U krańca Lublina czworokąt czarny
szumem poemat wiatrów skanduje.
Klony, brzeziny, kasztany, tuje
obsiadły wyspę umarłych.
[At the edge of Lublin, a black quadrangle
Chants a poem of the wind, with a murmur.
Maples, berry, chestnuts, thuja
They settled the island of the dead.]
— Józef Czechowicz
I
Cut into a man’s flesh, and his lifeblood pours out. Cut into the veins of the blessed gods, and golden ichor is said to issue forth. Cut into the surface of an ancient city, and it is history that irrupts into the present. Such an irruption can happen entirely by chance, as was the case in the eastern Polish city of Lublin, in late April, when the construction of an underground transformer station inadvertently revealed evidence of the lost world of the Polish Jewry. Having delved a mere four feet down, the work crew struck a layer of brick masonry and rubble-covered basements, with interspersed artifacts dating from as early as the 17th century. The project was paused at the behest of the Lublin Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments, which immediately undertook an archaeological survey, but it was immediately clear that these structures bore some relation to a tenement house that once occupied the address of ulica Zamkowa 5, parts of which were uncovered in a similar fashion during the 2012 construction of a nearby public toilet. These fragmentary remains are poignant reminders that underneath Lublin’s Old Town, concealed beneath only a few feet of soil and debris, lies what little is left of the once-flourishing Jewish district of Podzamcze.
The Jewish community of Lublin was first formed in the mid-14th century, but in 1535 the Christian burghers of the city requested the “royal privilege” of de non tolerandis Judaeis, the non-toleration of Jews, so a separate walled Jewish town (“żydowskie murowane miasto”) rose up at the base of the castle hill, in an area of drained wetlands adjacent to the Czechówka River. A beit almin, an “eternal home” or cemetery, was soon established on a loess hill near what is presently the junction of Kalinowszczyzna and Sienna streets, and it is here that one can still find the oldest in situ Jewish tombstone in all of Poland, belonging to the Talmudic scholar Ya‘akov Kopelman, and inscribed with the words:
Grief and a mournful song I shall raise, crying
And with tears I shall sing upon the one, who
is buried here. Gaon, our teacher, lord, master
Kopelman, Jaakow of the tribe of Levi
his name. And it has its meaning.
Proficient in the wisdom of all
books, especially the book of six
orders, and who promoted Torah
as well as he? And who will manifest
his glory? He, mighty with knowledge of Torah,
a precious cornerstone,
the throne is sealed with his name. Mighty,
noble Jaakow, the son of Jehuda
of Levi, blessed be his memory. He died on 13 Sivan
and was buried on Sunday, 5301 [June 18, 1541] by a short reckoning.
A brick synagogue, a yeshiva, and a Hebrew printing press would be erected within a few years, and by 1568 it seems that Podzamcze even managed to obtain the royal privilege de non tolerandis Christianis, turnabout certainly being fair play in this instance.
Podzamcze became a center of learning, so much so that Lublin as a whole was dubbed the “Jewish Oxford.” Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the renowned Hassidic rabbi, tzadik, Kabbalist, philosopher, and “Seer of Lublin” (Heb. ha-Chozeh MiLublin), whose tomb can also be found in the Old Jewish Cemetery, considered Lublin the “navel of the world,” the “cosmic center,” even the “New Jerusalem.” And Lublin was indeed the focal point of the Polish Jewry, where the Council of the Four Lands (Heb. va‘ad arba’aratsot), representing the Jewish communities of Greater and Lesser Poland, Ruthenia, and Volhynia, met and legislated during the spring fair. Lublin’s Jewish community thrived, numbering around 9,000 souls by the middle of the 19th century — more than half the city’s population.
At the turn of the century, those numbers had swelled to more than 23,000, reaching 37,000 by the 1920s. More than a hundred shuln, batei midrash, and private houses of prayer, often located in tenement houses, offices, and outbuildings, were distributed throughout the city, alongside schools, workers’ educational societies, libraries, theaters, and sports associations. Jewish political parties flourished in Lublin. The neoasymilatorzy, or “neo-assimilators,” of the Jewish Democratic Youth Association published the city’s first Jewish magazine, the Polish-language Myśl Żydowska, or Jewish Thought, beginning in 1916, while the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland held its inaugural convention there at the end of the following year. Zionist organizations, general and revisionist alike, were well represented in the city, and youth movements like the Captain Josef Trumpeldor Scouting Association and Hashomer Hatzair operated within the city and its environs. While the bare bricks and shattered foundations of the tenement house at ul. Zamkowa 5 gives us only the slightest hint of what life was like in Podzamcze and Lublin before the Shoah; they still serve as a powerful aide–mémoire, a useful point of departure for a historical exploration of all that was subsequently lost.
