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Kielce
Kielce's history really takes off in the eleventh century when the archbishop of Cracow made the city's castle his summer residence. The settlement that developed around the Bishop's residence grew quickly and in 1364 it received its municipal charter, in which it was explicitly stated that the city was church property belonging to Diocese of Cracow. Accordingly, for the next several hundred years, the legal binding privilegia de non tolerandis Judaeis was enforced, which meant that no Jews were allowed to settle inside the city. The law was confirmed in a 1761 bishop's document that ordered the unconditional expulsion of all Jews living in Kielce. An equal right to settle Kielce was finally establish by a royal decree in 1862 giving Jews a degree of autonomy. This change engendered a dynamic period of development for the Jewish community of the city. Ten years after this decree according to a census of 1873, there were 1000 Jews residing in the city; thirty five years later, in 1909, there were nearly 12,000 Jewish residents. Jews played an integral role in the development of the city's trade and industry. Additionally they were leading figures in medicine, law, journalism and the arts.
During the interwar period the number of Jewish inhabitants of the city grew to 15,000. There were two synagogues, not to mention several prayer halls, a regional Yiddish weekly in addition to Jewish schools with both lay and religious teachers. There were also Jewish educational and philanthropic organizations that served broader public functions.
The outbreak of war and the Nazi occupation brought an end to this rich social life. The ghetto was created in the spring of 1941 imprisoning not only Kielce�s Jewish residents, but also those from neighboring towns and villages. The ghetto eventually held 27,000 people. In the course of one year that is until their deportation in 1942, illness and starvation claimed more than 7,000 of the ghetto�s souls. The rest were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka.
After the end of the war about 200 Jews returned and lived in the building at Planty 7. It was here on July 4 1946 that a brutal massacre took place in which 42 people where killed and twice that many injured.
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The pogrom was inspired by a plot of "ritual murder" that had whipped up a febrile fervor in the town; several thousand people eventually took part in the killings.
The memorial on the grave of the masacre victims from 1946. Photo: J.J.
In 1990 a plaque commemorating the events of that day was unveiled. In addition to the plaque there are to other two other monuments in Kielce commemorating the history of its Jewish residents.
The first of these is the synagogue that was built in 1902 in the popular neo-Gothic style of the time, though it was adorned with some art nouveau accents. It is difficult to recognize the previous splendor in the building�s current role as an archive, as it was entirely rebuilt in the 1950s in a neoclassical style.
The city archive building. Photo: J.J.
The second monument is the lapidarium (a memorial built of gravestones) on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery that dates from 1868. During the Nazi occupation the cemetery was destroyed; it was also the location of mass executions of prisoners. In the 1960s what remained was completely leveled, with the gravestones ground down into aggregate for making cement. In the 1980s an effort was made to collect the remaining fragments of the gravestones out of which was built the lapidarium cum memorial.
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