Resumo de Jewish Cemetery In B?onie

The beginnings of the Jews from B?onie are lost in the mists of time. Probably, Jews lived here already in the 15 Th century. In 1507 B?onie was on the list of Jewish communities that were taxed because of the Sigismund the Elder's coronation. For years this city was closed for the Jewish settlement. In 1827 only four people of Moses confession lived here. Starting from 1862 the Jews could easily buy some premises in the city. Five years later B?onie was inhabited by 1027 Jewish people. Many of them were into hawking, sewing or shoemaking. Some of the Jews from B?onie took part in the January Uprising in 1863.

The number of the Jews in B?onie must have been growing very fast. In spite of the wide- spread emigration at the beginning of the 20 th century, the 1921 registration notes down here as many as 1262 Jewish people. During the Polish-Soviet war the local rabbi Efraim Fiszel Szapiro was condemned to death : his gestures of blessing were mistaken for signals for spies. In B?onie for some time lived Szymon Kalisz - the later tzaddik of Skierniewice, who was regarded as a wonder-worker."The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust" describes the fate of the Jews from B?onie during World War II as follows : "As the Germans entered at the beginning of September 1939, the Jews were forced to do the forced labour. At the end of 1939, 600 people deported from other towns (among others from Aleksandrów Kujawski, ?ód? and I?ów) were settled here. The ghetto with Judenrat was established in autumn 1940 and it was destroyed in February 1941. The Jews from B?onie were deported to Warsaw and later to the extermination camp in Treblinka". The Jewish cemetery in B?onie was established in the 19 th century and it is situated at the end of the Polna street, on the edge of the meadows on the Utrata river. The necropolis was destroyed by the Nazis and this process was unfortunately being continued in the post-war years. It is worth quoting the letter that was sent by the pupils from the secondary school in Pruszków, Anna Brysiak and Natalia Kaleta, to the Jewish Historical Institute : "We found in the Institute some photos of this cemetery, made in 1960 and 1995, that portray a much more better preserved monument than it is in the reality. Its appearance is just terrifying. We saw a completely different view than we expected after browsing through the archive materials. Dug up graves and toppled matzevot sadly contrast with the adjacent modern houses. The cemetery gives the impression of a "dying one" and it slowly disappears among the luxuriant grasses. And although it has been written down in the national register of historic monuments, it is hard to notice that this object is a protected one". To this day only several matzevot and the posts of the old cemetery gate have been preserved. In the grasses one can find some fragments of the broken gravestones, in some places there are visible tracks of the graves' excavation. The necropolis has a status of a monument, but the lack of a fence and the location in an out-of-the-way place create favorable conditions for a potential devastation. In this part of B?onie one can see the rapid growth of the single- family housing. We can only cherish the hope that in couple of years another building will not be erected here, and these few matzevot will not serve as a filling for the new building's foundation.

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