II
The recently-unearthed apartment building was situated between the Gothic Lublin Castle and the stout Grodzka Gate, a spot which allows us to plan an itinerary beginning at the Zamkowa tenement, then passing through the medical portal and onto the wide, picturesque Grodka Street. During the interwar period, a pedestrian following this route would have strolled by the Jewish Town Shelter for Orphans and the Elderly (founded in 1862), perhaps stopped to do bit of browsing at the marvelous bookshop of the antiquarian Szlomo Baruch Nisenbaum, and taken in the architectural charms of the 16th-century burgher house at ul. Grodzka 19, home to one of the most extraordinary figures of pre-war Lublin, the lawyer, journalist, patron of the arts, actor, theater director, soldier, and confirmed eccentric, Jakub Waksman.
Another prominent cultural figure in 1930s Lublin, the poet Józef Czechowicz, was killed during a Nazi bombing raid on September 9, 1939 — his body, pulled from the rubble at Krakowskie Przedmieście 46, was only identified thanks to the red, pocket-sized English dictionary he always carried with him — but he left behind an extraordinary testament to his hometown, the “Poemat o mieście Lublinie,” or “Poem on the City of Lublin,” which hauntingly describes the ul. Grodzka:
Noc letnia czeka cierpliwie,
czy księżyc spłynie, zabrzęknie,
czy zejdzie ulicą Grodzką w dół,
On się srebliwie rozpływa
w rosie porannej, w zapachu ziół.
Jest pięknie!
[The summer night waits patiently
For the moon to float down, murmuring
Or drift down Grodzka Street
To dissolve its silver
In the morning dew, in the scent of herbs.
How beautiful!]
Another writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose father was born in the Lublin Voivodeship, provided an equally memorable account of the pre-war city in Der Kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, or The Magician of Lublin:
The dusk descended. Beyond the city there was still some light, but among the narrow streets and high buildings it was already dark. In the shops, oil lamps and candles were lit. Bearded Jews, dressed in long cloaks and wearing wide boots, moved through the streets on their way to evening prayers. A new moon arose, the moon of the month of Sivan. There were still puddles in the streets, vestiges of the spring rains, even though the sun had been blazing down on the city all day. Here and there, sewers had flooded over with rank water; the air smelled of horse and cow dung and milk fresh from the udder. Smoke came from the chimneys; housewives were busy preparing the evening meal: groats with soup, groats with stew, groats with mushrooms. … The world beyond Lublin was in turmoil. Every day the Polish newspapers screamed war, revolution, crisis. Jews everywhere were being driven from their villages. Many were emigrating to America. But here in Lublin one felt only the stability of a long-established community. Some of the town’s synagogues had been built as long ago as the time of Chmelnicki. Rabbis were buried in the cemetery, as well as authors of commentaries, legists, and saints, each under his tombstone or chapel. Old customs prevailed here: the women conducted business and the men studied the Torah.
Pore over old maps of Lublin and Podzamcze, pass your eye over pictures of wide avenues and shadowy alleyways, step over the exposed bricks of tenement houses that once huddled at the base of Lublin Castle, and you can almost hear the jumble of voices emanating from the crowded taverns, taste the cebularz lubelski (onion-topped flatbread) served at famous bakeries like Bajtel’s on ul. Furmańska, and — somewhat less appealingly — smell the pungent ammoniacal odor of the city’s innumerable tanneries. It was that world that was wrenched into the present day, entirely by accident, when earthmoving equipment revealed the long-forgotten Zamkowa Street tenement house.
However much we would like to linger in the midst of that lost civilization, even if only in our minds’ eyes, it cannot be avoided that on March 24, 1941, the Nazis established the Lublin Ghetto and began the liquidation of the Jewish community. Around 34,000 Jews were sealed within the Podzamcze district before being sent to the extermination camps of Belzec, Maidanek, and Sobibor. No more than 300 of them survived the war. After the final liquidation Aktion had taken place, in the summer of 1944, the Nazis demolished the centuries-old synagogues, cemeteries, and entire residential and commercial districts of Lublin, including Podzamcze. A 1952 Yizkor-bukh, or memorial book, published in Paris by former residents of Lublin, entitled Dos bukh fun Lublin, contrasted the halcyon days of pre-war Lublin with the devastation wrought by the Holocaust:
Hundreds of sounds mix together, weaving themselves into one symphony of being, in which tremble all the contradictions of the continual transformations that wind themselves into the settlement, of the continual struggle between old and new forms of life, rising up and growing in the process of its communal and intellectual differentiation … Until all those visions melt together into one singular, bloody-wound vision of long, interminably long lines of Jews, that are driven over the so well-known streets to their last course. Until those very streets, whose names have been mentioned hundreds of times, shrink more and more down to one single place of despair: to the first ghetto, to the second ghetto, to Maydan-Tatarski, until Majdanek swallows up everything and everyone…
Buildings like ul. Zamkowa 5 lay in ruins for an entire decade, until the rubble was finally carted off and the exposed basements filled in. A few relics of Lublin Jewish life remain, aside from the shattered masonry occasionally encountered by construction crews — the Old Jewish Cemetery, the old Jewish Hospital at 81 Lubartowska Street, the only preserved synagogue (also on Lubartowska Street), and a few other scattered structures, as well as more recent memorials and historical markers, like the modest stone obelisk on the Castle Square, commemorating the location of the now-invisible Jewish district.
