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Przedborz
Przedbórz, located on the Pilica River, was created by King Casimir The Great, though it was King Ladislaus Jagie³³o who introduced German law to the city. The history of Przedbórz’s Jewish community dates from the 12th century, when the city received its charter. The city’s location, on major trade routes from Ruthenia, Little Poland and Silesia, proved attractive to Jews settling there.
Photo: from the archives of Tomasz Wi¶niewski
Initially, the small community of Jewish settlers did not create a religious authority. King Stephen Bathory first granted Jews the right to settle in Przedbórz. At that time, in 1594, the Jewish community was created. The first synagogue and cemetery were also created at that time. The influx of Jews to the city soon led to protests by the city’s other residents. In 1595, King Sigismund III Vasa prohibited Jews from owning homes in the city and barred the Polish population from selling Jews all forms of real estate. Anyone violating this royal law would be severely fined. These restrictions were rescinded by King Ladislaus IV after the city was destroyed by fire in 1638. Removing restrictions on Jews settling in the city was intended to help rebuild and repopulate the city, as it was feared that the remaining population would simply abandon it. During this period, the weekly market and annual fair were particularly important for the city’s development. Przedbórz was granted the privilege to organize six fairs a year. Three of them were so large that they lasted over a week.
Photo: from the archives of Tomasz Wi¶niewski
In the 17th century, numerous wars and other misfortunes negatively affected the city’s development. In 1638, fire destroyed a large part of the town. It was barely rebuilt when the Swedish army wreaked havoc on the city. The Swedish seizure of the city served as a pretext to accuse the Jews of collaboration with the occupiers. In 1657, Hetman Czarnecki’s army retook the city and oversaw a pogrom against the city’s Jews during which nearly the entire Jewish population of Przedbórz perished. A wave of similar pogroms spread across a majority of the cities in that part of the country; collaboration with the Swedes was pretext behind them. After the Swedish invasion and the pogroms against the Jewish population carried out by the Polish army, Przedbórz’s municipal authorities, hoping to rebuild the city’s economic position, obtained the right to organize twelve fairs a year. Despite this, the town never regained its former role as a trading center. Not long after the tragic events of 1657, Jews were given the privilege to settle in Przedbórz. By the 18th century, six hundred Jews had settled and built a new synagogue.
In the 18th century, Przedbórz’s Jews took advantage of the many privileges bestowed upon them in various royal acts. These acts not only granted Jews the right to settle, but also protected them against them from abuse by the municipal authorities, especially city clerks and the starosta, i.e. the lord who oversaw Przedbórz and the surrounding area.
In 1754, there were twenty-five buildings housing Przedbórz’s Jews, and by 1789 eighty-three Jewish families lived in the town.
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The unstable political situation at that took a particularly harsh toll on the city’s Jewish population. Each time an army occupied the city, the city’s population was forced to pay enormous tributes. In Przedbórz, these contributions were extracted from its Jewish community, meeting both its and the rest of population’s shares. This was most likely a result of the privileges extended to the Jews, especially the exclusive right to trade in the town, which were considered particularly lucrative. Despite the large sums that the monopoly on trade brought in, the tributes proved ruinous for the town’s Jewish community. The Confederation’s army cost the Jewish community 58,000 Polish zloty, while Colonel £opuchin wrested a contribution of 5,000 Polish zloty during his stay.
During the second half of the 18th century, Przedbórz slowly began to recover from its economic collapse that was initially a result of the Swedish Deluge, and then compounded by events that followed. Przedbórz’s location along major trade routes provided many commercial opportunities that Jewish merchants took advantage of. At that time, petty trade dominated, which mainly met the needs of the town’s residents and those who lived in the area. Goods were imported from abroad (often Nuremberg) via Gdañsk. On a broader scale, merchants traded included wood, cattle and agricultural products that flowed along the Pilica River. Extant trade records from that period give us the names of a few merchants who traded on a larger scale: ¯awel Abramowicz, Jakub Markus, Icek Fraimowicz, Lewek Lejzerowicz, and above all the well-known Izrael from Przedbórz who know doubt was a wholesale merchant.
The turn of the 19th century brought major political changes to Przedbórz, which found itself changing hands among the region’s powers. Along with plans of building up the cloth industry in the center of the country, the first weaving workshops started to appear in Przedbórz. During the 1820s, the Jewish population stood around two thirds of the town’s population and was continually expanding. Jewish merchants and industrialists organized textile investments, deliveries of raw materials as well as traded in finished textile products. Goldberg soon built the town’s first linen factory. Around the same time Weinman built a lumber mill while Zachert founded a pot factory. The growth in the number of factories in the city increased the demand for craft goods, causing considerable growth in the crafts industry. During the second half of the 19th century, two spoon factories, four tanneries, a stocking factory, a brewery and a lime works were built in Przedbórz. The town’s industrial development impinged on the fast-paced growth of neighboring cities, especially £ód¼. In 1869, Jews comprised 73.9% of Przedbórz’s population, i.e. some 3,550 people. In 1939, there were five prayer houses in addition to the synagogue. The Jewish community played a significant role in the city, including in the municipal authority. Jewish council members comprised more than half of Przedbórz’s city council members.
Just before the outbreak of the war, Jews were more than fifty percent of Przedbórz’s population. During the September campaign, the town was to a large degree destroyed. At that time the wooden synagogue was burned. In January 1940, the occupying German authorities created a ghetto that housed over 4,500 Jews. In October of 1942, the Przedbórz ghetto was liquidated, with Jews being first transferred to the ghetto in Radomsko and then on to the death camp in Treblinka. The nine Jews who survived returned to Przedbórz in 1945. Around New Year’s 1946, they were forced from the town by right-wing members of the underground and murdered in the Radoszycki Forest.
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