A ceremony Thursday (Sept. 20) unveiled a memorial at the destroyed Jewish cemetery and officially inaugurated a new, multi-cultural heritage trail in the small town of Gostynin, in central Poland.
The new memorial includes a metal cage containing fragments of matzevot, situated behind a commemorative stone.
The Heritage Trail, two years in development, includes information panels at 10 locations around the town that highlight the pre-WW2 communities of Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews who once lived in Gostynin.
The aim, the project web site states, is to “educate and provoke a deeper interest in the past multi-faith and multicultural Gostynin.”
Three panels — in Polish, with summaries in English and Hebrew — deal with Jewish history in the town. Jews settled in the second half of the 18th century; on the eve of WW2 nearly 2270 Jews lived in the town, making up between 1/4 and 1/3 of the population.
One of the information panels describes the pre-WW2 shtetl and Jewish history
One describes the World War II Nazi Ghetto
One is located at the Jewish cemetery, located on ul. Gościnna.
The cemetery was totally destroyed by the Nazis. No matzevot remain — they were removed and used for construction and road work. Some fragments were discovered in a nearby forest in 2010, and these are now gathered in the memorial.
The web site states:
The Jewish cemetery in Gostynin was founded in the second half of the eighteenth century in the south-western part of the city. […] The cemetery was completely destroyed during World War II. Germans used the gravestones to harden the roads and sidewalks. Part of the tombstones survived the war, but “disappeared” when estate houses and apartment buildings were built on adjacent plots. No gravestone survived on 0.8830 ha area. Moreover, awareness of the inhabitants of Gostynin that this area is a Jewish cemetery, is very faint.
Local activists, headed by and the city worked together with several Jewish institutions and organizations in the commemoration. The cemetery memorial was organized by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute.
See web site of the Multicultural Heritage Trail
See Facebook page for the Multicultural Trail
See all of the Information Panels in the Trail
See the Yizkor book of Gostynin
See Virtual Shtetl pages on Gostynin
2 comments on “Poland: Jewish cemetery memorial inaugurates new multicultural heritage trail in Gostynin”
Helo
do you have anything from KOZIENICE ? (my parents home town)
Wonderful that you have commemorated this place! May the Jews who lived there and perished be for a memory.