir Yechiel Halevi Halstock, who was renowned for the fasts he kept across the decades of his life and for the sharpness of his Torah. Around his court and the town’s great shul gathered the shtieblach and battei midrash of a full chassidishe kehilla.

Torah of the Town. The court of the Ostrovtzer, the great shul, the battei midrash and the chadarim of Ostrowiec carried a full Torah life — a chassidishe town that bore its name into the wider world through its rebbe and his Torah.

The Churban. Under German occupation a ghetto was sealed in Ostrowiec, swelled to over fifteen thousand by Jews driven in from the towns around. On 11 and 12 October 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: some eleven thousand Jews were gathered in the market square and deported to Treblinka and murdered; a remnant held in a slave-labor camp at the steelworks was later sent to Auschwitz — the kehilla of Ostrowiec destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Sanok, a town of western Galicia on the San in the Carpathian foothills, held an old Jewish kehilla of some five thousand souls, a community of trade and craft and chassidus among the hills near Przemyśl.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Sanok was a chassidishe town in the Galician way, with its rabbonim, its shuls and its shtieblach of the Galician courts. For over thirty years its rav was R' Yehuda Yitzchak Frankel, mechaber of Me'at Mayim and Mechir Chalav; in the early 1920s the chair was held by R' Meir Shapiro, the future Maharam Shapira, who led its Torah in the years his Chachmei Lublin and Daf Yomi were taking shape. Its battei midrash and chadarim carried a full Torah and communal life in the foothills of the Carpathians.

Torah of the Town. Around its shuls and battei midrash, its shtieblach and chadarim, Sanok held the Torah life of a Galician kehilla — a town of rabbonim and chassidim in the hill country of the San.

The Churban. The Germans entered Sanok in September 1939 and burned its shuls; on Sukkos many Jews were driven across the San into Soviet-held land. The rest were sealed into a ghetto, swelled by refugees to many thousands; in September 1942 they were taken to the Zaslaw camp and from there deported to Bełżec and murdered, the sick and the aged shot in the forests — the kehilla of Sanok destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד.

The Town. Jarosław, a town of western Galicia on the San near Przemyśl, held an old Jewish kehilla reaching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its great fair was among the most important in the land, drawing merchants from across Poland and beyond.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Jarosław held a place of honor in the order of Polish Jewry: at its famous fair the Council of Four Lands — the governing body of Polish Jewry, seated at Lublin — would gather to rule on the affairs of the kehillos. The town’s own kehilla, with its Great Shul and its battei midrash, held a full Torah and communal life across the generations.

Torah of the Town. Around its Great Shul and its battei midrash, Jarosław carried the Torah life of an old Galician kehilla — a town of rabbonim and chassidim that had once hosted the leaders of all Polish Jewry at its fair.

The Churban. The Germans took Jarosław in September 1939 and within weeks drove almost the whole kehilla across the San into Soviet-held land; many were exiled deep into the Soviet interior. Those who remained or returned shared the fate of Galician Jewry, deported to Bełżec and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The old kehilla of Jarosław was destroyed.

The Town. Bochnia, an old salt-mining town of Lesser Poland southeast of Kraków, held a Jewish kehilla of some three thousand souls, about a quarter of the town, who lived by trade and craft and small industry.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Bochnia held an old and established kehilla, led for generations by a rabbinic dynasty of the house of Sanz — the Halberstam family — with its battei midrash and chadarim, its great shul and its battei midrash, and the shtieblach of the Galician chassidishe courts. Its chadarim and Talmud Torah carried the Torah life of the town across the generations.

Torah of the Town. Around its shul, its battei midrash and shtieblach, and its chadarim, Bochnia held a full Torah and communal life — an old kehilla of the Kraków region in the foothills southeast of the city.

The Churban. Under German occupation a ghetto was sealed in Bochnia in 1941, swelled by Jews driven in from the towns around. In the deportations of 1942 the kehilla was destroyed: thousands were sent to Bełżec and hundreds shot in the nearby forest; the remnant, held as a labor camp, was deported in 1943 to the camps and to Auschwitz — the kehilla of Bochnia destroyed al kiddush Hashem, הי"ד, the town declared free of Jews in October 1943.

The Town. Drohobitch — in the Galician foothills of the Carpathians, in the Lvov country — carried a kehilla from early centuries, and carried its wounds: in ת"ח (1648) the Cossacks of Chmielnicki stormed the town and murdered most of its Yidden. The kehilla rose again, and around it grew the salt-works and then the oil of Galicia — treasures its Yidden, with the Yidden of neighboring Boryslav, developed into a whole industry, until the Galician shtetl stood an industrial city; by the century's end some eighty-six villages of the countryside were bound to the kehilla of Drohobitch. Its history records mekubalim and lomdim, chassidishe rabbanim and rabbanim of the old school — and the storms of the Sabbatian era passing through it, with defenders of the faith standing against that fire.

The Great Shul. The first shul of Drohobitch rose in 1711; when fire took it, the kehilla built in its place the largest shul in all of Galicia — the Great Shul of Drohobitch, the crown of the oil city, whose walls would outlive the kehilla itself.

Rabbanim and Tzaddikim. The town's oldest crown is R' Yitzchak of Drohobitch — the tzaddik of the Besht's own circle who stands in the chain of the hidden ones, and the father of R' Yechiel Michel, the Maggid of Zlotchov; his name walks through the courts of the site at Yampola. In the 1840s the rabbanus was held by R' Eliezer Nissan Teitelbaum, son of the Yismach Moshe, who came to Drohobitch from the chair of Sighet — the father of the Yeitev Lev. A generation later the av beis din was R' Eliyahu Horoshovsky, the Ezor Eliyahu — into whose house, in the plague year of תרל"ג (1873), came R' Asher II of Stolin, der Yunger Rebbe, who secluded himself with the rov three hours, gave himself as a kapparah for the city, and was niftar and buried here — the kever of the Rebbe of Karlin-Stolin rests in Drohobitch to this day. And from the town's name runs the rebbishe line of Shatz-Drohobitch among the houses of the Zlotchover's descendants.

The Churban. In September 1939 the Germans took the city and handed it to the Soviets under their pact; the Soviet years nationalized the works and exiled the wealthy and the active into the depths of Russia. When the Germans returned in Tammuz תש"א (July 1941), a three-day pogrom broke over the Yidden at the hands of Ukrainians and Poles — hundreds murdered with torture — and the decrees came down: a Judenrat under Avraham Rosenblatt, squeezed for ransom payments and forced labor, and hunger in the kehilla almost from the first day. On 23 September 1941 some 368 Yidden, most of the intelligentsia, were seized — some murdered, some sent to the labor camps and to Janowska at Lvov; on 18 October hundreds more. In mid-November the officers Franz Wenzel and Josef Gabriel demanded of the Judenrat a list of the kehilla's sick and disabled — and those listed, more than 150 souls by one record and some 300 by another, were taken on 22–23 November and shot in the Bronica forest. In Av תש"ב (August 1942) the great Aktion began — days of hunts, and the transports ran to Belzec; the ghetto that followed was ground down in further aktions and Bronica shootings until its liquidation in תש"ג (1943). When the Russian army entered in August 1944, a remnant only remained of the thousands of Drohobitch. הי"ד.

What Remains. The Great Shul stood through it all — stripped and broken, but standing. In the years 2013–2018 it was restored, at the initiative of a survivor of Drohobitch and his son, and rededicated with some three hundred guests from many lands; today some 150 Yidden live in the city, and the yizkor book of Drohobitch-Boryslav keeps the kehilla's record. The largest shul of Galicia stands again over the oil city — and in its beis hachaim the Yunger Rebbe of Stolin keeps his watch over the town he came to shield.

The Town. Oświęcim sat in western Galicia where the Sola meets the Vistula — and its Jews called it Oshpitzin, from ushpizin, guests: a town whose Jewish name meant hospitality. By the prewar years Jews were roughly half the town, with its shuls, shtiblech and chadarim — an old, warm Galician kehilla. (Seeded thin — population figures, institutions and kehilla records await a dedicated pass; named targets: Pinkas Hakehillot Poland, Yad Vashem, the Auschwitz Jewish Center records.) On the dayan's seat of the kehilla sat, in the generation before its last rabbanim, R' Moshe Yaakov Scharf, the Darchei Yosher, rosh av beis din and moreh tzedek, who rests in an ohel in the town's beis hachaim.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The town's seats carried admorim and rabbanim of the Galician heartland: the Admor R' Dov Berish of Oshpitzin, whose testimony and descendants stand already on this site's cards; R' Yitzchak Aizik Rosenbaum, Rav of Oshpitzin, zeide of the Chelkas Yoav's house; R' Shlomo of Bobov, the first Bobover Rebbe, who held the rabbanus here in the years before Vishnitsa; and from תרס"ז the chain closed on his brother-in-law, R' Elazar Rosenfeld — the Oshpitziner Rav, of the house of Kaminka, youngest son-in-law of the Divrei Chaim, with his sons R' Shalom Reuven and R' Naftali Shmuel Tzvi serving beside and after him.

Torah of the Town. Oshpitzin was a town of chassidus — Bobover roots from the Rebbe's own tenure, the Kaminka court of its Rav — and of yeshiva Torah: among the first eight yeshivos of the Keser Torah network of Radomsk, one opened in Oświęcim, the town's bochurim learning in the network that covered western Poland.

The Churban. The German army took the town in September 1939 and renamed it Auschwitz — and at its edge rose the camp that would swallow the Jews of Europe, bearing the town's German name into eternal infamy. The kehilla itself was broken first: in 1941 the Jews of Oshpitzin were expelled — to Będzin and Sosnowiec, as this site's Będzin diary records — and from those ghettos they were deported to Auschwitz: the children of Oshpitzin murdered in the camp that carried their own town's name. Their Rav, driven to Sosnowiec, was niftar there in a cellar in תש"ג. (Expulsion dates and numbers seeded — named targets above.) הי"ד.

The Town. Chrzanów, a town of western Galicia near the border of Upper Silesia, held a large and intensely religious Jewish kehilla — some eight thousand souls — so devoted to the mitzvos that it was known as the Jerusalem of Galicia, a town where the Shabbos was kept, in its people’s words, as a Shabbos of Shabbosos.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Chrzanów was a chassidishe town, its rabbinic chair held in its last generations by rabbonim of the Halberstam family of Sanz — the court of Keshanov founded by R’ Dovid Halberstam, son of the Divrei Chaim, the first Keshanover Rebbe; in its old beis hachaim rest R’ Shlomo Bochner, a talmid of Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk, and the Halberstam rabbonim of the town. Around its great shul and its battei midrash gathered the shtieblach of the Galician courts.

Torah of the Town. Famed for its Shabbos and its yiras shamayim, Chrzanów held a full Torah life — its great shul, its many battei midrash and shtieblach, its chadarim and yeshivos — a kehilla whose devotion gave it its name among the towns of Galicia.

The Churban. Chrzanów lay in the region annexed to the Reich, near Oshpitzin. A ghetto was sealed in 1940; in June 1942 some four thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and the ghetto, turned to a slave-labor camp, was liquidated in February 1943, its last Jews sent to Auschwitz and murdered al kiddush Hashem — הי"ד. The kehilla of Chrzanów, the Jerusalem of Galicia, was destroyed.

The Town. Brody stood in eastern Galicia near the Volhynian border, and Yidden are recorded in it from the time of the gezeiros of ת"ח ות"ט. Documents of 1599 — fifteen years after the town was founded — already name a shul, a beis hachaim and a bathhouse. In 1704 the town was bought by the Potocki family, who helped the kehilla to its feet by freeing it in part from taxes; many Yidden leased or managed their estates.

Two things then made Brody what it became. In 1749 the Armenian merchants left, and the Jewish merchants of the town were left without competition. And in 1779 Kaiser Yosef II granted Brody the status of a free city — sitting on the Austrian-Russian border, it turned into one of the great trading places of Europe, and by the first half of the nineteenth century it was the second city of Galicia after Lemberg, with a Jewish majority for long stretches. When the pogroms drove Yidden out of the countryside, Brody became the place they ran to.

The numbers say the rest. In 1827, of 11,718 Jewish merchants in the whole of Galicia, 1,134 — about one in ten — lived and traded in Brody; the town held thirty-six Jewish brokers and nine Jewish bankers, and 163 of its 175 factories were in Jewish hands. When Balzac passed through in 1847 he wrote of the Yidden of Brody that for all the millions they could make, they would not leave their own ways behind them.

What the Kehilla Paid For. A register of 1765 lists the men the kehilla had on its payroll — a hundred and sixty-three of them: five rabbanim, twenty-seven officials of the vaad, nine chazzanim, three sofrim, two baalei tefillah, seven melamdim, six sofrei stam, eleven doctors, nine apothecaries, two maggidim, twelve healers and barbers, and one man over the taxes. It is a photograph of a kehilla that ran itself.

The Fortress Shul. The first shul of Brody burned. In 1742 the kehilla built in its place a shul in the shape of a fortress — thick-walled, built to be defended — and it stood through two centuries until the churban. Around it grew the chevros: a Chevras Talmud Torah, a Chevras Shas and others, founded at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Kloiz. At the heart of the town stood the beis medrash beside the old Great Shul, known across Galicia simply as the Kloiz of Brody. It was not like the other batei medrash of its time. Where those were carried by the kehilla, the Kloiz was a private institution, founded and kept by one wealthy family — by R' Yaakov Babad, as the record has it, whose son-in-law R' Chaim Segal Landa of Apta stood at its head for many years. A fixed and deliberately small number of outstanding lamdanim sat in it and did nothing else, and its men were known above all for Kabbalah and for taking on the minhagim of mekubalim.

Through the eighteenth century rabbanim came to Brody from across Galicia and stayed the whole week in the town to learn there, through the nights as well. The Noda BiYehuda came at thirteen to continue his learning in it, and wrote afterward of what he had found: ״בעת ההיא היתה העיר הזאת כלילת יופי, מלאה חכמים וסופרים״ — in that time this city was perfect in beauty, full of chachamim and sofrim.

The Chachmei HaKloiz. The roll of those who sat in it is the answer to why Brody is remembered. Among them: R' Chaim Tzanzer — not to be confused with the Divrei Chaim of Sanz — mechutan of the Toldos Yaakov Yosef, who wrote the Neder Bar Kadesh on Avos and the Hod Tehillah on Chanukah; the Noda BiYehuda; R' Avraham Gershon of Kitov, the brother-in-law of the Baal Shem Tov; R' Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz; R' Yitzchak of Drohobitch; R' Yechiel Michel of Zlotchov; R' Nachman of Horodenka; R' Shabsai of Rashkov; R' Mordechai Zev Ornstein, deputy to the Rav HaMedina of Galicia; R' Meshulam Igra; R' Elazar Rokeach, of the house that would give Galicia the Sar Shalom of Belz; R' Yehoshua Leshtzover, whom the town called R' Yehoshua Klausner for the Kloiz itself; R' Moshe Osterer, mechaber of the Arugas HaBosem on Shir HaShirim and the Derash Moshe on Tehillim; R' Naftali ben Levi of the Beis Levi; R' Meir Margolios of the Meor Nesivim; and R' Ephraim Zalman Margolios, the Beis Efraim, the last of the great chachmei HaKloiz.

The Rabbanim. Brody was known for the rabbinic houses that held it — Katzenellenbogen, Babad, Rokeach, Horowitz and above all Kristianpoller, who held the chair on and off through the eighteenth century. R' Meir Kristianpoller, who had married a daughter of R' Avraham Shechnish of Brody and served first in Kristianpol, took the town in 1785 and held it some thirty years; when he was niftar his son R' Yechiel Michel was too young to follow him, and the town turned to R' Aryeh Yehuda Leib Teomim, who took it at eighty-eight and held it past his hundredth year. After him came R' Elazar Landa, an einikel of the Noda BiYehuda, then R' Yechiel Michel Kristianpoller, R' Menachem Shor and R' Yitzchak Chayes.

And from Tammuz תק"פ (1820) for nearly fifty years R' Shlomo Kluger served as maggid meisharim and dayan of the city — never its official rav, and yet the man the world came to call the Maggid of Brody, one of the most prolific poskim of the century. It was the old rav, R' Aryeh Yehuda Leib, who honored him when he came and saw to his parnassah.

The Cherem Against the Frankists. Brody did not only learn; it ruled. In 1756 the Frankist sect was placed under cherem in Brody — and on the strength of that cherem the sect was put under the ban across the kehillos of Poland. Its rabbanim stood through that generation against Shabsai Tzvi's inheritors: R' Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz, rav of the town in the 1760s, signed the cherem against the Frankists, though in the matter of R' Yonasan Eybeschutz he sought the more forbearing side.

And Against the Haskalah. The same border and the same trade that made Brody rich made it a gate through which the Haskalah entered Galicia; in 1865 the Hebrew weekly Ivri Anochi was founded in the town. The Torah-loyal of Brody stood against it, and R' Shlomo Kluger was among the fiercest of its opponents. Something of what the place had been survived in another way: the hero of Agnon's Hachnasas Kallah is Reb Yudel of Brody.

