Before the Second World War, Krakow was home to Poland’s fourth-largest Jewish community. Around 65,000 Jewish residents, representing one quarter of the city’s population, played an important role in its life and appearance. Their principal centre was Kazimierz, once an independent town and incorporated into Krakow only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Named after its founder, King Casimir the Great, Kazimierz was established in 1335 as a new town beside Krakow’s crowded walls. From the outset, it was intended as a centre of learning and culture, as plans to establish a university demonstrate.
Kazimierz was originally separated from Krakow by a branch of the Vistula following the course of today’s Dietla Street. The prosperity of its medieval residents is still reflected in impressive churches including St Catherine’s, Corpus Christi and St Michael the Archangel.
Larger groups of Jewish residents began settling in Kazimierz towards the end of the fifteenth century. Following anti-Jewish violence in Krakow in 1492 and 1495, Jews were expelled from the city and established a new home mainly around today’s Szeroka Street. Poland was considered unusually tolerant at the time and attracted Jewish communities from Bohemia, Germany, Italy and Spain, turning Kazimierz into a lively international centre of Jewish life. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it had become an important intellectual centre whose influence extended beyond Poland.
In 1558, the Jewish community and municipal authorities agreed to separate the Jewish settlement from the Christian town with a wall. This created the so-called oppidum Iudaeorum, the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, which existed until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Jews received the right to live in other districts.
Full civil rights were granted to Jews under the constitution of the Habsburg Empire in 1867. Wealthier Jewish residents and intellectuals then moved to other neighbourhoods, and Kazimierz gradually became a typical Eastern European shtetl inhabited mainly by poorer and Orthodox Jews. Until 1939, it remained a district strongly shaped by the past and often perceived as exotic by visitors.
The establishment of the ghetto in Podgórze and the Plaszow camp by the German occupiers marked the beginning of the path to destruction for most of Krakow’s Jews, many of whom were murdered in Bełżec and Auschwitz. Only around ten per cent survived, mainly by leaving the city or country. Today, Krakow’s Jewish community numbers only around 140, mostly older members, who gather for prayer and community life at the Remuh Synagogue on Szeroka Street.
Present-day Kazimierz is regarded, together with Venice’s Jewish quarter, as one of Europe’s best-preserved historic Jewish districts. Six synagogues, two cemeteries—including one of Europe’s three oldest beside the Remuh Synagogue—prayer houses and ritual facilities such as the mikveh have survived.
Kazimierz has developed into a vibrant centre of Jewish culture. Numerous restaurants designed in a Jewish style serve traditional dishes, accompanied by klezmer music performed each evening. Every June, the Jewish Culture Festival fills the streets with music and a celebratory atmosphere, although the memory of the district’s difficult history remains ever present.
