Kazimierz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
overview
Market square with a Jewish restaurant in Kazimierz
Map of Krakow with Kazimierz 1891
Map of Kazimierz with numbered # sights
town hall
High synagogue
Temple synagogue
Street in Kazimierz
Galicia Jewish Museum
Jewish restaurant "Ariel"

Kazimierz [ kaˈʑimʲɛʃ ] ( German Kasimir ) is a district of Krakow in Poland . It is located southeast of the old town and, like this, on the left bank of the Vistula . Kazimierz was an independent city until 1800. This also included the Jewish quarter in the east with numerous synagogues .

Today it has mostly been renovated and has become an attraction for domestic and foreign visitors.

history

City of Kazimierz

The Kazimierz settlement emerged from a few villages near Kraków and was named after King Casimir the Great . In 1335 the settlement received city ​​rights under Magdeburg law .

The city received fortifications and three churches, the Gothic Katharinenkirche , the also Gothic Corpus Christi Church and the Baroque monastery church Skałka , which was built on the site of an old Slavic sanctuary and a station for pilgrims before the coronation. Under Casimir Jagiello , the Corpus Christi Church was handed over to the Augustinian Canons of the Lateran , so-called Canons Regular , who still own it. On January 24, 2005, Pope John Paul II elevated the Church of Corpus Christi to the rank of a minor basilica .

Jewish settlement

In 1494 King Jan Olbracht had the Jews there resettled to Kazimierz after pogroms in Krakow. A separate Jewish settlement (oppidum Judaeorum) was established in the east of the city. This was surrounded by a wall and until the 18th century formed the smaller suburb of Kazimierz next to the larger Christian district in the west, whose inhabitants had little contact.

Kazimierz became the cultural and religious center of the Jews in Poland . In 1497 the first synagogue was built , and in 1521 the first Hebrew printing house in Poland. Scholars such as Jakob Pollak and Moses Isserles came to Kazimierz, and rabbis for all of Poland were trained in the Talmud school there , which attracted students across Europe. In 1553 the Remuh Synagogue was built. Of the seven houses of worship that still exist today, the greatest significance was the Old Synagogue and the Isaac Synagogue , which was built between 1638 and 1641 . The influx of Jews from western Europe, especially Bohemia, Germany, Spain and Italy, became so strong that the Jewish community reached that in 1568 Christians were banned from settling in the Jewish district.

In 1795 Kazimierz came to the Habsburg Monarchy as part of the Third Partition of Poland , which worsened the situation of the Jewish population. It was ghettoized by allowing it to trade freely only within its settlement, requiring German surnames and schooling, and only granting citizenship to around 1.5 percent of the then 13,000 community members who were recognized as scientists or artists.

District of Krakow

Around 1800 Kazimierz was incorporated as a district after Krakow. Under the Austrian administration, the walls around the quarter were removed in 1822; As a result, Jews were basically able to settle anywhere in Krakow. However, the majority of the Jewish community, many of whom lived in poverty, remained under the influence of the local Orthodox rabbis, even when legal restrictions were relaxed during the 19th century and in particular through the liberal Austro-Hungary constitution of 1867 all Jews received equal civil rights ( Jewish emancipation ). Mostly a few intellectuals and merchants assimilated, left the quarter and partly converted to Christianity. Dieter Schenk describes the place at that time as the "interface of the East and West Jews ". The Kazimierz district as a whole was one of the centers of political resistance and liberation movements during the Austrian rule.

From the 1860s, the quarter, which was dominated by Jewish shops and markets, was partially rebuilt. At the end of the 19th century, the Vistula arm, which ran between Kazimierz and Krakow, was filled in.

Nazi regime and German occupation

After the November pogroms in 1938 , some Jews from the German Reich fled to Krakow under the Nazi regime and built a modern residential area in the western part of Kazimierz, which was called Little Berlin . After the occupation of Krakow by the Wehrmacht in World War II , the Jewish community of Kazimierz was initially relocated to the Krakow ghetto in Podgórze from March 1941 ; a total of about 64,000 Jews lived in Krakow at the time, a quarter of the city's population. As a result, almost all of the members of the community were murdered; In three waves of liquidation, according to the historian Erica T. Lehrer , they were deported to the Plaszow and Auschwitz concentration camps and killed on the spot if there was resistance. According to Bogdan Musiał , most of the former residents had returned to Kazimierz after the resettlement in 1941 and were transported from there in three deportation waves from the end of March to the end of April 1942 to the Belzec extermination camp and killed, as the district was intended as a resort for German administrative employees of the Lublin district was.

