The Kielce Jewish Cemetery (also known as the Pakosz Cemetery) is located in the Pakosz District of

Kielce Kielce (, yi, קעלץ, Keltz) is a city in southern Poland, and the capital of the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship. In 2021, it had 192,468 inhabitants. The city is in the middle of the Świętokrzyskie Mountains (Holy Cross Mountains), on the bank ...

, Poland, at the intersections of Pakosz Dolny and Kusocińskiego Streets. It has an area of 3.12 hectares. There are about 330 tombstones saved and preserved inside the

necropolis A necropolis (plural necropolises, necropoles, necropoleis, necropoli) is a large, designed cemetery with elaborate tomb monuments. The name stems from the Ancient Greek ''nekropolis'', literally meaning "city of the dead". The term usually im ...

, of which about 150 are arranged in the form of a lapidary monument. The cemetery is closed to visitors without special permit. Virtual Shtetl (2016)
Cmentarz żydowski w Kielcach.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews .

History

The cemetery was founded in 1868 based on design by architect Franciszek Ksawery Kowalski. During World War II the cemetery was devastated by Nazi Germans. It was a place of regular mass executions of Poles and Jews. Notably, on 23 May 1943, the German paramilitary police murdered 45 Jewish children there, aged 15 months to 15 years. In 1946, the cemetery became a place of burial of 40 Jewish victims of the Kielce pogrom. In subsequent years, the bodies of victims of massacres committed by Nazi Germans inside the

Kielce Ghetto The Kielce Ghetto ( pl, getto w Kielcach, german: Ghetto von Kielce) was a Jewish World War II ghetto created in 1941 by the ''Schutzstaffel'' (''SS'') in the Polish city of Kielce in the south-western region of the Second Polish Republic, occup ...

during

the Holocaust in occupied Poland The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holoca ...

were exhumed from the banks of the Silnica River and transferred to the cemetery. In 1965 the cemetery was declared a monument and closed for further burials.

History

References

Further reading