The Churban — 1941. The full account stands in the Brody churban diary. Brody passed to the Soviets in 1939 — the kehilla council dissolved, industry and housing nationalised, and in January 1940 the great merchants and leaders of the kehilla exiled into the Russian interior; while the refugees who had fled to Brody from the German zone and registered to go home were sent instead to Siberia, which for many of them meant living. The Germans entered on 29 June 1941. A Judenrat was set up that summer, and the killing began at once: on 12 July, between two hundred and two hundred and fifty of the town's learned and professional men — summoned two days earlier to a meeting with the authorities — were murdered.

The Ghetto. In January 1942 a ghetto was made for the 6,500 Yidden left in Brody. In September some 3,000 refugees from the surrounding towns and villages were driven in with them, and in December about two thousand more from Toporow, Stanislawczyk and elsewhere. There was no fuel and there was no food. The ghetto was sealed off from the world, and through the winter of 1942–43 the dying ran at forty and fifty a day; typhus took several hundred more.

The Aktions. On 19–21 September 1942 the Yidden were gathered in the market square and some two and a half to four thousand were sent to Belzec; about three hundred were shot in the round-up itself. On 2 November 1942 came the second aktion — thousands more to Belzec, and the head of the Judenrat murdered. By then the truth about Belzec was known in the town, and there were Yidden who took their own lives rather than board.

The Liquidation. On 21 May 1943 Katzmann, the SS and Police Leader of Galicia, ordered the ghetto and its labour camp destroyed. The surviving Yidden — the counts run from two and a half to three and a half thousand — were deported to Majdanek. The liquidation took a month, running into June. About forty Yidden were still alive at work in the city afterward; they were murdered on 19 July 1943. Of a kehilla that had been near 9,000 before the war — close to seventy of every hundred souls in the town — the ancient kehilla of Brody was brought to its end al kiddush Hashem. הי"ד.

What Was Attempted in the Ghetto. At the end of 1942 a resistance was formed in secret under Shmuel Weiler, which made contact with the Polish underground and tried to get arms. A family camp of between eighty and two hundred Yidden of Brody hid in the Pianica forest. A general rising never came; but during the liquidation men of that group shot dead several of the Ukrainian police. And there were gentiles who helped: Otto Hassenstein of the forestry administration saved Yidden by putting them on the forest rolls, telling everyone that whoever worked for him was to be dealt with honestly, Jew or Pole or German; his wife Liselotte hid Yidden in her attic, and when she was denounced for sheltering a Jewish woman who had jumped from a death train she was tried in Lemberg and sentenced to two years.

What Remains. The Germans tried to bring down the fortress shul of 1742 and did not finish the work; its ruins stand in Brody to this day. The old beis hachaim survives, and in it the kevarim of the Beis Efraim and of the Maharshak — a stop on this site's map. The town was retaken in 1944 after heavy fighting, and of the kehilla of chachamim and sofrim that the Noda BiYehuda had found perfect in beauty, what is left is a ruined wall, a field of stones, and the seforim.

The Town. Tomaszów Lubelski (Yiddish Tomashov) was founded at the close of the 16th century by the magnate Jan Zamoyski and named for his son Tomasz. It lies in the southeastern corner of the Lublin region, close to the old Galician border. A Jewish kehilla took root there early, and by the 19th and 20th centuries Jews made up about half the town — more than five thousand souls by 1939.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. With the spread of chassidus in Poland, Tomashov became a seat of rebbes and a town of many shtieblach — batei medrash of Kotzk–Ger, Trisk, Radzin, Belz and Sanz stood side by side. Its own admorim were R' Yehoshua Frisherman and his father R' Yosef of Yartshev, of the Yaritchov court, and later R' Aryeh Leibush Rubin of the Chelm line, who served as rav and rebbe in the town.

Torah of the Town. Tomashov was the birthplace of R' Mordechai Yosef Leiner, the Mei HaShiloach of Izbica, and the place where the Kotzker Rebbe spent his early years — an extraordinary pair of contemporaries drawn from one small town. Among its lomdim was R' Shmaya, baal Siyata DiShmaya, and it gave the Torah world a stream of rabbonim and dayanim.

The Churban. Six days after the German invasion the town was bombed on 6 September 1939, and about a hundred and fifty were killed; that December the Germans herded the sick and disabled into a cellar and drowned them. The Jews were forced under a Judenrat, penned into a ghetto, and in 1942 deported the few kilometres south to Bełżec, where the kehilla of Tomaszów Lubelski was murdered al kiddush Hashem הי"ד.

The Town. Eishishok (Lithuanian Eišiškės; Polish Ejszyszki; איישישאָק) lies in the Vilna region of Lithuania, some sixty kilometres south-southwest of Vilna on the old road to Novogrudok, near the Belarus border. By tradition it was founded around 1070 by the Lithuanian commander Eišis — older than Vilna by some two and a half centuries — and its Jewish presence was among the most ancient in Eastern Europe: matzeivos in its beis hachaim were reported from as early as the 11th century. From the mid-18th century Jews were more than half the town, reaching some eighty percent by 1820, dominating its trade and crafts and its famous horse and cattle markets.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Across Lita the town was known as ayaras haperushim — the town of the prushim — for its Kibbutz HaPerushim, an elite kollel of married scholars who parted from their homes to toil in Torah. Among its rabbonim were R' Yosef Zundel Hutner, his son R' Naftali Menachem Hutner, and, in its last years, R' Shimon Rozovsky הי"ד, who was murdered with his kehilla. The chair was held in its day also by R' Yehuda Leib Rabinowitz, who went from Eishishok to the rabbanus of Grodno itself. In its final generations the town divided, as many Lita kehillos did, between a zealous Torah-loyal camp — most of its baalei batim and the men of the Kibbutz HaPerushim — and a Zionist-maskilic one; the prushim twice brought the Chofetz Chaim to deliver sharp derashos against the new movements and against the "cheder metukan," though the tide could not be wholly held back.

Torah of the Town. The Kibbutz HaPerushim was a nursery of gedolim. Among those who sat and learned there in their youth were R' Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, later the manhig of Lita; R' Isser Zalman Meltzer; the Steipler Gaon; R' Shabsai Yogel, later rosh yeshiva of Slonim; R' Nachum Zev Ziv of the Kelm mussar house; R' Elya Chaim Meisel; and R' Chaim Aryeh Leib Mishkovsky, the Stawisker, who sat five years among its prushim. It was here, too, that R' Moshe Danishevsky, the young "illui of Smorgon," taught in his early years, and among his talmidim in the town was R' Meir Simcha HaKohen, later the Ohr Sameach of Dvinsk, who learned by him in Eishishok for some two years. From this small town flowed roshei yeshiva, dayanim and rabbonim across the Torah world.

The Churban. German troops entered Eishishok on 23 June 1941, and on 21 September an SS Einsatzkommando arrived with Lithuanian auxiliaries. The Jews of the town and the surrounding villages — more than four thousand souls — were herded into the great shul and two batei medrash over Rosh Hashanah and then, on Tzom Gedalia, led out in groups to the old beis hachaim. On 25–26 September 1941 the men were shot at one pit and the women and children at another: some three and a half thousand of Eishishok's Jews, and fifteen hundred more from nearby, murdered al kiddush Hashem in two days; barely twenty-nine survived in hiding. Its churban has its own record, and its faces live on in the Tower of Faces in Washington, gathered by the survivor Yaffa Eliach. הי"ד.

The City. Shavel — Šiauliai, called Shavl by its Jews — is the fourth-largest city of Lithuania and the chief town of Žemaitija (Samogitia), in the north of the country. From the nineteenth century it grew into a center of the leather trade: the tannery founded by Chaim Frenkel in 1879 was the largest in the whole Russian Empire. A fast-growing Jewish population came with it — by 1902 Jews were nearly three-fifths of the city.

The Kehilla. Expelled en masse into Russia in 1915, the Jews returned through the 1920s; by 1939 some 8,000 lived there, about a quarter of the city, with their shuls, their Hebrew and Yiddish schools, and a line of distinguished rabbonim — among them R' Yosef Zecharia Stern and R' Meir Atlas, and finally R' Aharon Bakst — "Reb Archik" — its last rav.

Torah of the Town. Shavel never housed one of the great Lithuanian yeshivos; its Torah life ran through the town's rav and beis din, its shuls and Talmud Torah. What gave it its place on the Torah map of Lita was its chain of rabbonim: R' Yosef Zecharia Stern, who sat on its beis din for forty-three years — the “Rav HaZocher” of phenomenal memory, author of the Zecher Yehosef; R' Meir Atlas, father-in-law of R' Elchonon Wasserman and R' Isser Zalman Meltzer; and finally R' Aharon Bakst. Shavel was also the birthplace, in 1910, of R' Yosef Shalom Elyashiv — the future posek hador of the Litvish world — born into the household of his grandfather, the great mekubal R' Shlomo Elyashiv, the Leshem, who had himself served as a moreh tzedek in the town.

The Churban. The Germans entered on 26 June 1941. Three days later the rav R' Aharon Bakst, his son-in-law Dayan Aizik Rabinowitz, Dayan Avraham Yitzchak Nachumovski and other Jews were forced to dig their own graves and shot in the Kuziai forest; within weeks about a thousand of the city's six thousand Jews had been murdered. The rest were sealed into the Shavel ghetto and set to labor in the leather works; in 1943 it became an SS concentration camp; in the Children's Aktion of 5 November 1943 more than five hundred of its children were torn away and murdered at Auschwitz; and in July 1944 its remnant was deported to Stutthof. Only some five hundred of the kehilla survived. The full account is told in the churban diary of Shavel; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The City. Dvinsk — called Dinaburg until the Russian renamings, today Daugavpils in Latvia — sits on the Dvina (Daugava) river in the southeast of the land, near the meeting of Latvia, Lita and White Russia. A fortress and railway city of the Russian Empire, it held one of the great Jewish kehillos of the region, Jews forming a large share of the city through the late nineteenth century.

The Kehilla — Two Crowns. A generation before the crown was shared, the rav and Av Beis Din of Dvinsk was R' Aharon Shaul Zelig HaKohen, the Pruzhiner (1868–1879), the rosh yeshiva of Minsk who came to the city in his later years; in his seat from תרל"ט came R' Reuven HaLevi Levin — Reb Ruvele Denenburger, the Rosh L'Reuveni, rav of the city to his petirah in תרמ"ז, while the Pruzhiner's son-in-law R' Moshe HaKohen Korelitz carried the beis-din burden — the bridge to the years of the two crowns. For a generation Dvinsk was led by two geonim at once: the Ohr Sameach over the misnagdic kehilla from תרמ"ח, and the Rogatchover Gaon over the chasidishe one — a pairing told in full on their two cards, which gave the city a stature in Torah unmatched by any community of its size. The Ohr Sameach stood on the dike of the Dvina when the river rose, and stayed under the guns of the First War — every bullet has its address — and both geonim lie in the Dvinsk beis hachaim to this day.

The Churban. The kehilla of Dvinsk perished in the churban of Latvian Jewry: in Sivan תש"א (1941) the Nazis took the city and put its Jews to death, הי"ד — among them Rachel, daughter of the Rogatchover, who had raced to that very month to send her father's manuscripts to New York as two-centimeter photographs, as his card tells. The kevarim of the two geonim survived: the remnants of the kehilla still go up to them, as a recorded aliyah of 2011 attests — a card to be told in full in its own pass.

The Town. Salant — Salantai — a small town of Žemaitija (Samogitia) in northwestern Lita, held a Jewish kehilla of modest size and outsized name: it was the town of R’ Zundel of Salant, by whom the founder of mussar learned, and the town whose name R’ Yisrael Salanter — R’ Yisrael Lipkin, raised there — carried into every beis medrash of Lita. Here too R’ Naftali Amsterdam, of the first of the movement, was born in 1832.

The Churban. The kehilla of Salant perished in the churban of Lithuanian Jewry in תש"א (1941), הי"ד — the wider story told in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. A card to be told in full in its own pass.

The Town. Tismenitz — Tysmienica, in eastern Galicia near Stanisław — was an old kehilla: Jews are recorded there from the fifteenth century, and an organized community stood by the turn of the eighteenth, reckoned among the kehillos under the Council of the Province of Russia, a limb of the Va’ad Arba Aratzos. The town, held by the Potocki magnates — King Jan Sobieski himself lodged there in 1686 — grew into a famed center of the fur and leather trade, its furrier-merchants traveling to the great fairs of Leipzig and Breslau. When the old wooden shul burned in 1754 the kehilla raised a great stone beis haknesses in its place; some eight hundred Jews paid the poll-tax in 1765, and through the nineteenth century the kehilla numbered between two and two-and-a-half thousand souls, a quarter and more of the town. Poland until 1772, then Austrian Galicia, then Poland again between the wars, Tismenitz lies today in Ukraine.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The name of Tismenitz stands in the Torah world above all on one chair — the thirty-year rabbanus of R' Meshulam Igra, the orphan-iluy of Buczacz, who came to its seat at barely seventeen and made his Tismenitz beis medrash a beis medrash of geonim: there the Ketzos HaChoshen, the Nesivos, R’ Mordechai Benet and his nephew R' Naftali of Ropshitz sat together on one bench. After him the kehilla kept a long line of rabbonim — among them the Horowitz ravs (R’ Aryeh Leibish and R’ Shmuel Halevi Ish Horowitz) and R’ Yosef Hager — down to its last rav, R’ Aharon Aryeh Leib Koten, who led the kehilla into the churban. The great stone shul stood at its heart.

Torah of the Town. Tismenitz was also a cradle of chassidus. R' Yaakov Koppel Chossid — Reb Yaakov Kopel Likover, a talmid of the Baal Shem Tov — settled there and made it a seat of the rising chassidus of Galicia; when a dispute broke out between the misnaged gaon Igra and the townsmen, it was R’ Yaakov Koppel who kept the peace and stood at the rav’s side. From his house came his son R’ Menachem Mendel, the founder of the Kosov dynasty — and from Kosov grew Vizhnitz: so the great Kosov–Vizhnitz line is rooted in Tismenitz, where R’ Yaakov Koppel lies buried. The chassidim of the town were harried in the anti-chassidic campaigns of early Austrian Galicia, and in time the Haskalah pressed at its Torah life as well; yet its battei midrash, its chadarim and its shtieblach carried the kehilla’s learning to the end.

The Churban. Under Soviet rule from 1939, Tismenitz fell to the Germans in the summer of 1941; on 2 July 1941 Hungarian troops entered the town amid a wave of Ukrainian-nationalist pogroms, and its Jews were given over to violence and plunder. In September 1941 the Jews of Tismenitz were driven to Stanisławów, the regional city — and there they were swallowed in its destruction: in the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 12 October 1941, when some ten to twelve thousand Jews were shot at the Stanisławów cemetery, and in the deportations through 1942 to the death camp of Belzec. The ancient kehilla of Tismenitz — the seat of the Igra and a cradle of Kosov — was annihilated, הי״ד.

The Town. Eisenstadt — Kismarton — stood at the head of the sheva kehillos, the seven guarded communities of western Hungary under the Esterházy princes, and carried one of the great rabbinic chairs of the land: the city of R’ Meir Eisenstadt, the Panim Meiros, in whose yeshiva the young R’ Yonasan Eibeschutz learned, and of R’ Akiva Eiger the first, later of Pressburg. Here R’ Yeshaya Pick (Berlin) was born in תפ"ה — the boy whose hagahos would one day sit in the margin of every Gemara. In 1851 the chair passed to R' Azriel Hildesheimer, who built here a yeshiva that joined limudei kodesh with secular study and grew from twelve talmidim to over a hundred before he was called to Berlin in 1869 — a derech that drew the fierce opposition of the Hungarian kannoim. A card to be told in full in its own pass.

The Town. Ivye (Iwie; Yiddish Ivye) is a small town in the Grodno region — today in Belarus — founded in the fifteenth century. Between the wars some two thousand Jews lived there — a large part of the town — with Tarbut and Yiddish schools and a full range of youth movements.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. A kehilla of traders and craftsmen grew in Ivye over the centuries — several hundred Jews through the nineteenth century, swelling to some two thousand between the wars, with its shuls and batei medrash. Its rav for some fifty years in the eighteenth century was R' Moshe Ashkenazi, who was close to the Vilna Gaon and served without pay; later generations were led by the Grodzinski rabbinic line. Ivye was the birthplace of R' Aharon Bakst — "Reb Archik."

Torah of the Town. Ivye had its dayanim and a local rosh yeshiva, but no yeshiva of wide renown; its Torah life centered on the town rav and its batei medrash. Its pride was rather the gedolim it sent out into the Torah world — foremost among them R' Aharon Bakst, "Reb Archik," who was born there.

