Lębork New Jewish Cemetery

The New Jewish cemetery in Lębork was established in 1888 at the intersection of Hindenburg and Sophieweg (today’s Bolesława Krzywoustego and Abrahama streets). The cemetery occupied a plot of about 0.5 ha. It was surrounded by a low wall and there was a funeral home and a house for a caretaker by the gate. The facility was devastated in 1938 during Kristallnacht, when, among others, the building of the funeral home was burned down. It is known that after 1945 there were still a number of matzevot in the cemetery.
In the 1960s, the remains of the tombstones were removed at the request of the local authorities. One of the people participating in these works was Maurycy Frąckowiak. In his study entitled “Jews and Lębork energy”, he describes the devastation of the cemetery as follows: “We were ordered to take shovels, crowbars and ropes. An official from the Regional Municipal Economy Company and a tractor with two trailers were waiting for us. The official announced that our task was to extract overgrown with grass and barely visible tombstones and stone frames of graves. When asked, he explained that what could be easily dismantled had already been dismantled by their teams, loaded and taken away – and what was left was waiting for us for two days, perhaps. We pulled the stone remains of the graves out of the ground and loaded them onto trailers. I remember that among the excavated elements there were six or seven slightly damaged matzevot “.
Some of the tombstones were used to make steps and curbs at the stadium at Sportowa Street. Probably at the beginning of the 1950s some matzevot were used for the construction of Primary School No. 4 at Wolności Avenue.
In the 1990s, the area of ​​the cemetery was sold to the Statoil concern. The transaction caused a scandal, as a result of which the Jewish Religious Community in Gdańsk was dissolved and in its place a branch of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in the Republic of Poland was established. In August 1998, workers digging a ditch for a heat pipeline for a gas station built here discovered human bones and fragments of matzevot. The police, the conservator of monuments and the authorities of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities were notified about it. The case dragged on for several years, and the Committee for the Protection of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe was also involved in the dispute over the fate of the necropolises, threatening to boycott all Statoil stations in Europe. In the end, the petrol station remained in its place, and the cemetery was commemorated by placing a boulder with the inscription: “They lived on this land, passed away to eternity, the memory remains … for the Jews of Lębork in their place of rest. The society of Lębork, the Jewish Community”.
(K. Bielawski, cmentarze-zydowskie.pl)