Narewka ( be, На́раўка) is a village in eastern

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

, with its population estimated at 935 residents (as of 2011). It is located in

Gmina Narewka __NOTOC__ Gmina Narewka ( be, Гміна Нараўка) is a rural gmina (administrative district) in Hajnówka County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland, on the border with Belarus. Its seat is the village of Narewka, which lies appr ...

Hajnówka County __NOTOC__ Hajnówka County ( pl, powiat hajnowski) is a unit of territorial administration and local government (powiat) in Podlaskie Voivodeship, north-eastern Poland, on the border with Belarus. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result ...

, within

Podlaskie Voivodeship Podlaskie Voivodeship or Podlasie Province ( pl, Województwo podlaskie, ) is a voivodeship (province) in northeastern Poland. The name of the province and its territory correspond to the historic region of Podlachia. The capital and largest cit ...

. The village is located near Poland's border with

Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by R ...

. Many of its residents belong to Poland's Belarusian minority. The village has Polish

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

and Belarusian

Eastern Orthodox Eastern Orthodoxy, also known as Eastern Orthodox Christianity, is one of the three main branches of Chalcedonian Christianity, alongside Catholicism and Protestantism. Like the Pentarchy of the first millennium, the mainstream (or "canonical") ...

churches. It used to have a

synagogue A synagogue, ', 'house of assembly', or ', "house of prayer"; Yiddish: ''shul'', Ladino: or ' (from synagogue); or ', "community". sometimes referred to as shul, and interchangeably used with the word temple, is a Jewish house of worshi ...

, but it was destroyed by the local

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""Th ...

ish population, angered after the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

, which had invaded Poland in 1939, desecrated the synagogue by turning it into a storage building. Narewka's significant Jewish community eventually perished in

the Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

and has not been restored. It is in one of five Polish- Belarusian bilingual regions in Podlaskie Voivodeship regulated by the ''Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Languages'', which permits certain gminas with significant linguistic minorities to introduce a second, auxiliary language to be used in official contexts alongside

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...

.Dz. U. z 2005 r. Nr 17, poz. 141

References

External links

Jewish cemeteries
File:Memorial_Danuta_Siedzik_Narewka.JPG, Memorial for

Danuta Siedzikówna Danuta Helena Siedzikówna (nom de guerre: ''Inka''; underground name: ''Danuta Obuchowicz''; 3 September 1928 – 28 August 1946) was a Polish medical orderly in the 4th Squadron of the 5th Wilno Brigade in Home Army. In 1946 she served with t ...

File:Poland_Narewka_-_church.jpg Villages in Hajnówka County Białystok Voivodeship (1919–1939) {{Hajnówka-geo-stub