The Churban. The Germans entered at the end of June 1941. On 2 August 1941 some two hundred and twenty of the town's educated men — its teachers, bookkeepers, technicians and professionals, aged twenty to sixty — were taken to the forest by Stonevichi (Staniewicze) and shot. In February 1942 a barbed-wire ghetto of about three thousand was sealed, the Jews of the surrounding villages brought in. On 12 May 1942 a Gestapo unit from Lida gathered the Jews on the pretext of a passport check and murdered some two thousand five hundred of them — by then mostly women and children — at Stonevichi; about twelve hundred able-bodied Jews were kept alive in a shrunken ghetto. It was destroyed by the start of 1943, its last Jews sent by way of Lida to Majdanek; a remnant escaped to the forests, and the Bielski partisans brought out more than a hundred. The full account is told in the churban diary of Ivye; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Vilna (Vilnius) was founded in the early fourteenth century and held a central place among the cities of Lithuania. A Jewish community took shape around the city's great shul, and by 1592 the street on which it stood was already known as "Jews' Street."

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. From at least the second half of the seventeenth century Vilna was one of the largest Jewish communities in Lithuania. It governed itself through the Kahal — an elitist communal council of talmidei chachamim and men of means that ruled with a firm hand; in the nineteenth century the Kahal lost its authority and communal governance passed to the various parties active in the city. Renowned rabbis settled there from the seventeenth century onward, and in the twentieth century its rabbinate was led by R' Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, author of the Achiezer — in his generation the leading halachic authority and manhig of Lithuanian Jewry. On his beis din sat, youngest of the dayanim, R' Yisrael Zev Gustman — last of the dayanim of Vilna, who would carry the name of Ramailes through the churban to Yerushalayim.

Torah of the Town. Though Vilna rose as a Torah center later than other great Polish-Lithuanian kehillos, by the seventeenth century it had secured its standing in the Jewish world. The crown of its "primacy of Torah" was the Vilna Gaon in the eighteenth century and his talmidim, the ro'ei pnei haGra, who established Lithuanian Jewry as a Torah-centered Jewry and created the very type of the Lithuanian yeshiva — among its houses of learning Yeshivas Ramailes and the Gaon's kloiz. In the nineteenth century the city was also the principal center of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe and a cradle of the mussar movement, the early seat of R' Yisrael Salanter. The Gaon himself, though the supreme halachic authority of his age, refused all communal office; and from Vilna's presses came the Romm edition of the Talmud — the Shas Vilna, completed in the 1880s — which became the standard printed Gemara of the Jewish world. The census of 1897 counted 63,891 Jews in Vilna — some 42 percent of the city; and the years after the First War were bought with blood: in April 1919, in the Polish–Lithuanian struggle for the city, eighty Jews were killed by Polish army units.

The Churban. Vilna's Jewry — "Yerushalayim d'Lita," flourishing for centuries — was annihilated in the Shoah, in the ghetto and in the pits of the Ponar forest outside the city. The full account is told in the churban diary of Vilna; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Kovno (Kaunas) was among the foremost Jewish cities of Lithuania. Across the river lay the suburb of Slabodka (Vilijampolė), where Jews settled in the eras when they were barred from the city itself; it became a Jewish-majority quarter and the seat of one of the great mussar yeshivos.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. Kovno's rav in the later nineteenth century was R' Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, the posek hador, whose secretary R' Yaakov Lifshitz directed "the Black Bureau" (ha-Lishka ha-Shechora) in the battle against the Haskalah and Zionism and founded the famed Kollel Kovno. R' Tzvi Hirsch Rabinowitz later served as rav of the city, and its last rav was R' Avraham Dovber Kahana-Shapira, the Dvar Avraham, who led the kehilla into the ghetto and was niftar there.

Torah of the Town. Slabodka was a world of yeshivos. In 1877 the Alter of Slabodka, R' Nosson Tzvi Finkel, founded the mussar yeshiva Knesses Yisrael; in 1894 he appointed R' Moshe Mordechai Epstein and R' Isser Zalman Meltzer as roshei yeshiva — Meltzer was later sent to found the yeshiva of Slutsk. The mussar controversy that shook Slabodka in 1897 drew in R' Yitzchak Blazer, a foremost talmid of R' Yisrael Salanter, at the invitation of R' Tzvi Hirsch Rabinowitz — who that same year founded a second yeshiva, Knesses Beis Yitzchak. In 1924 R' Avraham Grodzinsky and R' Yechezkel Sarna established a Slabodka branch in Chevron, which after the 1929 riots moved to Yerushalayim as Yeshivas Chevron; R' Aharon Kotler was among Slabodka's sons.

The Churban. On the night of 25 June 1941 Lithuanian nationalists fell upon Slabodka and murdered some 800 Jews. On 15 August 1941 the Kovno ghetto — officially "Ghetto Viliampolė" — was established in the Slabodka suburb; it was emptied and destroyed in July 1944. The full account is told in the churban diary of Kovno; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד. What remains of the city today — the Choral Shul of 1871 still functioning, the Ninth Fort memorial with the victims' names on its walls, the Lietūkis garage stone, and the buried archives raised from the ghetto earth — is told in the churban diary.

The Town. Brisk (Brest; Yiddish Brisk, formerly Brisk d'Lita) is a city in the southwest of today's Belarus, on the Polish border. For centuries it was among the foremost kehillos of Lita — a Torah and spiritual center for the region from the Middle Ages, and one of the chief communities of the Va'ad Medinas Lita, the Council of the Land of Lithuania. In the last generations before the Soloveitchik era its chair was held by the Padwa house and its heirs — R' Yaakov Meir Padwa, the Maharim Padwa, av beis din from ת"ר, founder of the city's great Talmud Torah, after whose petirah in תרט"ו the chair stood empty ten years until R' Tzvi Hirsh Orenstein came from Lvov. The records trace the kehilla from the thirteenth century, and count it the spiritual and Torah center of all Lita's Jewry until the seventeenth century; on the eve of the Second World War the records give its Jews at between some twenty and thirty thousand — two in five to nearly half the city — and the conflict of the figures is stated. Its name was later carried across the Torah world by the dynasty that led it.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. The elder chain of Brisk's chair carried crowns of its own: the records count among the city's rabbonim R' Yoel Sirkis — the Bach, R' Yaakov Meir Padua, and the Maharil Diskin, "the Rav of Brisk" of the generation before the dynasty. Then Brisk's name became bound to the Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. R' Yosef Dov Soloveitchik — the Beis HaLevi, rav of Slutsk and then of Brisk and a rosh yeshiva of Volozhin, was succeeded by his son R' Chaim Soloveitchik — "Reb Chaim Brisker" (rav from 1892 to 1918), and then by R' Chaim's son R' Yitzchak Zev — the Brisker Rav (the Griz), the city's last rav (1918–1939). Beside them sat the dayan R' Simcha Zelig Rieger, whom R' Chaim had made a condition of his own appointment — brought as the town's moreh hora'ah so that he himself need not turn to day-to-day psak.

Torah of the Town. Brisk gave the Torah world the Brisker method — the analytic derech of Talmud study, its first seeds in the Beis HaLevi and its full power brought out by R' Chaim, then the Griz, and later R' Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. The city's communal yeshiva gedolah was Toras Chesed, led by the Imrei Moshe, R' Moshe Sokolovsky. When the Griz escaped to Eretz Yisrael in 1941, he reestablished the derech as Yeshivas Brisk in Yerushalayim, where his sons and grandsons carry it on.

The Churban. After the German invasion of June 1941, Brisk's Jewry — some twenty thousand souls — was destroyed: a first massacre of thousands of its men that summer, a ghetto sealed in December 1941, and a liquidation in October 1942 in which most were carried to the pits of Bronnaya Gora. Among the murdered was the aged dayan R' Simcha Zelig Riger. The Griz, away from the city when war broke out, escaped through Soviet-held Vilna and on to Yerushalayim — but the kehilla he had led did not survive. The full account is told in the churban diary of Brisk; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד. The full churban is told in the Brisk churban diary; what remains in the living city — the fortress, the photographed card-file in the Brest archives, the mass grave of 2019, and the derech carried by the yeshivos of Yerushalayim — is recorded at its close.

The Town. Telz (Telšiai) is one of the oldest towns of Lithuania, set in its northwest. Jews began settling there in the sixteenth century, at first under the kehilla of nearby Kiddan. By 1897 some 3,080 Jews lived there, close to half the town.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. For all its charedi character, Telz also saw considerable Zionist activity between the wars — Herzl himself once spoke there. Its rav and rosh yeshiva was R' Yosef Yehuda Leib Bloch; after him his son R' Avraham Yitzchak Bloch led both the kehilla and the yeshiva, until he perished with his community in 1941.

Torah of the Town. The glory of Telz was its yeshiva, founded in 1875 by three local rabbis and raised to greatness after R' Eliezer Gordon became rosh yeshiva in 1884 — by the end of the century some 400 talmidim, among the largest yeshivos in the world, with R' Shimon Shkop among its maggidei shiur for some eighteen years. Telz was famed for its ordered, rigorous regime and its distinctive analytic derech — talmidim grouped by their level rather than their age — and for the intellectual mussar brought in from 1885 by R' Gordon's son-in-law R' Yosef Yehuda Leib Bloch. The rosh yeshiva passed within a single family: from R' Gordon to R' Yosef Leib Bloch, the Shiurei Daas, and then to his grandson R' Avraham Yitzchak Bloch; and after the churban the yeshiva was rebuilt on new soil in Cleveland by another son, R' Eliyahu Meir Bloch, carrying the name and the derech of Telz to America.

The Churban. When the Germans came in the summer of 1941 they herded together the Jews of Telz and the surrounding towns. The men — among them the rav and rosh yeshiva R' Avraham Yitzchak Bloch, his brother the mashgiach R' Zalman, and the talmidim of the yeshiva — were driven to the Rainiai estate and murdered there on כ' תמוז תש"א (15 July 1941); in the aktionen that followed the women, the elderly and the children were taken to the pits, and the kehilla was destroyed. On Shabbos, ז' אלול תש"א (30 August), the women and children held at the Geruliai camp were murdered, some five hundred young women held months longer in a ghetto by the lake until the liquidation of late December; sixty-four survived. Its yeshiva lived on, rebuilt in Cleveland by R' Eliyahu Meir Bloch. The full account is told in the churban diary of Telz; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד. What remains of the town today — the surviving wooden shul, the yeshiva building, the old beis hachaim with its rabbanim's kevarim, and the quantified grave-grounds of Rainiai, Geruliai and Viešvėnai — is told in the churban diary.

Mezhibuzh (Medzhybizh), at the meeting of the Buh and Buzhok rivers in Podolia, was an old and honored kehilla long before it became the best-known shtetl of the chasidishe world: from ת"ק (1740) the holy Baal Shem Tov made it his home, and there he lived, taught, and was buried — the town ledger itself recording its "Baal Shem, Doctor." Around him stood the town's own klei kodesh: the dayan R' Zev Wolf Kitzes, who rests beside him, and the maggid meisharim Reb Dovid Perkus, the opponent who became one of his foremost talmidim. In later generations the town carried the courts of his descendants — the line of the Degel Machaneh Efraim and R' Boruch of Mezhibuzh — and its old beis hachaim, with the Besht's ohel at its heart, remains one of the holiest grounds of the chasidishe world, a place of tefillah to this day. Beside the chasidishe courts the town also kept an ordinary rabbanus, and it stayed in one family for well over a century: from R' Dov Berish Rapoport, who settled there and was niftar in תקפ"ג (1823), the Rapoport–Bick line held the beis din of Mezhibuzh, sitting in the old town shul of R' Yoel Sirkes and carrying its kashrus, its dinei Torah and its dealings with the Russian authorities. Around the year 1800 the chasidishe and non-chasidishe kehillos of the town separated and each kept its own representation, and the beis din remained with the family. The last to hold it was R' Chaim Yechiel Michel Bick, chosen rav in 1911 at twenty-two, who left for New York in 1925 — after him no rav sat in Mezhibuzh again. His son R' Moshe Tzvi Aryeh Bick carried that rabbanus to the Bronx. This card stands thin by design, to be enriched.

The Town. Grodno (Hrodna; Yiddish Grodne) is a city in the west of today's Belarus, on the banks of the Niemen river, near the border triangle of Poland and Lithuania. On the eve of the war some twenty-five thousand Jews lived there — about half the city — among the senior kehillos of Lita and an important center of Jewish life.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. Grodno was one of the oldest and most senior kehillos of Lita. Together with Brisk and Pinsk it ranked among the veteran communities whose standing the rising kehilla of Vilna long laboured to match, sending its representatives to the Council of the Chief Communities of Lita. Among the glories of the town was its great shul, founded in 1578 by R' Mordechai Yaffe, the Levush; and among its tzaddikim R' Alexander Ziskind, author of the Yesod V'Shoresh HaAvodah (niftar 1794). After him the city's most beloved figure was R' Menachem Nachum Kaplan — Reb Nachumke of Grodno (1811–1879) — who held no rabbinic post yet was renowned as a hidden tzaddik and gabbai tzedakah, and was the rebbe muvhak of the Chofetz Chaim. In those same generations the city’s horaah was carried by its famed morei tzedek — at their head R' Elyakum Shlomo Shapira, av beis din of the city, whom the record calls “the father of instruction, the sage of the rabbis of Grodno”; and from 1885 to 1905 the rabbanus was held by R' Yehuda Leib Rabinowitz, who resigned the chair in his last years to go up to Eretz Yisrael and ended his days in Yerushalayim — after him the full rabbanus of Grodno was never filled again, the city’s horaah carried by its morei tzedek.

Torah of the Town. Yeshivas Shaar HaTorah, founded in the city in 1915, was its crowning Torah institution. It began among bachurim stranded by the First World War — gathered with the help of R' Yaakov Aryeh Lifshitz in the beis medrash of the Yesod V'Shoresh HaAvodah — and in 1920 R' Chaim Ozer Grodzinski called R' Shimon Shkop to its helm. His iyun, set down in the Shaarei Yosher, shaped a wide circle of Lithuanian roshei yeshiva and remains a pillar of the yeshiva derech to this day; among his Grodno talmidim were R' Dovid Lifshitz, R' Chaim Shmuelevitz, R' Shmuel Rozovsky, R' Yisrael Zev Gustman and R' Aryeh Leib Malin. Of the city's rabbinic houses stood the Rozovskys: R' Michel Dovid of the morei horaah, his shver R' Avraham Gelbort the kehilla's rav — and the son R' Shmuel Rozovsky, first rosh yeshiva of the rebuilt Ponevezh, whose eldest brother R' Yehoshua Heshel, rav of Grodno in his father's place, was murdered with the kehilla, הי"ד. And in an earlier generation the city had been the home of R' Nochum’ke of Horodna — R' Menachem Nochum Kaplan, the humble shamash and gabbai tzedakah who was the hidden tzaddik of the town and the rebbe muvhak of the Chofetz Chaim.

The Churban. After the German invasion the city's Jews were enclosed, in November 1941, in a ghetto of two separated quarters: in "Ghetto 1," in the old city around the great shul, some 15,000 Jews were crammed, and in "Ghetto 2," across the railway tracks in Slobodka, some 10,000 more, mostly ba'alei melacha. The deportations began on 2 November 1942; over five days from 18 January 1943 some 10,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, on 13 February 5,000 more to Treblinka, and by 13 March 1943 the last were sent on to Bialystok and Grodno was declared judenrein. The full account is told in the churban diary of Grodno; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Ponevezh (Panevėžys) is a city in the north of Lithuania. On the eve of the war it held about seven thousand Jews — roughly a third of the city — one of the principal kehillos of northern Lita, with its shuls and schools and the Torah world that R' Kahaneman built around it.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. On its rabbinical chair sat the Aderes, R' Eliyahu Dovid Rabinowitz-Teomim, before he went on to Mir and then Yerushalayim; after him, from 1895, the great lamdan R' Yitzchak Yaakov Rabinowitz — Reb Itzele Ponevezher, author of the Zecher Yitzchak and the rebbe in lomdus of R' Shach — who led the kehilla until his petirah in 1919. Then came R' Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rav, who built up not only the kehilla but a whole network of Torah institutions: a yeshiva gedolah, a yeshiva ketana, a talmud torah and kindergarten, and a Bais Yaakov seminary for the town's girls.

Torah of the Town. In 1919 R' Kahaneman founded the Ponevezh yeshiva gedolah — twenty-seven bachurim at its start, lodged in the homes of the town's Jews. Among those who shaped it in its early years were R' Yosef Leib Nendik, who came with bachurim from Grodno, and the famed mashgiach R' Yerucham Levovitz, who served as menahel ruchani before leaving for Mir at the end of 1922; afterward R' Kahaneman's brother-in-law R' Asher Kalman Baron led the ruchniyus. By 1929 the yeshiva and its lower divisions counted hundreds of talmidim, and in 1930 R' Kahaneman moved them to a campus bought with funds he raised in America.

