Piotrkow Trybunalski New Jewish Cemetery
Cemetery Information
Historical overview
The new Jewish cemetery was established in 1792 and is located about 1.3 km north of the market square, among fields. In 1905, it was fenced with a brick wall with a gateway, which still exists today. During World War II, it was partially destroyed. The Germans carried out executions and burials in mass graves there. After the war, the survivors exhumed the bodies of the victims of a mass execution in the Rakowski Forest and buried them in the new cemetery in brotherly graves. Survivors also partially cleaned up the area.
Since 1996, the cemetery has been cleaned with the participation of city authorities. The matzevot found during the renovation of the streets were brought there and used to build a provisional lapidarium. At the beginning of the 21st century, Jewish organizations rebuilt four ohels of local tzadiks. The cemetery is shaped like an irregular, elongated polygon with an area of approximately 3.5 hectares and is covered with deciduous trees. In the western part, there is the former gravedigger’s house. An avenue runs alongside the cemetery from the gate. There are four ohels, a World War I military headquarters, Holocaust graves, and symbolic tombstones (cenotaphs). About 1,750 tombstones have survived (the oldest one is from 1793). They are mainly traditional sandstone and concrete stelae, non-traditional tombstones (in the form of a tree trunk, broken column, pillar), and post-war ones formed similarly to the Catholic ones. The older matzevot feature various interesting symbolic motifs. The inscriptions, apart from Hebrew, are in Polish, Russian, German, and Yiddish. The cemetery is open (the last burial took place in 2005) and belongs to the Jewish Community in Łódź.