III
Yet the most extraordinary artifacts to have survived the ravages of time and genocidal hatred must be those books that once graced the shelves of the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, and are even now being rediscovered. The prestigious Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, founded in 1930 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro with the financial support of the New York rabbi Benjamin Gut of the Chasam Sopher synagogue, and many others in Poland and abroad, was a center of Jewish learning in the years leading up the the Second World War, featuring a library of anywhere between 15,000 and 40,000 volumes, some of which dated back to the 16th century. It was long assumed that the Nazi authorities consigned the contents of the yeshiva’s library to a bonfire, but Adam Kopociowski, a professor of Jewish history at Lublin’s Marie Curie-Skłodowska University, has concluded that only some of the collection was destroyed, the rest initially being stored in the Lublin Staatsbibliothek, a German state library, whereupon “the majority of the books left Lublin shortly before the city was entered by the Soviet troops. They may have been headed toward Warsaw or Silesia, or, as I think, most credibly, to Prague, where the Germans planned to locate their museum of the extinct race.”
An ongoing project by Lublin’s Grodzka Gate‐NN Theatre Center, a local government cultural institution operating out of the old Grodzka Gare and the adjoining tenement, has been tracking down books in public and private collections all over the world that still bear the stamp of the Lublin Yeshiva. Only ten of the books have been physically returned to Lublin, but Piotr Nazaruk and other Grodzka Gate‐NN Theatre Center researchers and “memory activists” have been working to establish a digital catalog of the vanished library. Some 850 books have been uploaded, still only five percent of the original collection, but Nazaruk is looking on the bright side: “On the one hand, it’s not a lot, but on the other hand, it proves that probably thousands more are still around.”
Books from the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva library are still floating around, regularly appearing in public sales and on e-commerce sites. One such volume, auctioned off in 2020 for $11,000, was an 18th-century copy of Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat, owned and annotated by the German talmudist Rabbi Yeshaye Pick, described by the auction house as
Donated by the Kloiz D’Chasidei Boyan to Yeshivath Chachmei Lublin. With stamps from both institutions, as well as an inscription on the opening blank from the librarian of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin calling attention to the annotations by Rabbi Berlin-Pick. A remarkable volume with hundreds of autograph annotations and with a distinguished provenance from the crown jewel of pre-war Polish yeshivoth.
A distinguished provenance indeed.
Only 10 of the tens of thousands of books once held by the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva library remain in Lublin. Only a few hundred Jews reside in a city that once hosted tens of thousands. Only a few pre-war buildings from what was once Podzamcze have survived. Yet there were those, like the authors of the post-war Lublin Yizkor-bukh, who sought “to extend – at least in spirit – the life of their settlement, embracing it in the hemshekh [continuation] of the generations,” and thankfully there are still those, like the researchers at the Grodzka Gate‐NN Theatre Center, who are working to preserve the memory of Podzamcze and its people, and “to reclaim from oblivion the names, faces and stories of the Jewish Lublin community,” as they describe their mission.
Earlier, we journeyed together from Castle Hill, through the Grodzka Gate, and into the heart of Lublin’s bustling Jewish district, and now, as we must take our leave, perhaps the last word should be given to the poet Józef Czechowicz, who concluded his ode to his hometown with the melancholy envoi:
Dobranoc, miasto stare, dobranoc. Drogi białe wychodzą stąd na północ, zwężają się w ścieżyny, ścieżyny rozlewają się w drobne strużki steczek. Wędrowiec jest już tylko ciemnym punkcikiem na jednej z nich. Zniknął za wzgórzem.
Dobranoc, miasto,
dobranoc…
[Good night, old city, good night. White roads lead from here to the north, narrowing into paths, paths spreading into small streams of scree. The traveler is now only a dark dot on one of them. He disappeared behind the hill.
Good night, city,
good night…]
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
In Memoriam: Keith Edward Windschuttle, 1942-2025
Some Ruminations on Natural History and Political Economy
The Perils of Personalism: Thoughts on ‘Liberation Day’