The Churban. The Germans entered on 26 June 1941, and by 11 July the city's Jews were driven into a ghetto on a few streets; on 23 August 1941 some seven and a half thousand Jews of Ponevezh and the surrounding towns were murdered in the pits of the Pajuostė forest. Its rav, R' Kahaneman, had reached Eretz Yisrael in 1940 and there rebuilt the yeshiva in Bnei Brak — naming it Ponevezh after the town that had been destroyed, at once a memorial and a rebirth. The full account is told in the churban diary of Ponevezh; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Uzhvent — Užventis in Lithuanian, Uzhventy in the Russian registers — sat in the heart of Zamut, twenty-one miles southeast of Telz and twenty-eight from Shavl, a near-neighbor of Kelm. It was one of Lita's small kehillos: some 330 Jews at 1900 — traders and craftsmen of a market town — with a well-ordered kehilla that maintained its shul, its beis medrash, its Talmud Torah, and the rav's house. The kehilla numbered 330 at 1897, 173 at 1923, and about 100 Jews by 1940 — nearly every family keeping a small garden and a cow beside its trade. In June 1939 a great fire — suspected arson by antisemites — burned down the shul, the beis medrash, the Talmud Torah, the rav's house, and five homes, striking some thirty families; a public appeal for aid, signed by the town's rav, went out to the Jews of Lita. The rabbanim of Uzhvent, per the Pinkas register: R' Yaakov Mordechai Dinezon (תר"מ–תרמ"ז), R' Shlomo Nosson Kotler (until תרנ"ט), R' Nesanel Yosef Graz (until תרפ"ו) — whose son R' Zevulun Aryeh Graz went up with the founders of Yeshivas Chevron and became av beis din of Rechovot, and the last rav — R' Yaakov Wolpe, who signed the fire appeal; whether he went with the kedoshim of the Pažilvis forest or of Zhager the record does not state, and it is seeded.

Torah of a Small Town. The measure of the town's Yiddishkeit is preserved, remarkably, in the memory of its own gentile neighbors: a Lithuanian townsman's recorded testimony states that the majority of the Jews of Uzhvent kept their tradition and did no work on Shabbos, and kept separate vessels for meat and for milk — the Shabbos and the kashrus of a Zamut shtetl as its neighbors saw them. And from this small town came a crown of the mussar world: here was born, in תרמ"א (1881), R' Moshe Rosenstein — the talmid of Kelm and Radin who stood three decades as Mashgiach of Yeshivas Lomza.

The Churban. When the war broke on 22 June 1941, refugees from Kraziai and from Kelm — among them a number of rabbanim — fled into Uzhvent; few of those who tried the road east got through. The Germans arrived on 24 June, but the town's rule passed to the local Lithuanian nationalists under a lawyer of the town, and for three weeks they beat, robbed and humiliated their Jewish neighbors and drove them to forced labor. For a time all the Jews were imprisoned in the alcohol-brewing cellar of the Smilgiavičius estate. On ו' אב תש"א (30 July 1941), 91 Jews — most of them of Uzhvent — together with ten refugee rabbanim were taken to the Pažilvis forest, three kilometers southeast, and murdered there, al kiddush Hashem הי"ד.

The names of the ten rabbanim are not preserved in the reached record — the Pinkas counts them without naming them, and the memorial's own inscription says only “among them, worldly just rabbanim”; their names are seeded for the Koniuchowsky testimony collection (O-71, files 102, 105–106) and the Yad Vashem files the Pinkas entry cites. The remaining Jews were driven to Zhager (Žagarė), and their fate was the fate of all the Jews gathered there: murdered in the great Zhager massacre the day after Yom Kippur תש"ב (2 October 1941; one printing of the record gives 11.10 — the variance stands as printed). Nine Jews were kept alive in the town for months more — and on 8 December 1941 they too were murdered; and with them, on that same day, twenty Jews who had accepted baptism to save their lives were murdered regardless — the record's own bitter testimony that the murderers made no distinction. A postwar name-list preserves 48 of the murdered by name, delivered to the killing ground by wagon. Of the kehilla survived only a few — among them the sisters Rachel and Miriam Davidov, hidden by a farmer of the district for two and a half months until they reached the Shavl ghetto.

What Remains — and the Bones Carried to Vilna. The record states plainly the shame that followed: for years after the murders — through the war and into the Soviet years — Lithuanians of the district came to the mass grave in the Pažilvis forest and rummaged it for valuables and for the gold teeth of the murdered. The surviving bnei hakehilla then carried the bones of the kedoshim to Vilna, and buried them there with dignity, raising a memorial over the kever with a Hebrew inscription — preserved in the record's rendering: this monument is a witness... for the holy of Uzhvent, and two of Luoke, who were murdered by the occupying enemy — among them, worldly just rabbanim... may their souls be bound in the bond of life (the original lashon awaits the matzeivah's own record and is seeded). The Pažilvis site on the Užventis–Pašilvė road stands in the US Commission survey; the Jews of Uzhvent driven to Zhager lie in the mass grave of the Zhager town park. The names of the Lithuanian murderers are kept, the Pinkas notes, in the Yad Vashem archives — not to be mentioned in one breath with the few righteous saviors. By 1970 four Jews remained in the town; by 1989, one. (Sources: Pinkas HaKehillot Lita — Užventis, via the JewishGen yizkor project · the USHMM Holocaust Survivors and Victims name-list record · the International Jewish Cemetery Project / US Commission survey · the LitvakSIG neighbor-testimony record · this site's R' Moshe Rosenstein card.)

The Town. Shklov sat on the Dnieper in the Mogilev land, on the old border-road between Poland and Russia — and every army that crossed that border crossed Shklov: the Cossack wars of the 1650s, the Swedes of 1708, Napoleon's men in 1812, and its Jews bore the brunt each time. After the first partition of 1772 carried it into the Russian Empire, Shklov rose as the first great Jewish commercial city of Russia — the largest Jewish shtetl of the whole Mogilev gubernia — its merchants trading from Riga to the Black Sea; and at the opening of the twentieth century it held some 5,400 Jews, four of every five souls in the town.

The Metropolis of the Misnagdim. More than a trading town, Shklov was the Torah metropolis of White Russia — the stronghold of the old learning and of the circle of the Vilna Gaon, some of whose choicest talmidim were the town's own sons; in the years of the great machlokes, declarations of the misnagdim went out from the rabbanim and talmidei chachamim of Shklov as from few other towns in Lita. Its own record runs deep: the Imrei Pinchas — R' Pinchas of Koretz was born in the town in תפ"ו (1726); R' Yaakov, mechaber of the Betzias HaPas, sat as its rav — father of R' Baruch Schick of Shklov, the dayan who at the Gra's word turned Euclid into lashon hakodesh, recording in his hakdamah the Gaon's teaching that what a man lacks of the other chochmos he will lack a hundredfold in Torah — and R' Baruch's einiklach were the Mishkenos Yaakov and the Keren Orah. Here too stood the beis medrash of R' Binyamin Rivlin, of the Gra's circle, and a Hebrew printing press from the 1780s — among the first in Russia — that sent seforim across the land. In those same decades the first stirrings of the Russian haskalah gathered around the town's merchant courts; the batei medrash of Shklov withstood that wind, and the Torah thread remained the town's crown. In the nineteenth century its chair carried great names: R' Yehoshua Leib Diskin held Shklov before he went to Brisk; after him came R' Hillel Milikovsky, of the talmidim of R' Yisrael Salanter; and from the תר"ל years, for some fifteen years until תר"נ, R' Yehoshua HaLevi Horowitz, son of Cherikov.

The Sar of Ustye. Just outside the town, at the estate of Ustye, stood the wonder of the generation: the beis medrash and great library of R' Yehoshua Zeitlin — talmid of the Shaagas Aryeh, purveyor of Potemkin's armies and counselor of the imperial court — who left the palaces and set a house of Torah in a field, sustaining talmidei chachamim at his table for years on end: a kollel before the word existed. His daughter's daughter Tzertil was the mother of the two Horowitz gaonim of Cherikov.

Gates of Yerushalayim. Out of Shklov went the builders of the old yishuv: R' Yisrael of Shklov, mechaber of the Pe'as HaShulchan, who led the third caravan of the Gra's talmidim to Eretz Yisrael in תקס"ט, and his chaver R' Menachem Mendel of Shklov, who led the first — the Perushim of Tzfas and Yerushalayim, sustained by the Vilna trustees under R' Chaim of Volozhin, as this site records. One Dnieper town, and from it the gates of two cities of Eretz Yisrael.

The Last Generations, and the Churban. Before the first war the yeshiva of R' Pesach Pruskin stood in Shklov and neighboring Amstislav — R' Moshe Feinstein learned within it. Under the Soviets the kehilla was ground down: private trade liquidated in the early 1930s, Jews pressed into crafts, field-work and the town's paper factory, a Yiddish school in place of the chadarim, the young drained to the cities — until on the eve of the invasion some 2,100 Jews remained, a quarter of the town. The Germans entered on 12 July 1941. Within a week part of the kehilla was driven to the village of Ryzhkovichi: after a selection, 84 men between fifteen and sixty-five were shot, and the rest were penned in an open-air ghetto in the village square under Belarusian police guard, given no food at all. In Shklov itself a ghetto was set on a street of destroyed houses — its Jews forced to wear the yellow magen-david armband — and some 100 more were held at the Iskra kolkhoz. On 2 October 1941 Germans, Finnish troops and Belarusian police led the Jews of Ryzhkovichi down to the Dnieper and murdered them near the village of Zarechye; and at about the same time the ghetto of Shklov and the Jews of the kolkhoz — 1,459 souls in all — were taken by truck to Zarechye and murdered there, every one. The kehilla of the Gra's circle, of the Sar of Ustye and the Perushim, ended on that riverbank. The names of its kedoshim await the registers (→ Yad Vashem, Ghettos Encyclopedia; JewishGen Belarus; the Mogilev-land registers). הי"ד.

The Town. Cherikov — טשעריקאָוו in the mouths of its Jews — sat on the Sozh river southeast of Mogilev, some twenty miles from the rail station at Krichev, a river town of wharves and great horse fairs. Jews stood in it from the settlement wave of the 1500s–1600s, and in 1648 King Władysław IV granted the Jews of Cherikov a charter — to trade in liquors and grain, to acquire property, and to keep their own shul and beis olam free of tax. In that very year of תח ותט the Cossacks fell upon the town and massacred its Jews — the charter and the churban of 1648 standing in one year — and the kehilla rebuilt itself upon its dead. With the first partition of Poland in 1772 the town passed to the Russian Empire and became the seat of its own uyezd in the Mogilev governorate. At the census of 1897 it held some 2,700 Jews of 5,200 souls — a Jewish-majority town of small traders, tailors and artisans, with Jewish farmers working the district villages around it.

The House of the Levi'im. In this small uyezd town lived R' Tzvi Hirsh HaLevi Horowitz — "R' Hirsh Milchiger" — of the Stanisławów Horowitz line of Reb Itzikl of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek and the descent of the Shelah HaKadosh, who in extraordinary stringency of kashrus ate no meat for forty years, and who brought to print the commentary of R' Yehoshua Zeitlin on the Smak. His wife Tzertil was a granddaughter — a daughter's daughter — of R' Yehoshua Zeitlin, the Sar of Ustye. Two sons born in Cherikov rose to great chairs of White Russia: R' Elazar Moshe Horowitz, born ב' תשרי תקע"ח (1817), thirty years ABD of Pinsk, whose hagahos stand in the Vilna Shas; and R' Yehoshua HaLevi Horowitz, born ~תקפ"ג (1823), ABD of Shklov — and both returned their neshamos in one year, תר"נ. The town sat in the Mogilev land whose Torah metropolis was Shklov of the Zeitlin line; and in Shklov and the neighboring district town of Amstislav the yeshiva of R' Pesach Pruskin would later stand before the first war — where R' Moshe Feinstein learned — the region's chain of Torah running down to the last generation.

Under the Soviets. In the 1920s the Jews of Cherikov were still its craftsmen and merchants; even in 1928 two shuls stood open in the town, holding on under the pressure of the years. The Yiddish school was closed in 1938; and by 1939 only 914 Jews — some fifteen percent of the town — remained, the young drawn away to the cities, the old kehilla shrinking under the Soviet decades. Its inner registers — the shuls by name, its rabbanim of the last generations, its chadarim and chevros — await the fuller record (→ the Mogilev-land registers; Rossiyskaya Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya; JewishGen Belarus).

The Churban. The Germans entered Cherikov on July 17, 1941. In October 1941 — one record says November — all the Jews of Cherikov were taken out to the Mostovoye Ravine and shot; in 1942 a second operation murdered the Jews of mixed marriages and their children. The Red Army returned on October 1, 1943, to a town emptied of its kehilla. What survived: the old Jewish beis olam of Cherikov still stands, photographed and registered — the last witness of the kehilla of the 1648 charter. The names of its kedoshim await the registers (→ Yad Vashem, The Untold Stories; the IJCP survey; JewishGen). הי"ד.

The Town. Pinsk sat on the Pina river amid the great Polesia marshes, at the meeting of the water-roads of the south — and its kehilla was one of the oldest and greatest of Lita, standing from the early 1500s and counted among the head-kehillos of the Vaad of Medinas Lita beside Brisk and Grodno. For generations the city was in its majority a Jewish city — merchants of the river trade, craftsmen, and a world of Torah; on the eve of the churban some 21,000 Jews lived in Pinsk, an absolute majority of the town. The old trials struck it too: in April 1919 thirty-five Jews were shot against a wall by Polish soldiers — the massacre of Pinsk — and a further pogrom followed in 1920.

The Rabbonim. The chair of Pinsk carried some of the great names of the generations: R' Yehuda Leib Pohovitzer the mochiach; R' Refael HaKohen, later ABD of Hamburg; and R' Levi Yitzchak — the Kedushas Levi, who served in Pinsk as rav and rosh yeshiva until תקמ"ה (1785), before Berditchev — the years of the great machlokes between chassidim and misnagdim touching Pinsk as sharply as anywhere in Lita. In the nineteenth century the chain ran: R' Aharon of Kretinga, the Tosefes Aharon, niftar suddenly in 1841; three empty years; R' Mordechai Zakheim of Ruzhany (1844–1858); and from תר"כ (1860), for thirty years, R' Elazar Moshe Horowitz, the Ohel Moshe, whose hagahos stand in the Vilna Shas — beside whom lived his son-in-law R' Baruch Epstein, the Torah Temimah. After him: R' Tzvi Hirsh HaKohen Volk, and at the last R' Aharon Walkin, under whom Pinsk and Karlin were united into one kehilla — its last rav, murdered with his family in the churban; the main record gives ו' שבט תש"ב, an older tradition the days of the Germans' entry, and the conflict is kept.

Karlin Beside It. Across the way stood Karlin — the suburb that gave its name to the first great planting of chassidus in Lita, the town of R' Aharon HaGadol and of the Beis Aharon; for generations the two kehillos, Pinsk and Karlin, stood side by side, each with its rav — the misnagdishe chair of Pinsk and, in Karlin, R' Dovid Friedman, the She'eilas Dovid, one of the poskim of the generation, who held its chair for close to fifty years from תרכ"ח. Between the two banks lived one of the fullest Jewish cities of Lita. When R' Elazar Moshe Horowitz took the Pinsk chair in תר"כ, one of his first acts was to restore peace between the two kehillos, whose relations had long been strained.

Torah of the Town, and the Churban. Already under R' Elazar Moshe the kehilla was bound to generous support of its Talmud Torah. In the 1920s Pinsk held a branch of the Novardok world — the Beis Yosef yeshiva of Pinsk under R' Shmuel Weintraub, which in the war's first winter was carried into exile and found shelter in Vilkomir, as this site records. The kehilla's own registers — its shuls and batei medrash, its chadarim and mikvaos, its chevros — await the fuller record (→ Toyzent Yor Pinsk, New York 1941; the Pinsk yizkor volumes via JewishGen). The churban: the Germans entered in July 1941; the first mass murders came within weeks, the ghetto in 1942, and its liquidation in the fall of תש"ג (October 1942) — the kehilla of five hundred years destroyed (→ Yad Vashem Ghettos Encyclopedia; the Pinsk volumes). הי"ד.

The Town. Krinik (Krynki) stood in the Grodno country of Lita-Poland. The record of the town itself — its age, its parnassah, its shuls and chadorim — is seeded for the Pinkas HaKehillot Polin entry and the town's own yizkor record, Pinkas Krynki, on the JewishGen yizkor project.

The Rabbanim. From תרס"ג (1903) the chair was held by R' Shlomo Zalman Sender Kahana-Shapira, the Grz"s — the great-grandson of R' Chaim Volozhiner who came to Krinik from Maltsh, and whose yeshiva learned in the town until the First World War drove rav and talmidim into exile in Tula. When at the war's end he went up to Yerushalayim, the chair passed to R' Chizkiyahu Yosef Mishkovsky, the Krinker Rav, who sat some eighteen years and stood central in the public leadership of the region; the earlier chain of the town's rabbanim is seeded for the Pinkas and the yizkor record.

