Kisielice Jewish Cemetery

Documents mentioning the establishment of a Jewish cemetery in Kisielice date back to the 17th century, which confirms that there was an independent Jewish community in the town at that time. The cemetery was located at today's Mickiewicz Street. It was enlarged by additional land in the 1870s and 1880s, when a new synagogue was also built. (sztetl.org.pl) In the nineteenth century, the first reliable statistics appear, from which we know that in 1816 there were 12 of them, in 1843 - 111, including only three without full bourgeois rights. In the following decades, their number began to increase, finally reaching the number of 276 people in 1871, which constituted 10% of the total population. At that time, a synagogue was erected on the then Markstraße (today's Mickiewicz Street) and the cemetery area was expanded. In 1922, only 22 Jews lived in Kisielice, and hostile moods began to emerge. In November 1923, local anti-Semites and National Socialist supporters demolished several Jewish shops and plants. [...] Also in 1931 there were riots, when the building of the local synagogue was attacked, stones were thrown at it and windows were broken. Ultimately it was destroyed during the "Crystal Night". At that time, the Jewish cemetery was also devastated. It is not certain whether the house of prayer and the cemetery were located in the same place as in the period of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the case of the cemetery, we can assume this possibility and point to a wooded area directly behind the present communal cemetery on the left side of the road to Gardeja (Dolna street). Currently, there are warehouses on the synagogue parcel. The remains of the building were dismantled immediately after 1945 and transported along with the remaining building material from the old town to Warsaw, as part of the action "the whole nation builds its capital city". (“Żydowskie domy modlitwy oraz cmentarze na Warmii i Mazurach – stan obecny” book by Seweryn Szczepański, 2017; doi.org/10.26774/rzz.165)