Poland

After the end of World War II , around 6,500 Jews who had survived the Holocaust returned to Krakow in the spring of 1945 . A pogrom broke out against her in Kazimierz in August , in which one female survivor was killed and five injured; in connection with other pogroms such as that of Kielce , most Jews left Poland by 1948. In Kazimierz, which, unlike many other Jewish centers in East Central Europe, had largely remained physically intact, Poles settled mainly from poor urban areas; the Jewish history of the place was kept secret according to the government policy and was forgotten. The district fell into disrepair to a large extent and was considered a poor quarter in Krakow, even if local artists were supported by the administration in the late 1950s and 1960s. The largely intact Jewish settlement structure of Kazimierz, with its oldest parts dating back to the 15th century, was a major reason for Krakow's inclusion in the 1978 World Heritage List , which led to increased interest in this district in the course of the 1980s. The neglected district experienced an upswing from 1993, when Steven Spielberg shot parts of his Holocaust film Schindler's List in Kazimierz. A trinational Kazimierz Action Plan , which worked out a detailed urban planning revitalization, got stuck in the planning phase in 1994, while the renewal was left to the free play of market forces with protests by the population against gentrification and the conversion into a tourist quarter. In particular, the renovation of earlier Jewish buildings stalled, as foreign Jewish investors showed little interest in Kazimierz and the local population remained skeptical. In the meantime, many of the buildings have been renovated, and shops and restaurants have opened. Kazimierz is visited by many visitors to Krakow today.

Attractions

The numbers correspond to those on the map of the district .

Christian Quarter :
  1. The former town hall on the market was built in the 16th century and rebuilt in the 19th century. Today it houses the Ethnographic Museum .
  2. St. Catherine's Church
  3. Corpus Christi Church
  4. Skałka Rock Church
  5. Industrial museum
    Jewish Quarter :
  6. The old synagogue dates from the end of the 15th century. After a fire, it was rebuilt in the Renaissance style in 1557 . At the beginning of the 17th century the choir room and the women's school (women's prayer room ) were added. Now the Jewish section of the Kraków City History Museum is located here .
  7. Remuh Synagogue , built in 1553 by Israel ben Josef . It still serves as a place of worship today.
  8. High Synagogue , built in 1563?
  9. Isaac Synagogue , built in 1644
  10. Kupa Synagogue , built in 1643
  11. The Temple Synagogue is the youngest in Kazimierz. The church, built in 1860 by the progressive Israelites , was the center of the Jewish liberal intelligentsia.
  12. The Old Cemetery was established in 1551 and is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Krakow. In addition to numerous artistically valuable gravestones ( Mazewa ), Rabbi Moses Isserles is buried here, whose grave is visited by Jews from many countries. It has not been used for funerals since 1800.

Also:

  • The Breite Strasse (Ulica Szeroka) was the center of the Jewish district. Many prayer houses, bath houses ( Mykwaot ), synagogues and the cemetery were located here.
  • The Popper Synagogue dates from 1620 and was donated by the merchant and banker Wolf Popper. Today there is a culture house in the building.
  • The Jewish Galicia Museum opened in 2004.
  • The museum, I remember, in honor of the painter Chaim Goldberg , opened in 2016.

Events

The Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow is the cultural highlight of the year in the Kazimierz district.

literature

  • Jehuda L. Stein: Jews in Krakow. A historical overview 1173–1939. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 1997, ISBN 3-89649-201-2 .
  • Heinz-Dietrich Löwe : The Jews in Krakau-Kazimierz until the middle of the 17th century. In: Michael Graetz (Ed.): Creative moments of European Judaism in the early modern period. Winter, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-1053-1 , pp. 271-320.
  • Monica Rüthers : Jews and Gypsies in European History Theater: "Jewish Spaces" / "Gypsy Spaces" - Kazimierz and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the new European folklore. Transcript, Bielefeld 2012, chapter 2: “Krakow's Jewish quarter Kazimierz”, pp. 55–92 (preview).
  • Maria Klańska: The Kazimierz district of Kraków. In: Joachim Bahlcke , Stefan Rohdewald, Thomas Wünsch (Ed.): Religious places of remembrance in East Central Europe. Constitution and competition in access across nations and epochs. Akademie, Berlin 2013, pp. 117–125 (preview) .

Web links

Commons : Kazimierz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikivoyage: Krakow / Kazimierz  - travel guide

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Schenk : Krakauer Burg: the power center of the Governor General Hans Frank, 1939-1945. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 26.
  2. ^ Website of the monastery of the Augustinian Canons of the Lateran. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
  3. ↑ Dieter Schenk : Krakauer Burg: the power center of the Governor General Hans Frank, 1939-1945. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 26.
  4. ↑ Erica T. Teacher: Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2013, p. 28.
  5. ↑ Erica T. Teacher: Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2013, p. 28.
  6. ↑ Dieter Schenk : Krakauer Burg: the power center of the Governor General Hans Frank, 1939-1945. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 26.
  7. ↑ Erica T. Teacher: Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2013, p. 28; Dieter Schenk : Kraków Castle: the power center of Governor General Hans Frank, 1939–1945. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 27.
  8. ↑ Dieter Schenk : Krakauer Burg: the power center of the Governor General Hans Frank, 1939-1945. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 27.
  9. ↑ Erica T. Teacher: Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2013, p. 28.
  10. ^ Bogdan Musiał : German civil administration and persecution of Jews in the General Government. A case study on the Lublin District 1939–1944. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999, p. 238 f.
  11. ↑ Erica T. Teacher: Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2013, pp. 28-30.

Coordinates: 50 ° 3 ′ 6 ″  N , 19 ° 56 ′ 41.5 ″  E