The Churban. The kehilla of Krinik was destroyed in the churban with the kehillos of the Grodno country. The dates, the ghetto, and the deportations are seeded for the Yad Vashem Ghettos Encyclopedia entry, Pinkas HaKehillot Polin, and Pinkas Krynki — the record awaits its own churban pass. הי"ד.

The Town. Plungyan — Plungė, in the heart of Zamut in western Lita, in the Telz district — held one of the region's substantial kehillos. One account records Yidden in the town as early as the fourteenth century; the settled kehilla ran from the eighteenth, and by 1900 it numbered more than 2,500 souls — more than half the town — standing at some two-fifths of it between the wars, with the villages around adding hundreds more. Its Yidden were the traders and craftsmen of the town, its rabbanus a respected chair of the Zamut country; and its last Yid would recall, to the end of his long life, that Yidden and Lithuanians had lived in the town as good neighbors — a memory the churban would make terrible. Among its earlier rabbanim was the zeide of R' Zevulun Aryeh Graz, for whom that gaon was named.

The Kehilla and Its Torah. At the town's heart stood the Great Shul and the beis medrash beside it — the two houses around which the kehilla's whole life turned, and inside whose walls its last chapter would be written. In the interwar years the newer institutions rose beside the old — a Yiddish gymnasium and library carrying the name of the writer Peretz — while the Torah thread held: the shul, the beis medrash, the chevros, and the rabbanus. And the town gave the Torah world one of the fathers of the mussar movement: R' Yosef Yozel Horowitz, the Alter of Novardok, was born in Plungyan — the boy of Zamut who would build the network of Novardok yeshivos across Russia and Poland.

The Rabbanus. In the last generations the chair was held by R' Shmuel Avigdor Feivelson — the eldest of the Feivelson brothers of Lita's rabbanus, of whom the Ohr Sameach testified he had not seen a mind so deep and sharp — who came to Plungyan from the rabbanus of Anikst and served until his petirah in תרפ"ה (1924). The roster of the town's other rabbanim has not come down in the record here. Beside the rabbanus the town carried a yeshiva of its own: in the mid 1890s R' Chaim Yitzchak HaKohen Bloch — a son of Plungyan, whose father was the town's shochet — came home from Volozhin with R' Chaim Soloveitchik's semichah and opened a yeshiva for boys of unusual gifts, and led it four years. It was there, at ten, that the Ponevezher Rov began. After his four years at its head he was called to nearby Palangen as rav and av beis din, though some later biographical sources list his rabbanus as Plungyan itself.

The Churban. R' Moshe Rosenstein, the Mashgiach of Lomza, was niftar in Plungyan in תש"א (1941) and is buried in the town — among the last kevarim of the kehilla. When the Germans invaded on 22 June 1941, some three hundred of the town's Yidden fled east with the retreating Soviets; the Germans entered Plungyan on 25 June, and Lithuanian nationalists under Jonas Noreika took the town's administration and police into their hands. In the first days some sixty young Yidden were shot on the charge of serving as a rear guard for the Red Army; on 26 June the remaining Yidden were driven into the streets around the Great Shul and the beis medrash, declared a ghetto — and then locked into the Great Shul itself, some two weeks, without food or water, taken out for forced labor under beatings, their valuables extorted, the old and the weak dying in the filth and the press. In mid-Tammuz — the records give 13 to 16 July 1941 — they were marched some five kilometers to pits dug at the village of Kaušėnai: group after group made to stand at the edge and shot, the next group made to cover the dead and dig its own pit. Some 1,700–1,800 Yidden of Plungyan were murdered there — the memorial wall carries 1,800 names, and the dedication record counts over 2,200 with the surrounding villages — and only a few survived. Noreika was executed for treason in 1947. The full account is told in the Churban Diary of Plungyan. הי"ד.

What Remains. A few dozen of Plungyan's Yidden returned after the war and held a small kehilla — and even then, on erev Rosh Hashanah תשי"ט (1958), a pogrom broke over them under Soviet rule. The memory of the kehilla was kept by its last Yid, Yaakov Bunka — who had fled east with his family, fought in the Red Army's Lithuanian division to Berlin while his father and brother fell, and came home to carve. From 1986 he raised the carved-wood pillars of the Kaušėnai memorial over the pits; and in 2011, seventy years after the murder, a memorial wall was built at Kaušėnai from the bricks of the demolished Great Shul — each brick bearing the name of a murdered Yid. Days before its dedication the wall was vandalized; it was dedicated as it stood, the damage left in view. Yaakov Bunka was niftar in 2014, and the kehilla of Plungyan lives in the record — the shul that held its Yidden in their last two weeks holding their names now, brick by brick, at the place where they lie.

The Town. Anikst — Anykščiai, on the Šventoji river in the Utena country of eastern Lita — was founded in 1440 and held town rights from 1516, and its kehilla grew until, by 1897, Yidden were some seven of every ten souls in the town. In the First World War the town was destroyed to the ground; it was rebuilt in the years of independent Lita, and in 1921 its kehilla numbered 1,800 Yidden — some forty-five of every hundred — the traders, craftsmen, and market-Yidden of the Utena country, with their shuls and batei medrash at the town's heart.

The Rabbanus. The chair of Anikst carried old names. Among its early rabbanim the record counts R' Gershon, son of R' Abele Isserlis of Lublin — of the line from which R' Avraham Abele Poswoler would come — and R' Aryeh Leib ben Nosson Nota, who rose from Anikst to the av beis din chair of Brody, a brother of R' Dovid Tevel, the Nachalas Dovid of Minsk. In the last generations the chair was held by R' Shmuel Avigdor Feivelson from תרס"א (1901) — the eldest of the Feivelson brothers of Lita's rabbanus, of whom the Ohr Sameach said he had not seen a mind so deep and sharp — and it was here that he fought the Bund, which was then sweeping the town's Yidden after it: a rav's stand against the socialist tide in the very years it broke over Lita. From Anikst he was called to Plungyan. The roster of the chairs between and after has not come down in the record here.

The Churban. The kehilla rebuilt from the First War's ruin stood one more generation. In the summer of תש"א (1941), in the first months of the German invasion, the Yidden of Anikst were taken from the town and murdered in the forest nearby — the men first, and the women and children after them — and the kehilla of Anikst ended as the kehillos of the Utena country ended. הי"ד. The town where Yidden had been seven of every ten lives in the record — in the old names of its chair, and in the rav who stood against the tide.

The Town. Kupishok — Kupiškis, on the Lėvuo and Kupa rivers in the far northeast of Lita, a near-neighbor of Rakishok — carried a kehilla from the seventeenth century: the local record dates it to 1682, when the nobleman Pacas granted the Jews the right to build their shul, and matzeivos of the 1600s have been found in the old beis hachaim. The kehilla grew from 1,350 souls at 1847 to 2,661 — seventy-one percent of the town — at 1897. In May 1915 its Jews were expelled eastward with all the Jewry of Kovno province; only part returned, 1,444 (54%) at the 1923 census, and the interwar years drew its youth out to South Africa and to Eretz Yisrael.

Two Kehillos, Three Shuls. Kupishok was, like its neighbor Rakishok, the rare thing in mitnagdishe Lita — a town with a substantial chassidishe kehilla beside its misnagdim; and the record preserves the doubled frame in full: two officiating rabbanim, two shochtim, two chevros kadisha, and three shuls — the chassidishe davening-house, the misnagdishe beis medrash, and the Great Shul, a fine stone building capable of holding all the Jews of the town — with a stone-built mikvah-house, a yeshiva, and a Talmud Torah beside them. On the misnagdishe chair sat forty years R' Alexander Sender Kaplan, the Shalmei Nedarim — from c. ת"ר to his petirah ד' אב תרמ"ד, and he is buried in the town. After him the chair was held by R' Yehuda Leib Fein from תרנ"ט (1899) until his call to Oshmina in תרס"ו (1906), and then by R' Eliyahu Meir Feivelson, baal Netzach Yisrael and Pikuach Nefesh — one of the first ten bochurim of Telz and among the four signers of the 1912 Agudas Yisrael kol korei — who led the town until his petirah on כ"ה טבת תרפ"ח (1928). The earlier roster of both kehillos, and the chassidishe kehilla's own rabbanim, have not come down in the record here.

The Native Son. In Kupishok was born R' Ephraim Oshry — the talmid of Slabodka who, in the Kovno ghetto, wrote down on scraps the sheilos of the churban and their teshuvos, the Shu"t MiMaamakim, and lived to print them: one of the very few rabbanim of Europe to survive, and the posek whose Torah preserved the ghetto's halachic record for all generations.

The Churban. The Germans entered on 26 June 1941, and the murders began before the ghetto did: in late June about 1,000 Jews were murdered at the "Free Thinkers’" cemetery at the end of Gediminas street, and 78 more in the Slavinčiškis woods — the local killing unit led by the town’s own Lt. Antanas Gudelis. In mid-July the remaining Jews were ordered into a ghetto, and through July to September תש"א some 2,700 were murdered beside the town’s own Jewish beis hachaim (another record counts 1,500–2,000; the conflict is noted). Three kever-achim grounds hold the kedoshim: by the Free Thinkers’ cemetery, at the Jewish beis hachaim, and in the forest a kilometer from the railway station. הי"ד. And the aftermath is its own record: after the war the town midwife, Stefanija Glemžaitė, and her helpers compiled the names of the murdered Jews, name by name — and those names stand today on the Wall of Memory, dedicated in 2004 by forty-eight descendants of Kupishok inside the Great Shul itself, which still stands — the Soviet-era "culture house," now the town library, its walls holding the names of its kehilla; at the dedication was held the first tefillah in the building since the churban. The wider story is told in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. (Sources: the ESJF cemetery surveys · Remembering Litvaks / the litvaks.org community record · Encyclopaedia Judaica · the JewishGen Kupiskis kehilalink. Seeded: the rabbanim rosters of both kehillos, the yeshiva’s record, the Shalmei Nedarim’s kever site.)

The Town. Rakishok — Rokiškis — sat in the far northeast of Lita, near the Latvian border, its Jewish settlement running from the late seventeenth century. The railway of 1873, binding the town to Riga and Libau and to the Russian interior, made it a regional trading center, and the kehilla grew with it: 2,067 Jews by 1897 — three-quarters of the town. The first war scattered most of the kehilla eastward into Russia; it returned and rebuilt under independent Lithuania — 2,013 Jews at the 1923 census — and when the twenties' economy turned against the shtetl, its sons went out to South Africa, to America, and to Eretz Yisrael, the Johannesburg landsleit becoming a pillar of the town across the sea. On the eve of the churban some 3,500 Jews lived in Rakishok, four of every ten souls in the town.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim — a Chassidishe Town in Lita. Rakishok's mark in the map of Lita was its chassidim: a strong chassidishe presence, rare almost to uniqueness in mitnagdishe Lithuania, lived side by side with the town's misnagdim — the yizkor book of the town devotes whole chapters to "Rakishok and its Chassidim" — and the kehilla carried the two worlds' shuls, shtiblach, chadorim and mikvaos together. The roster of the town's rabbanim across the generations — the chassidishe kehilla's rabbanim and the misnagdishe — is seeded honestly for the yizkor book's rabbanim chapters (Yisker-bukh fun Rakishok, Johannesburg 1952) and the Pinkas HaKehillot (Lita) entry.

Torah of the Town. The town lived a full Torah life to the end — its botei midrash of both camps, its melamdim, the niggunim its emigrant sons wrote down longingly in the yizkor book ("My Father's Niggun") from across the world. The record of its yeshiva-ketanah and chadorim is seeded for the yizkor book's education chapters.

The Churban. When the war broke on 22 June 1941 the town saw what was coming — nearly half its Jews fled toward Russia in panic, virtually all its youth among them — and those who remained fell into the hands of the Germans and the Lithuanian partisans within days. The record preserves weeks of cruel torture before the end; the despair of those weeks is preserved in the account of the town's doctor and two mothers who poisoned their children and themselves rather than wait. The murders came in Av תש"א under the documented deception that the Jews were being sent to work in Smolensk: the survivor accounts record the men shot on י"ז אב (10 August 1941) and the women on כ"ז אב (20 August), while the documented record — the murderers' own Jäger tally and the Lithuanian museum's account — sets the ghetto's emptying at the Velniaduobė pits by Bajorai on erev Shabbos and Shabbos, כ"ב–כ"ג אב (15–16 August): 3,207 souls, and the women and children at the Antanašė forest on ב' אלול (25 August): 1,160; the survivor's memory and the perpetrator's ledger are both preserved in the churban diary of Rakishok.

And the yizkor book preserves the crown of the kehilla's end: its rav spoke at the pits — and because of his words, the rav was shot first; the kedoshim were driven into the pits under a hail of bullets, and the record laments that those killed at once were the fortunate, who were not buried alive. The rav's name is seeded for the yizkor book's necrology. The Jews of the district — Abel, Ponemunok, Sevenishok and their neighbors — were murdered with them, al kiddush Hashem הי"ד. The Johannesburg landsmanshaft raised the town's matzeivah in 1952 — the 626-page yizkor book; the wider story is told in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. (Sources: the Yisker-bukh fun Rakishok un umgegnt, Johannesburg 1952, via the JewishGen yizkor project — the survivor accounts, the dates, the deception, the rav at the pits · Hebrew Wikipedia Rokiškis · the JewishGen project record. Seeded: the rabbanim roster, the rav's name, the chadorim record.) What remains of the town today — the surviving old beis hachaim, the rav's wooden house on Sinagogų Street, and the monument to the three shuls of the shul square — is told in the churban diary.

The Town. Vilkomir (Ukmergė) rose on the Šventoji where the roads to Vilna and Riga crossed the river, and its Jews were there from the town's early centuries — timber men, bargemen, traders of grain and linseed oil on the river whose guild-rules governed the sculling from 1589. The kahal and its shul stand in a document of 1685; a generation earlier, in 1665, the princedom of Zamut had given the 622 Jews of the Vilkomir kahal leave to build their first shul — the “River Crossing” — and sanctioned the beis hachaim. The Jewish quarter sat at the River Crossing, its streets bearing names like “Egypt” and “Bath.” The kehilla grew from 716 souls at the 1766 census to 3,758 by 1847 — merchants, craftsmen, the tanneries — and by the 1880s to some 10,000 Jews, before the new railroads bypassed the town and the numbers eased: 7,287, more than half the town, at 1897. In 1878 a market-day fire burned down the entire town — and the kehilla rebuilt itself on its ashes. In May 1915 the Jews of Vilkomir were expelled eastward with all the Jewry of Kovno province; those who returned rebuilt again under independent Lithuania — 3,885 Jews at the 1923 census — and the kehilla's Chevra Kadisha kept its register and restored matzeivos three hundred years old in the old beis hachaim.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. The record's own testimony of the kehilla is that it was renowned for its conservatism — a fortress of the old ways: when the haskalah passed through it, and the maskil Lilienblum began his public career in the town in the 1860s, he found the kehilla unmoved, holding to its mesorah. Its rabbinical chair carried great names — R' Chaim of Volozhin himself held the Vilkomir rabbanus for a single year (c. תקמ"ט) before Volozhin drew him home. Across the generations the chair and its beis din carried great names: R' Aharl'e Vilkomirer — R' Aharon ben R' Shlomo HaLevi (תקע"א–תר"כ), the tzaddik whose name became one with the town's; R' Moshe Shapira, the Pnei Moshe, son of R' Yehoshua Yitzchak Shapira — R' Eizel Charif; R' Shaul Padwa of Polotsk (on the chair תרמ"ד–תר"ע); the dayanim-mechabrim R' Yosef Padwa, the Ikrei HaKorbanos, and R' Alexander Kaplan, the Shalmei Nedarim; and the town's famed darshan, R' Chaim Yitzchak Aharon Rappaport, the Maggid of Vilkomir.

And in the last generations on it sat R' Aryeh Leib Rubin, who founded the yeshiva of the town and was among the heads of Agudas HaRabbonim of Lita; after his petirah in Cheshvan תרצ"ו (1935) came R' Yosef Zusmanovich, “the Yerushalmi” — chosen for the seat over R' Yaakov Kamenetsky, then the struggling rav of little Tzitevian, who had also vied for the Vilkomir rabbanus and thought he had secured it; the loss carried R' Yaakov to America and, as he would say in later years, saved his life and the lives of his family. The crowning of the Yerushalmi also stilled the long and painful machlokes of Slabodka: at last, in the record's own words, the undisputed rav — and rosh yeshiva — in a prestigious town — a great lamdan whose kuntreisim of chiddushim on the whole Shas were lost in the war. When the refugee yeshivos were dispersed from Vilna, the Beis Yosef Novardok yeshiva of Pinsk, under R' Shmuel Weintraub, found shelter in Vilkomir under his hand — the rav himself delivered shiurim to its bochurim.

