Rzeszow New Jewish Cemetery

The New Cemetery was established in 1849 about 1 km to the south-east of the market square, in the fields of the hamlet of Czekaj. It was enlarged several times before its final area of 2.5 hectares shaped as an irregular elongated polygon was finalised. It was surrounded by a wall. In the north-western corner, there was a funeral house. From 1940, the Germans systematically destroyed the cemetery. The wall was demolished, the tombstones made of valuable rocks were taken away and sold, the sandstone ones were used for construction purposes, and some of them were moved to a nearby brickyard. Several hundred brick tomb enclosures remained. Hundreds of ghetto victims were executed in the cemetery and buried in mass graves. The places of burial have not been identified. After the war, the survivors got several hundred of the tombstones back. Some of them were put in their old places and the rest were laid on the ground. Some of them were later stolen again. In 1947, a monument commemorating the victims of the Holocaust was erected in the cemetery. Later, another two modest monuments appeared. In 1981 and 1988, three ohels were built over the graves of six rabbis and tzadiks. During the widening of Rejtana Street, part of the cemetery area was used for road construction, and the former funeral house was demolished. In 1986, the cemetery was surrounded by a wall. At present, there are over 750 tomb enclosures made of stone, around 650 tombstones and fragments of tombstones (the oldest dating from 1849). In addition to the traditional steles, there were tombstones in a form adopted from the Christian tradition. There are inscriptions in German (from the period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Polish (from the period of the Second Polish Republic).