The Churban. The Germans took Vilkomir on 25 June 1941, and the local Lithuanians fell upon the Jews from the first day. In the Pivonija pine forest, four kilometers from the town, the pits were dug: the actions of August 1941 and the great massacre of 5 September 1941 murdered the Jews of Vilkomir together with the Jews of the district towns brought to the same pits — more than 7,000 kedoshim per the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum's record (the US Commission survey counts 6,354 across the three great actions; the memorial plaque at the kever achim records 10,239); the ghetto's remnant was murdered in late September. With his kehilla went its rav, R' Yosef Zusmanovich, the bochurim of the town's yeshiva, and the sheltered bochurim of the Pinsk Novardok yeshiva. An obelisk of 1953 stands in the forest; the fuller account is told in the churban diary of Vilkomir and on the yeshiva card, and the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Baranovich (Baranavichy), in the Brest region of today's Belarus, was a relatively young town that rose to importance from 1870 as a junction of the Vilna–Lvov and Moscow–Warsaw railways; by 1883 it counted some two thousand souls. Jews settled there only from the close of the nineteenth century — residence had been formally barred until permission was granted in 1903 — yet the kehilla grew swiftly. Between the wars (1921–1939) the town lay in Poland with a Jewish majority, and on the eve of the Second World War about 12,000 Jews lived there, more than half its people.

The Kehilla & its Rabbonim. Across the life of the kehilla two rabbonim served in succession: R' Chaim Yehuda Leib Lubchansky (from 1887 until his petira in 1906) and his son-in-law R' Dovid Weitzel, who held the rabbanus from then until the kehilla's destruction — his wife and children were murdered, and he himself reached Eretz Yisrael after the war. The town rav's son, R' Yisrael Yaakov Lubchansky, would serve as mashgiach of the Ohel Torah yeshiva. Between the wars the town held a full Jewish life: Tarbut, Yavneh, Beis Yaakov and TzISHA schools in Hebrew and Yiddish, Zionist parties and youth movements, and six Yiddish weeklies; in 1931 both Ze'ev Jabotinsky and the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik visited.

Torah of the Town. Baranovich was a town of yeshivos. Foremost was Yeshivas Ohel Torah, founded by the Alter of Novardok and led from 1921 by R' Elchonon Wasserman. From 1928 the town also became a center of Slonim chassidus and its Yeshivas Toras Chesed — shaped and led as menahel ruchani by R' Moshe Midner, grandson of the Yesod HaAvodah — and two of the Slonimer admorim dwelt there — R' Avraham Weinberg II (the Beis Avraham) and his son R' Shlomo Dovid Yehoshua Weinberg, who perished in the Shoah. The rosh hakehilla of the city was R' Moshe Avraham Berezovsky, intimate of the Beis Avraham, murdered with his family הי"ד — his son R' Shalom Noach Berezovsky, the Nesivos Shalom, rebuilt the chassidus and its yeshiva in Yerushalayim.

The Churban. The Germans took Baranovich at the end of June 1941; a ransom was levied, the yellow badge imposed, and some five hundred young Jews murdered that July. On 12 December 1941 the Jews were sealed into a ghetto in the south of the town. In the first great aktion, on 4 March 1942, some twenty-four hundred were murdered, and about a thousand Jews deported from Theresienstadt were killed in gas vans near the town. A second aktion in September 1942 took some six thousand lives, with about two hundred escaping to the forests. On 17 December 1942 the ghetto was liquidated — the last roughly three thousand Jews shot in a nearby forest — and the town declared "free of Jews"; some 250 forced labourers at a nearby airbase were murdered that January. When the Soviets returned in 1944, about 150 local Jews who had fought with the partisans came out of the forests. After the war R' Yaakov Lachowitzki, a Slonim chossid, briefly served as the town's rav before settling in Italy, where he founded Yeshivas Maor HaGolah. The full account is told in the churban diary of Baranovich; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Slabodka (in Yiddish Slabodke; in Lithuanian Vilijampolė — "the town on the Vilija") lies across the river Neris from Kovno, near where it meets the Neman. Because Jews were at times forbidden to dwell within Kovno itself, they settled across the water in Slabodka; in 1919 it was brought within the city's bounds.

The Kehilla. For all its modest, working-class character, on the eve of the war Slabodka was a quarter with a Jewish majority — and one of the beating hearts of the Lithuanian Torah world, its name carried by the yeshiva that bore it across the globe.

Torah of the Town. Slabodka was home to two of the great yeshivos of Lita. The first was the mussar yeshiva Knesses Yisrael of the Alter of Slabodka; the second, founded in תרנ"ח (1897) by R' Tzvi Hirsch Rabinowitz in memory of his father R' Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovno, was Knesses Beis Yitzchok — later led by R' Boruch Ber Leibowitz — the two standing side by side through the years of Slabodka's great machlokes over the place of mussar. From the Alter's derech of Gadlus HaAdam, Knesses Yisrael sent into the world a generation of roshei yeshiva — among them R' Isser Zalman Meltzer, R' Moshe Mordechai Epstein, R' Aharon Kotler and R' Yaakov Kamenetsky.

The Churban. On the night of 25 June 1941, even before the German army had taken firm hold, Lithuanian nationalists fell upon the neighborhood and murdered some 800 Jews — among them the rav of Slabodka, R’ Zalman Osovsky, with rabbeim and bachurim of its yeshiva. On 15 August 1941 the Germans sealed within Slabodka itself the Kovno ghetto — officially the "Vilijampolė ghetto" — emptied and destroyed in July 1944; through its years the mashgiach R’ Avraham Grodzinski stayed with his talmidim, perishing in the final liquidation. The full account is told in the churban diary of Slabodka; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Volozhin (in Yiddish Volozhin; today Valozhyn in Belarus) was a small market town in the Vilna gubernia, within the Pale of Settlement, founded around the fifteenth century by the counts Tyszkiewicz and held by their line for generations. Its land was fertile and good for flax; its Jewish population was never large — yet for all its modest size, the name of Volozhin came to be known wherever Jews learned Torah.

The Kehilla. Volozhin was an ir va'em b'Yisrael — a mother-city of Torah — and the life of its kehilla was bound up with its yeshiva. The bochurim who filled the town rented their rooms from the townsfolk, and the yeshiva gathered funds across Eastern Europe to sustain them, so that the yeshiva was itself a mainstay of the town's parnasa; its talmidim were, as one of them wrote, the very breath of the place.

Torah of the Town. Volozhin was the home of Yeshivas Etz Chaim — the Volozhin yeshiva — founded in תקס"ג (1803) by R' Chaim of Volozhin, foremost talmid of the Vilna Gaon, to carry his rebbe's derech in learning down the generations. It was the first of the great Lithuanian yeshivos — eim hayeshivos, the cradle from which all the rest descended. After R’ Chaim it passed to his son R’ Itzele Volozhiner and in its later years to the Netziv, who led it for some forty years and grew it to about five hundred talmidim. Among those who taught there were the Beis HaLevi, R’ Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, and the Netziv’s son-in-law R’ Rephael Shapira, a rosh yeshiva of Volozhin whose own son R’ Yaakov Shapira would be its last. The Russian authorities forced its closure in 1892 over the demand for secular studies. Its derech of iyun — and its talmidim, among them R' Chaim Brisker and R' Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook — became the template for every great Lithuanian yeshiva that followed: Mir, Slabodka, Telz and Radin among them.

The Churban. Under Soviet rule from September 1939, Volozhin fell to the Germans on 25 July 1941; on his second day the town's new mayor had the Jewish doctor and ten others seized and shot, and in August a ghetto of some 3,500 was sealed. After the killings of October 1941 the ghetto was largely destroyed in the great aktion of 10 May 1942, and its last remnant murdered in the final liquidation of 29 August 1942. The full account is told in the churban diary of Volozhin; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Mir was a small town in the Novardok region — Polish between the wars, today in Belarus. Jews settled there from the early seventeenth century; already in 1685 the town's lords were ordered to grant them equal rights in trade and dwelling and not to meddle in their inner affairs.

The Kehilla. On the eve of the war close to 2,000 Jews lived in Mir, drawing their parnasa from peddling, crafts and trade — and famously from the writing of holy scrolls, for some hundred of the town's Jews were sofrei stam; a little came too from renting rooms to the yeshiva bochurim. The kehilla had its parties and youth movements, four Jewish schools (one Yiddish, two Hebrew, and an Agudah school for girls), a library and a culture club.

Torah of the Town. Mir was the home of the world-famous Mir yeshiva, founded in 1815 by R' Shmuel Tiktinsky and led for generations by his family; it rose to its golden age under R' Eliyahu Boruch Kamai, his son-in-law R' Eliezer Yehuda Finkel and his son R' Avraham Tzvi Kamai, with the mussar of the mashgiach R' Yerucham Levovitz, growing to some five hundred talmidim. The yeshiva itself sat in the White Shul on Wisoker Street, where R' Avraham Tzvi davened through all his years in Mir and gave the rov's two yearly droshos, on Shabbos HaGadol and Shabbos Shuvah. When the Red Army came in 1939 its situation grew impossible, and in 1940 the bochurim left the town — making their way through Vilna and across the world to Shanghai, where, alone among the great yeshivos of Europe, the Mir survived the war almost whole. From its survivors it was rebuilt in Yerushalayim, where it stands today as the largest yeshiva in the world.

The Churban. The yeshiva escaped; the kehilla did not. In October 1941 the Jews were sealed into a ghetto, and on 9 November 1941 — in the aktion the survivors called "the first slaughter" — some two-thirds of the town were murdered, the rav of the kehilla R' Avraham Tzvi Kamai among them. The remnant was destroyed in August 1942; the full account is told in the churban diary of Mir; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Radin (in Yiddish Radin; today Radun in Belarus) was a small market town, mentioned already in the fourteenth-century documents of Grand Duke Władysław II Jagiełło, with a fortress in its early days and town rights granted in 1649. After the third partition of Poland in 1795 it lay within the Russian Empire; between the wars it belonged to Poland, in the Nowogródek voivodeship. Modest in size, its name nonetheless came to be known wherever Jews learned Torah.

The Kehilla. On the eve of the war some 900 Jews lived in Radin, most of them in petty trade, peddling and the crafts; a Tarbut school served the town. Among its rabbonim were R' Eliyahu Margolios, R' Yehuda Aryeh Leib Kawal, R' Zecharia Mendel Katz, R' Mordechai Sender Kopstein, and R' Aryeh Leib Poupko — a son of the Chofetz Chaim.

Torah of the Town. Radin was the town of the Chofetz Chaim, R' Yisrael Meir HaKohen, and the home of his Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim — founded in תרכ"ט (1869). From Radin the Chofetz Chaim gave the Torah world his Chafetz Chaim on the laws of lashon hara and his Mishnah Berurah on the practical halacha of daily life. Its very remoteness, far from the distractions of the city, made it an ideal place to sit and learn; its bochurim, who took their meals in the houses of the townsfolk, were known as perushim, and its kollel was famed for the study of Kodshim — reflecting the Chofetz Chaim's longing, as a Kohen, for the rebuilding of the Mikdash. In 1900, on the recommendation of the Netziv, he called R' Moshe Landynski to head the yeshiva, and in 1904 he brought R' Naftali Trop as rosh yeshiva; in the golden age that followed Radin grew into one of the largest yeshivos in Europe. The First World War scattered the yeshiva into exile — R' Landynski and the mashgiach R' Yosef Leib Nendik holding it together, with R' Elchonon Wasserman among its ramim in those years — and after the churban the Chofetz Chaim’s son-in-law R' Menachem Mendel Zaks raised it anew in America as Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim.

The Churban. Under Soviet rule from September 1939, Radin fell to the Germans at the end of June 1941. A ghetto was sealed that autumn, into which nearly a thousand Jews of the surrounding towns were also driven; in May 1942 it was destroyed — a group forced to dig their own graves rose against their guards, and after a handful broke free the rest were shot and the ghetto liquidated; the few hundred craftsmen spared were deported that June to Lida and Szczuczyn and murdered there. The full account is told in the churban diary of Radin; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Kelm (in Lithuanian Kelmė) was a town in the Shavel district of northern Lithuania, first recorded in 1416. By the census of 1897 some 2,710 of its 3,914 inhabitants were Jews — most of them merchants — and famous rabbonim made their home there.

The Kehilla. Kelm was a town small in size but great in Torah, its life shaped by the spirit of mussar that radiated from its yeshiva. Its Jews were chiefly tradesmen, and the town carried a quiet dignity that its mussar masters held up as a value in itself. On the eve of the churban some 2,500 Jews lived in Kelm — and the survivor record testifies that part of the town's very parnassah came from its famed yeshivos, to which bochurim came from all Lithuania and from across the world, America and Eretz Yisrael among them. The same record testifies that the town was strictly religious — and remained so through the Soviet year.

Parnassah of the Town. The Zak testimony preserves the town's working life whole. Its larger houses: the sawmill of Yitskhok Shapiro, and the sawmill of the partners Mende Rozin and Nokhum Udwin; the electric power station of Moyshe Udwin, Nokhum's father; the starch factory of Khonon Rubikovitsh; the candy factory of Meyer Mordkholovitsh; the variety store of the brothers Meyer-Mote and Leyzer Shtern; the iron businesses of Moyshe Shafer and of the Fridman family; the textile houses of Yisroel Gurvitsh and of Shabsay Beker; and the tanneries of Efroyim Milner, Avrom Podles, and Zalmen Orl. Around the town lay nine Jewish farm compounds: of Zunde Lunts and of Efroyim Milner in the town itself; of Avrom Zaks at Veidszhia; of Shimen Osher at Madzhiunai; of Yankl Kholozhik at Lucinawa; of the Berman family at Kablowcisne; of Khatzl Kushelevski at Paduole; of Moyshe-Leyb Mendelovits at Blekharne; and of Moyshe Gelman at Lukodeme. The kehilla kept a Hebrew school of seven grades; a Jewish national bank — its director, Mr. Mer, would fall among the first kedoshim of the churban — a free-loan gemach, and societies of mutual aid; part of the youth went on to the gymnasiums of Kovno and Shavl. In the Soviet year the compounds, the larger enterprises and the houses were nationalized, yet the record testifies that the town's parnassah on the whole held.

Torah of the Town. Kelm was the home of the Talmud Torah of Kelm — the yeshiva of R' Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm, foremost talmid of R' Yisrael Salanter — who from תרכ"ו (1866) remade the town's plain talmud torah into a house of mussar. Among those who helped him was the young R' Nosson Tzvi Finkel, later the Alter of Slabodka. After the Alter the Talmud Torah passed to his son R' Nochum Zev Ziv and to R’ Tzvi Hirsch Broide, the Alter's nephew and son-in-law, and among the Torah greats it raised was R’ Elyah Lopian. In its last generation the institution was led by R' Daniel Movshovitz and his brother-in-law R' Gershon Miadnik — both sons-in-law of R' Nochum Zev Ziv, as was R' Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, the Michtav MeEliyahu. Its way was the doctrine of Gadlus HaAdam — the greatness of man — pursued through a regime of exacting self-work unlike any other yeshiva; and from Kelm the Alter's talmid R' Nosson Tzvi Finkel built the Knesses Yisrael yeshiva of Slabodka, so that Kelm stands as a fountainhead of the whole Lithuanian mussar world. The survivor record adds the houses themselves: the yeshiva of the town — Rabbi Sadovsky at its head — sat in the great beis hamidrash and the shul, and those who finished it entered the higher house, the beis hatalmud under R' Daniel, which stood in a building of its own, and those who completed it received semichah; and besides these stood a learning-house of its own for the town's frum young men. The record knew R' Daniel by the town's own name for him — the Siderer, the man of Sidra.

The Chair of the Town. The register of Kelm's rabbanim is a register of crowns: R' Eliezer Gutman, the first rav of the kehilla, from 1810; R' Yechezkel (niftar תרט"ו); R' Elyakum Getzel HaLevi Horovitz, whom the town called "the Shulchan Aruch" for carrying the whole of it by heart (niftar תרל"ג), and briefly his son-in-law R' Yitzchak Horovitz; R' Eliezer Gordon, before the chairs of Slabodka and Telz; R' Tzvi Yaakov Oppenheim, forty-three years on the chair, among the founders of the Telz yeshiva; and his son-in-law R' Kalman Beinushevitz, the last rav of Kelm, who carried it to the pit's edge. The yizkor record adds the yeshiva's own heads at the outbreak of the war: R' Shlomo Pianko, a Kelmer by birth, at its head, R' Eliahu Kremmerman beside him, and the mashgiach R' Pesach Sadovetski of Shadova — the "Rabbi Sadovsky" whom the Zak testimony remembers at the head of the yeshiva; the two records are set down side by side, the variance kept.

The shuls of Kelm. Two batei knesses stood at the heart of the kehilla. The Old Shul — by tradition more than three centuries old, raised in wood by the town's poritz, Gruzhevski — was famed across Lita for its artistry: an Aron Kodesh carved with a penknife by Yaakov ben Shlomo of Resain and finished in 1775, and a great copper chandelier of forty branches brought from Vilna and first kindled in 1820, on a day Kelm long remembered as di groiseh simcha. Beside it rose the white, spacious Beis HaMidrash; and after a great fire late in the nineteenth century spared the shuls, the Jews of Kelm built a Kloiz in thanks. The survivor record remembers the old wooden shul still standing in the courtyard of the beis hamidrash in the town's last days, its carved Aron Kodesh a wonder to the end.

The Churban. On ה' אב תש"א (29 July 1941) the men of Kelm and the talmidim of the Talmud Torah were marched to the killing pits and murdered. Before the end R' Daniel Movshovitz spoke to the kedoshim of kiddush Hashem, and R' Gershon Miadnik went down into the pit holding a sefer Torah. The women, the elderly and the children, held apart on the farm compounds, were murdered at the same pits in a second aktion on erev Shabbos, כ"ט אב תש"א (22 August 1941). With the kehilla fell its rav, R' Kalman Beinushevitz — the survivor testimony records him brought to the pits with the Jews of Vaiguva on ה' אב, forced to kneel beside the pit through the whole day, whispering tefillah as his kehilla was murdered, and shot last. The full account is told in the churban diary of Kelm; the kehilla-wide record here follows the survivor testimony of Yakov Zak — one of the 121 witnesses recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky in the DP camps, 1946–48; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Novardok (in Polish Nowogródek; today Navahrudak in the Grodno region of Belarus) was an ancient town, recorded from the year 1116, once a seat of one of the principalities of Kievan Rus. Between the wars it was the capital of the Nowogródek voivodeship of Poland.

The Kehilla. Over 6,000 Jews lived in Novardok on the eve of the war. Its rabbanus was held over the generations by names known across the Torah world: R' Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, later the Gaon of Kovno, sat in Novardok from 1851 to 1864; and in its last generations R' Yechiel Michel Epstein, the Aruch HaShulchan, held the rabbanus until his petira in 1908, standing firmly behind the town's yeshiva when opponents of mussar sought to close it. On his passing the young R' Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman — later the Ponevezher Rav — served briefly as interim rav.

Torah of the Town. Novardok gave its name to Yeshivas Beis Yosef, the yeshiva of R' Yosef Yozel Horowitz, the Alter of Novardok — a talmid of R' Yisrael Salanter and the most demanding of all the mussar masters, whose talmidim gave no thought to comfort or food but to the work of the soul alone. Founded in תרנ"ו (1896), the yeshiva sent out a wide network of branches across Poland and Russia that numbered some four thousand talmidim at its height; in the First World War, when the front reached the town in 1915, it moved to Homel. Novardok taught the most radical form of mussar — that a man's own intellect can distance him from true self-work, and so must be subdued (hachna'as ha'sechel) through relentless, public labor on the middos; after the Alter's petirah — in Kiev in 1919, where he had gone to sustain Jewish refugees and was taken by typhus — his son-in-law R' Avraham Yoffen carried the Beis Yosef network onward.

The Churban. The Germans took Novardok on 4 July 1941; that December the Jews were sealed into a ghetto, and in a series of aktions through to May 1943 the kehilla of over six thousand was reduced to fewer than three hundred. From the doomed labour camp the last Jews dug a tunnel and broke out on the rainy night of 26 September 1943 — the largest such escape in Europe — many reaching the Bielski partisans in the forests. The full account is told in the churban diary of Novardok; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Kamenitz-d'Lita (in Polish Kamieniec Litewski; today Kamyanyets in the Brest region of Belarus) lay some forty kilometres north of Brisk. Founded, the Volhynian Chronicle records, in 1276, it received Magdeburg town rights confirmed by King Jan Sobieski in 1684.

The Kehilla. Between the wars some 1,900 Jews lived in Kamenitz — about four-fifths of the town — most in trade, a few in crafts and small farms. The kehilla maintained a Talmud Torah (the town's only Jewish school), three Jewish libraries and a drama circle; private teachers taught Hebrew, and the Zionist parties and youth movements were active.

Torah of the Town. From 1926 Kamenitz was the seat of Yeshivas Knesses Beis Yitzchak — the yeshiva founded in Slabodka in 1897 by R' Tzvi Hirsch Rabinowitz in memory of his father R' Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor of Kovno — whence its name Knesses Beis Yitzchak — and brought to the town by R' Boruch Ber Leibowitz, foremost talmid of R' Chaim Brisker and author of the Birkas Shmuel, who taught that a man must shape his mind to the Torah and not the Torah to his mind. The Kamenitz years were the most fruitful in the yeshiva's history, until the Soviet occupation of 1939; after the war it was rebuilt in Yerushalayim by his son-in-law R' Moshe Bernstein.

The Churban. The Germans first entered on erev Rosh Hashanah 1939, then handed the town to the Soviets; after their return the Jews were driven in August 1941 to the Pruzhany ghetto, allowed back, and sealed into a ghetto of some 450 families. On 9 November 1942 they were carted to the station at Wysokie Litewskie and deported to Treblinka; of the town's 1,900 Jews, three survived. The full account is told in the churban diary of Kamenitz; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Minsk — capital of White Russia, today the capital of Belarus — was one of the oldest and largest Jewish centers of the region. Jews settled there from the sixteenth century, and the community grew until, by the census of 1897, its 47,561 Jews made up more than half the city. It was a great hub of trade and, by the turn of the century, a center of the Jewish labor movement, alongside its life of Torah.

The Kehilla. Minsk was among the founding kehillos of the Vaad of Lita, the Council of the Lithuanian communities, and one of its most important. Its rabbinate was held over the generations by some of the great names of Lithuanian Jewry — among them R' Yechiel Heilprin, author of Seder HaDoros, called to Minsk in תע"א (1711) from the rabbanus of Hlusk; R' Gershon Tanchum; the Gadol of Minsk; his son-in-law and successor R' Eliezer Rabinowitz, who held the Minsk rabbinate for twenty-eight years; and the Maggid of Minsk. For decades the kehilla was so rich in talmidei chachamim that it appointed no official rav at all — and when it did seat a rav, it seated greatness: R' Dovid Tevel, the Nachalas Dovid, held the Minsk rabbanus. And of the house of its rabbanim came the Shaagas Aryeh — grandson and son of Minsk's rabbanim, rosh yeshiva in the city at thirty-seven until the break with the parnasim told on his card.

Torah of the Town. Under the influence of the Vilna Gaon, a number of yeshivos were established in the city — chief among them the famed Blumke's Kloiz, led by R' Gershon Tanchum, which was reckoned a preparatory gateway to Volozhin. The Gadol of Minsk sat in its rabbinate at the height of its renown, and the Maggid of Minsk roused its tens of thousands from the pulpit.

The Churban. When the Germans took Minsk in June 1941 some 80,000 Jews lived there, about a third of the city. A ghetto was sealed at the end of July, and through aktion after aktion at the pits of Tuchinka and Maly Trostinets its Jewry was destroyed; it was the largest and longest-surviving ghetto in the occupied Soviet Union, and a heartland of armed Jewish resistance. The Minsk community records that only some thirteen of its Jews survived. The full account is told in the churban diary of Minsk; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Smolevichi — Smolovitz in Yiddish — was a town of the Minsk region of White Russia, with a large Jewish community before the war.

The Kehilla. Jews had lived in Smolevichi from the late eighteenth century, and it grew into a Litvish, misnagdic kehilla of the Minsk region — a White-Russian shtetl on the Minsk–Moscow railway, with its shul and batei medrash and its trades. On the eve of the war it numbered well over a thousand Jews.

Torah of the Town. Its rabbinate was held by men of note: R' Eliezer Rabinowitz — son-in-law of the Gadol of Minsk — served here as his first rabbanus, from 1880, before being called to Minsk; and from תרע"ד (1914) the town was led by R' Yechezkel Abramsky, the Chazon Yechezkel, who went from Smolevichi to the rabbanus of Slutsk in the seat of R' Isser Zalman Meltzer, and was afterward Av Beis Din of London.

The Churban. When the Germans took the town at the end of June 1941, about 1,400 of its Jews were herded into a fenced ghetto. On 28 July 1941 some 120 of its men were murdered; at the end of August 1941 the Germans and their auxiliaries shot the kehilla — mostly its elderly, women and children — into the pits at Gorodishche hill, and a last remnant about 13 September; the German report itself counted 1,401 murdered. The full account is told in the churban diary of Smolevichi; the wider story in The Destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Lyuban sits in the Minsk pleck of White Russia, some thirty kilometers from Slutsk and close to the border of the Gomel region, first mentioned in the records in 1566. Through the generations its Jews made up a great share of the town; in 1939 there lived in Lyuban 1,077 Jews — thirty-five percent of the population.

The Kehilla. It was a kehilla of melamdim and carters, shochtim and shopkeepers — at its head the rosh hakahal and shochet R' Yaakov Moshe Kustanovitz — and from תרפ"א (the town record gives תרפ"ב) its rav and av beis din was R' Moshe Feinstein, who in תרפ"ב married Sima, the rosh hakahal’s daughter. His rabbanus here was a rabbanus of mesirus nefesh under the Soviets. In תר"ץ, when the Communist authorities laid a tax of seven thousand rubles on the rabbanim, he strained to pay it and stayed at his post — for resignation, he held, would be a chillul Hashem, since the authorities paraded every rav who stepped down as one who had “seen the light” of Communism. And in תרצ"ב, when they locked the mikvah on claims of “hygiene” and built a swimming pool in its stead, he put his life in danger and bribed the contractor to build, at a distance, a bor for rainwater joined to the pool by his instructions — so that the pool itself was kosher as a mikvah — both of them knowing that discovery meant death. His son R' Dovid said in later years that the zechus of that mikvah stood for his father long afterward. In Shevat תרצ"ז (the town record gives תרצ"ו) he left the Soviet Union for America — where he stood some fifty years at the head of Tiferes Yerushalayim on the Lower East Side, wrote the Igros Moshe, and was seen by many as the gadol hador. The posek of the generation was, first, the rav of Lyuban.

Torah of the Town. Lyuban gave the Torah world more than its rav. Here, in תרל"ד (1873), was born R' Yerucham Levovitz — the Mashgiach of Mir — to R' Avraham, a melamed of young children in the town: the shtetl that raised the master of mussar of the yeshiva world. And here in תרפ"ט (1929) was born R' Dovid Feinstein, named for his grandfather R' Dovid, a profound talmid chacham whose family descended from R' Avraham, the Vilna Gaon’s own brother; at eight he left with his father for Manhattan. And here, in תרס"ב (1902), was born R' Yehoshua Dovid Povarsky — of the town’s own Kustanovitz family — who would lead Ponevezh for over fifty years. A town of melamdim, whose children carried Lita to America and to Eretz Yisrael.

The Churban. The Germans took Lyuban on 28 June 1941 (some records, the 27th or 30th), and the occupation lasted three years, to 30 June 1944. Within days — on 4 July (one record, 2 August) — they went house to house, took the men from about fifteen to fifty, marched them out of the town, sent the non-Jews home, and shot the Jews, some two hundred men. From 5 July 1941 the rest were sealed in a ghetto, a Judenrat forced upon them under Boruch Molin, the former head of the carters’ artel, הי"ד. Again and again, from 1941 into 1943, its prisoners were taken to the marsh west of Lyuban and shot; in June 1942 (one record, July), at the farmstead of the Lyuban machine-tractor station, 1,150 Jews were shot in a single aktion — and by July 1942 some 1,400 Jews of Lyuban had been murdered al kiddush Hashem. Practically all the Jews of the district were killed; the few who escaped fought mostly with the partisans. Since 1964 a stone figure of a grieving woman stands on Kalinina Street over the kedoshim. The full record is told in the churban diary of Lyuban. השם יקום דמם.

The Town. Bűdszentmihály — Semihaly to the Torah world — was a village of Szabolcs county in eastern Hungary; in 1941 it was united with neighboring Tiszabűd, and from 1952 the joined settlement bears the name Tiszavasvári.

The Kehilla. Jewish settlement in the village grew from the second half of the 19th century — a small kehilla whose name in Torah far outgrew its size. At the appointment of the Kol Yehuda in תרל"ה (1875), and at the lead of his rebbe the Maharam Schick, it entered the union of Hungary's Orthodox kehillos, and around its shul, its cheder and its yeshiva it stood until the churban as one of the lights of Szabolcs.

Torah of the Town. R' Yehuda Greenfeld, the Kol Yehuda — one of the great masmichim of his generation, who gave semicha to the Atzei Chaim of Sighet, the Satmar Rav, R' Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, R' Elimelech Lowy of Tosh and the Keren LeDovid — served as ABD from 1875 until his petirah on ג' אדר תרס"ז (1907), an ohel raised over his kever. His son R' Shimon Greenfeld, the Maharshag — born in Chust, nine years a talmid muvhak of the Maharam Schick, the generation's foremost expert in freeing agunos — led the rabbanus and the yeshiva from תרס"ח (1908) until 5690 (1930), and was buried beside his father; the yeshiva, with R' Shlomo Eliezer Rotenberg as dayan, continued until the war. The full story is told in the Yeshivas Maharshag card.

The Churban. On Isru Chag Pesach 1944 the Jews of Bűdszentmihály were concentrated and taken to Nyíregyháza, held in its ghetto and then at the puszta camps, and deported to Auschwitz in the transports of 12, 18 and 26 May and 4 June 1944. The dayan R' Shlomo Eliezer Rotenberg, the Maharshag's son-in-law, was murdered with his wife Chaya and their eight children; the Maharshag's son R' Mordechai perished at Chelmno; the Kol Yehuda's printed chiddushim were lost. After the war some fifty Jews returned — twenty of them from the labor service — renovated the shul and raised a memorial to the kedoshim; from the late 1940s they began to leave, and the last Jews left Bűdszentmihály in 1956. The full account is told in the churban diary of Bűdszentmihály; the wider story in The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Bonyhád (Yiddish Bonihad) is a town in Tolna county in southern Hungary, west of the Danube. A Jewish kehilla took root there from the 18th century and grew into one of the important communities of the region — its Jews about half the town in its heyday, with more than three thousand souls before the war.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Bonyhád was a fortress of Chasam-Sofer Torah. Its rabbanus and yeshiva were held by the Pollak dynasty — R' Yitzchak Zekel Pollak, a talmid of the Chasam Sofer, and his son R' Moshe Pollak, the Vayedaber Moshe — and by R' Yehuda Grünwald, the Zichron Yehuda; the last Orthodox rav was R' Aharon Presburger הי"ד. In 1868 the kehilla split, as many Hungarian towns did, into an Orthodox and a Neolog community; the Orthodox held fast to the mesorah, and it is told that even the Neolog rav would eat only from the shechita of the Orthodox rav.

Torah of the Town. The great yeshiva of Bonyhád, led across the generations by the Pollaks and their successors, sent out roshei yeshiva and rabbonim across Hungary — among the town's bnei Torah were R' Yehuda Grünwald and R' Moshe Pollak, and in its last years its bochurim learned under R' Aharon Presburger. As in the Hungarian yeshivos of old, the out-of-town bochurim were sustained by teg — eating a different balebos's table each day of the week, the housewives setting out a proper meal on the day their bochur came though the family itself ate plainly the rest of the week.

The Churban. In May 1944 the Germans set up two ghettos — the upper for the Neolog community, the lower for the Orthodox around its shuls — and drove in some sixty Jewish patients from a nearby asylum. The ghetto was emptied first into the town's sports field and then, two days on, into a military base for deportation. On 4 July 1944 the kehilla was deported to Auschwitz, among them the rav R' Aharon Presburger; that October the SS shot about twelve hundred Jews left for forced labor, and barely three hundred and fifty of Bonyhád's Jews survived. The kehilla of Bonyhád was murdered al kiddush Hashem הי"ד.

The Town. Šurany — to its yidden Shoran or Nagy-Shoran — lies in the Nitra region of western Slovakia, in the Nové Zámky district; with the First Vienna Award of 1938 it was annexed to Hungary, and its Jews came under the Hungarian anti-Jewish laws. For about fifty years, from תר"ט (1849), its av beis din was R' Chizkiya Feivel Plaut, the Likutei Chaver ben Chaim — among the great talmidim of the Chasam Sofer, whose eleven volumes first printed his rebbe's Torah, and whose yeshiva here raised the bochurim of the Oberland.

The Kehilla. The kehilla was old and senior — already in 1787 some 211 Jews lived in the town, and in earlier generations the rav of Shoran held jurisdiction over Nové Zámky itself, until that city broke away to the Neolog stream. Before the Shoah the kehilla numbered some 150 families — over six hundred registered members, most of them Orthodox, kovea'i ittim baTorah — 722 Jews by the count of 1930, more than a tenth of the town — and it stood until the churban as one of the foremost centers of traditional Jewish life in western Slovakia. Its shul, raised in 1916, is reckoned among the jewels of shul architecture in Slovakia, and near it R' Meir Leib built a modern mikveh for the city in the early 1930s.

Torah of the Town. The rabbanus was held by R' Yeshaya Ehrenfeld — a son of R' Dovid Tzvi Ehrenfeld and so a great-grandson of the Chasam Sofer — until his petirah in 5666 (1906), and passed — as he had stipulated at the wedding — to his son-in-law and nephew R' Meir Yehuda Leib Freya, the Shevet Mishor, a great-grandson of the Chasam Sofer through his mother, talmid of the Levushei Mordechai and musmach of the Shevet Sofer. Immediately upon his appointment he founded Yeshivas Shoran, which grew to three hundred bachurim — one of the largest yeshivos in Hungary and Czechoslovakia — and from its seat he led Hungarian Orthodoxy in the Lishkas HaYereim beside R' Yehoshua Buxbaum of Galánta and R' Shmuel Dovid Ungar of Nitra.

The Churban. At the end of May 1944 a ghetto was set up in Šurany itself, near the shul and the Jewish school, into which were crowded some 1,115 Jews of the town and the Érsekújvár district. On 10 June 1944 it was emptied to the Kurzweil brickyard, the entrainment center, and on 14 June 1944 the Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. R' Meir Leib — admirers had bribed an official to take him from the train, but he refused to abandon his kehilla — was murdered al kiddush Hashem on כ"ו סיון תש"ד with three of his sons and eight grandchildren. By 1948 only fifty Jews remained, and most soon left; the shul stands today as the town museum, a memorial to the kedoshim where the aron kodesh stood. The full account is told in the churban diary of Šurany; the wider story in The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Kecskemét is a market city of the great Alföld plain in central Hungary, in the Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun district, north of Felegyhaz on the Kiskunság. Jews were permitted to settle there from 1746; most were tradesmen and merchants, dealing above all in the produce of that fertile plain — poultry, wine and flowers. By the eve of the war it was a city of some hundred thousand, with a Jewish community that, though never large in proportion, was old, established and well-organized.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. A community was organized at the start of the nineteenth century; the Jews bought a house for a shul in 1814 and consecrated their first shul in 1823, and in the revolution of 1848 their shops were looted. In the great split that followed the Hungarian Jewish Congress, the community went the way of much of central Hungary and joined the Neolog stream in 1868 — the assimilationist current that sought integration into Hungarian society and the softening of the old ways; its lay leaders raised in 1871 a vast Neolog temple, taller than the town church, which an earthquake felled in 1911 and which was rebuilt in 1913. The Jews who held fast to the mesorah were the minority, and in 1917 the shomrei Torah seceded and founded a separate Orthodox kehilla with its own shul, its chevra kadisha and its Talmud Torah — the Torah-loyal core of Kecskemét Jewry. The Neolog chair was held by Dr. Armin Perls (later of Pécs), Dr. Joseph Bárány, Dr. Joseph Borsodi and Dr. Joseph Schindler, who survived the camps and returned to the city after the war. Born in the town was the Neolog rav and historian Ármin Kecskeméti (1874–1944), who served as rav of Makó and lectured in Jewish history at Szeged University, and who was murdered in the Strasshof camp.

Torah of the Town. Two kehillos prayed in Kecskemét side by side — the larger Neolog and the smaller Orthodox — and between them they kept the institutions of a full Jewish town: shuls, a chevra kadisha, a women’s society, a Jewish elementary school and a Talmud Torah where the children of the Torah-loyal learned. Theirs was the lot of a small kehilla in a Neolog-leaning city, a fervent minority holding to Yiddishkeit in a place that had largely chosen the other path; in the years of the White Terror after the First World War the city turned on them, and in 1919 several of the Jewish notables were arrested and hanged on a false charge of having collaborated with the Romanians who had briefly held the city — a foretaste of what was to come.

The Churban. In the census of January 1941, the last before the German occupation, 1,346 Jews were counted in Kecskemét, about one percent of the city. After the Germans entered Hungary in March 1944, Kecskemét was made the regional ghetto and deportation center for a whole district of the Alföld: the mayor, Dr. Béla Liszka, penned the city’s Jews into a ghetto set up in the Orthodox shul and the buildings around it, and the great Copper Match Factory on the edge of the city was turned into a regional collection camp. To it were driven the Jews of the surrounding towns — Felegyhaz, Cegléd, Abony and others — by way of the Kecskemét brickyard, and from the match factory the transports went to Auschwitz on 25–27 June 1944. The members of the Kecskemét Jewish Council — Károly Adorján, Miksa Gerő, Lajos Gratzer, Mihály Kecskeméti and István Maskó — went the way of their kehilla. About 150 survivors returned to renew a remnant of communal life in 1946; the great Neolog temple, emptied of its Jews, today houses a museum. The fuller account is told in the churban diary of Kecskemét, and the regional deportation through the city is traced too in the churban diary of Felegyhaz. Sources: Yad Vashem Ghettos Encyclopedia, entry #974 (Kecskemét); Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary (Yad Vashem / JewishGen Yizkor Book Project); Encyclopaedia Judaica; Hebrew Wikipedia. Yizkor bibliography: János Hornyik, A kecskeméti zsidók története (Gyula, 1988).

The Town. Kiskunfélegyháza — Felegyhaz — is a market town of the Kiskunság on the great Alföld plain, south of Kecskemét. The old Cuman free-district long shut its gates to Jews: in the early 1800s the town council barred even peddling and forbade a Jew to remain within it after sunset; the first Jewish merchant obtained a leasehold only in 1824, on condition that no Christian tenant wanted the shop, and only the national enactments of 1838 opened the town to Jewish settlement.

The Kehilla. The kehilla was founded in 1850, and by 1852 the town's 113 Jews — twenty-six families — already held twenty-eight of its forty-one merchant houses; Jewish hands launched the town's first factories — vinegar, matches, brick — its first banks and its newspapers. On 30 January 1876 twenty-six members withdrew and the community divided — the Neolog majority of the Alföld pattern on one side and the Torah-true Orthodox kehilla on the other, the Orthodox founding their own chevra kadisha that year and their school and talmud torah from 1878, each with its own house on Bercsényi utca — both with beautifully painted ceilings. Around the Orthodox shul lay the Jewish courtyard: the cheder, the mikveh behind it, and at the back the home of the rav — a kehilla that lived the strict life of its fathers. By the census of 1941 the town held 975 Jews, and in the spring of 1944 the Orthodox kehilla numbered 517 souls and the Neolog 459, each with its school, the Orthodox with its talmud torah.

Torah of the Town. The first kehilla of 1850 was served by R' Sámuel Günsberger; in the Orthodox kehilla the rabbinic functions were carried until 1928 by Bernát Holländer, when the kehilla elected its first chief rabbi. The rav of Felegyhaz was R' Ahron Mordechai Lieberman הי"ד — talmid of the Be'er Shmuel of Unsdorf, ABD of Paye, Bilke and Ricse before Felegyhaz became his own kehilla — who against the assimilationist pressure of his day invoked the stand of the Machaneh Chaim a half-century before; his line ran through Liska and Ratzfert back to the court of Kaliv. His son-in-law Reb Chananyah Yom Tov Lipa Weinberger הי"ד served as dayan and led the yeshiva of Felegyhaz, dozens of talmidim strong, until he was seized for the labor service and perished in the winter of תש"ב; his Torah survives in the Shaarei Yom Tov.

The Churban. On 12 May 1944 the ghetto was ordered onto Bercsényi utca itself — the street of the two shuls — 985 souls behind boards, under the whip of Márton Zöldi; in its last days the boundary was shifted overnight, leaving the Orthodox shul outside the fence. On 15 June the Jews were marched down Kossuth Street to the station — Zöldi fell upon the elderly rav before the town, beating him and tearing his beard until he was covered in blood — 269 men, 341 women and 373 children, by way of the Kecskemét match factory with more than 5,400 of the region, to Auschwitz in the transports of 25 and 27 June 1944. A place secured for the rav on the Kasztner rescue train he gave up — he would not save himself while his kehilla remained. R' Ahron Mordechai and Rebbetzin Frimet were murdered al kiddush Hashem on י' תמוז תש"ד; of the deported, only 97 returned. The full account is told in the churban diary of Felegyhaz; the wider story in The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry. הי"ד.

The Town. Strizov — Strzyżów, in the hills of western Galicia near Rzeszów — was a small town that carried a great chair: for a century and a half its rabbanus seat passed through some of the most storied names of Galician Torah, until the house that sat on it last carried its court out of the town and into the crown of Hungary.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. The seat was founded by R' Avraham Aryeh Leib HaLevi, the Drishas Ari — the town's first Rav from c. תק"ל, the mekubal whose sefer bears the haskamos of the Berditchever and the Kozhnitzer, and the rebbe of his nephew the Yismach Moshe. After him the chair was held by the Bnei Yissaschar among his first rabbanus seats, and carried jointly — with Linsk and Sanok — by R' Naftali of Ropshitz; the Bnei Yissaschar's own son R' Elazar Shapira, the Yodei Binah — born in the town in תקס"ח — held the seat from תקצ"ח until his move to the Łańcut rabbanus in תרי"ז; and in its last generations the town was the seat of the Shapira Strizover Rebbes, among them R' Moshe Yehuda Leib Shapira (1853–1916), son of R' Shlomo Shapira.

Torah of the Town. From Strizov's beis medrash the chassidus of the Dinov house went out to the world: it was from Strzyżów that R' Shlomo Shapira carried his court to Munkacz in תרמ"ב (1882) — the little Galician town standing as the root of the great Munkaczer dynasty of the Bnei Yissaschar's line.

The Churban. In the churban the kehilla of Strizov was destroyed with the kehillos of the Rzeszów district — its Yidden driven into the district ghettos and murdered in the Bełżec deportations of תש"ב (1942). The full record of the town's last days is seeded for this site's diaries. Its kedoshim were murdered al kiddush Hashem הי"ד.

The Town. Chodorov — Khodoriv — sat on the rail line between Lemberg and Stryi in Eastern Galicia, a market town above the great Chodorov lake — the old documents call the place Khodoriv-stav — in the belt of country where the chassidus of Zidichov was the air the Jews breathed. Between the wars it grew into a rail junction and an industrial town — its great sugar plant the largest works in the district — the town numbering 4,206 souls in 1921 and 7,646 by 1931, with a kehilla of some 2,500 Jews on the eve of the churban. The kehilla was never large, but it carried a chair of Torah across the generations, and its name is woven into two great family maps of the Torah world.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. In the early generations its Torah house was R' Aharon Sternklar, a talmid of the Rebbe Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk, whose daughter married into the house of the Yismach Moshe — the zeide of the Yeitev Lev of Sighet. In the later, documented rabbanus sat the Eichensteins of Zidichov: R' Yehoshua Heshel Eichenstein (born תר"ג), son of R' Alexander Sender Yom Tov Lipa Eichenstein, the bechor of the Mahari"a of Zidichov, and named for the Skolyer zeide, who carried the town's rabbanus and was niftar soon after his father; and after him his son R' Yissachar Berish, ABD Chodorov for decades until his petirah in 1918 (תרע"ח) — of whom the record preserves that when his shidduch tanaim were written in the Mahari"a's house, the Mahari"a blessed the mechutan with the words of Chazal, כָּל שֶׁהוּא תַּלְמִיד חָכָם וּבְנוֹ תַּלְמִיד חָכָם וּבֶן בְּנוֹ תַּלְמִיד חָכָם — שׁוּב אֵין תּוֹרָה פּוֹסֶקֶת מִזַּרְעוֹ — and said the words fit his einikel from every side.

Torah of the Town. Chodorov davened and learned in the derech of Zidichov: its rav's house was a Zidichover house, and the Zidichov court card counts Chodorov among the branch-courts of the dynasty — the line that, in the last generation, crossed the sea and replanted itself in Chicago. And the town's crown was its shul: the great wooden shul of Chodorov, built in תי"ב (1652), its ceiling covered in painted heavens — among the most famous of the painted wooden shuls of Galicia, the work of Jewish artists whose like the world has not rebuilt. The town's Torah life ran around it in the Galician way: the beis medrash, the kloiz, the shtieblach of the chassidim. The shul itself was burned by the Germans in the first days of the occupation — and its painted ceiling lives on in the reconstruction that stands today in the Museum of the Jewish People (Beth Hatefutsoth) in Tel Aviv, built from the surviving records, as Yad Vashem's account of the shul tells.

The Churban. The Germans entered Chodorov in July תש"א (1941), and the blows began at once: the Jews were robbed and abused by the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators, and the great wooden shul — nearly three centuries old — was burned. In June 1942 came the first Aktion: some 1,000–1,500 Jews were seized; the sick and the weak were shot in the town itself, and the rest were sent to Bełżec, where they were murdered on arrival. In October 1942 a second Aktion sent 350 more to Bełżec. Some 800 Jews remained — and in February 1943 the Ukrainian police murdered the remnant of the kehilla beside the town's sugar plant. Of Chodorov's 2,500 Jews, some fifteen survived, most of them hidden by friends and neighbors — ten of them hidden for twenty-two months in the cellar of a Pole, Henryk Piczek, whose name deserves recording among the righteous. The kehilla of Chodorov was destroyed with the Jewry of Eastern Galicia, its Jews murdered al kiddush Hashem הי"ד. The full account is told in the churban diary of Chodorov. (Sources: the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. II; Yad Vashem's record of the wooden shul.)

Among the rabbanim who served the kehilla in the century before the churban was R' Yosef Yoel Deutsch, the Yad Yosef, who had sat as a dayan on the beis din of Tarnopol before he came to the rabbanus, and was niftar in תרט"ו (1855).

The Town. Kobrin — Kobryn to its Jews — sat on the Mukhavets river in Polesia, in the marsh-and-forest country between Brisk and Pinsk. Jews are recorded there from the fifteenth century, and under Poland, Lita, the Russian Empire and again interwar Poland — the Polesie voivodeship — the kehilla grew into a classic Litvish shtetl. Between the wars some 5,600 Jews lived there, the greater part of the town; Yiddish was the language of its streets, its shops stood shuttered on Shabbos and Yom Tov, and its communal life ran rich with every shade of Jewish party and mosad. From the late 1920s the kehilla's hanhala was led by a representative of Agudas Yisrael.

The Kehilla and its Rabbonim. Kobrin's rabbinic chain reached back through the generations — R' Shlomo, and R' Nachum, grandfather of the Maggid of Dubno, in the eighteenth century, and R' Meir Marim Shafit, mechaber of the Nir on the Talmud Yerushalmi, until תרל"ג. In תרל"ד R' Eliyahu Schick, the Ein Eliyahu, was called to its rabbanus and was niftar there suddenly half a year later, buried in the town. After him came R' Shaul Katzenellenbogen; then R' Chaim Berlin, son of the Netziv of Volozhin; and R' Meir Atlas, a talmid of R' Yisrael Salanter. In the last generation R' Michael Shemesh served as rav of the kehilla, murdered in the Shoah with his flock.

Torah of the Town. Kobrin was the cradle of Kobrin chassidus, a Lithuanian chasidishe court founded by R' Moshe Polier of Kobrin (1783–1858), of the Lechovitch–Slonim line — "by R' Moshe of Kobrin I found my heart," it was said of him — whose shtieblach, and a Kobrin–Bialystok branch after him, carried the avodah of the heart. Beside them R' Pesach Pruskin's yeshiva, founded in תרפ"ג (1923) — he a talmid of the Alter of Slabodka — drew bochurim to the lamdus of Lita; and between chassidus and yeshiva flowed the full life of a Torah town: its shuls and batei midrash, its Talmud Torah and chadarim.

The Churban. When the Germans took Kobrin on 22 June 1941 at the opening of Barbarossa, they began at once to burn Jewish homes, and by September had murdered some two hundred Jews. That November the Jews were sealed into a ghetto; with the Jews of Białowieża and Hajnówka driven in, it held some eight thousand souls. Within weeks the Germans demanded hundreds of "incurables," and when these could not be found the Judenrat was forced to fill the quota with the elderly, the sick and children, who were taken out and murdered. Early in 1942 the ghetto was split — Ghetto A for some five hundred craftsmen and their families, Ghetto B for the rest — and in the spring it was fenced with wire and its electricity cut; on Pesach the Jews were suffered to bake matzos only if they found their own flour.

On Shabbos, 27 July 1942, Ghetto B was liquidated, and some three thousand Jews — with the patients and staff of the Jewish hospital — were taken to Bronna Góra and murdered. A ghetto underground of some fifty young men and women now armed itself from the German arsenals; and when Ghetto A was destroyed on 14 October 1942 and its people were marched toward Dywin to pits prepared in advance, they fought — Gershon Tenenbaum shooting until he fell, Rachel Goldin flinging grenades, Dr. Chaim Goldberg firing and keeping his last bullet for himself. Some five hundred broke for the forests, of whom about a hundred reached them; the last craftsmen left in the town were murdered by year's end. The kehilla of Kobrin — its rebbe R' Moshe Aharon Rabinowitz among the kedoshim — was destroyed al kiddush Hashem — הי״ד.