Wałcz Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Wałcz was established in the first half of the 19th century at Królowej Jadwigi Street, on a plot of 0.75 ha. The necropolis was destroyed, and in the years of the People’s Republic of Poland a community centre was built in this place. Leszek Jóźwik from Wałcz describes the devastation process of the cemetery as follows: “The destruction took place basically before 1945, after Kristallnacht in 1938. In Wałcz, the synagogue and the cemetery were also destroyed after this event. Brigitte Kropp, a former resident of Wałcz, mentions it in the article: ‘Auf den Spuren der jüdischen Gemeinde von Deutsch Krone.’ The Germans built a shelter for civilians in the place of the synagogue, which probably still exists today. After the war, they were used to fortify the shores of Lake Raduń. Some of the entire slabs – probably with exhumation – were moved to the old Protestant cemetery, and today such tombstones can be found at this cemetery. It cannot be ruled out that some of the slabs were used by stonemasons from Wałcz. This was also the case in the former Protestant cemetery.”

In 2011, during the reconstruction of the shore of Lake Raduń, fragments of matzevot were found. According to the newspaper, Dziennik Pojezierze Wałeckie, the tombstones have been secured in the local museum. According to information from our correspondent, the reconstruction was dragging on and in November 2012, stones with Hebrew inscriptions could still be found on the side of the road.
On our website we present a photo of the matzevah from the Museum of the Wałcz Land. It is a tombstone from 1841. An epitaph was inscribed on it with the following text: “Here is buried respected Meir, son of Mr. Naftali, of blessed memory! He died on the 1st of the new month, tewet 602 according to small count” (trans. Renata Uszyńska).
(K. Bielawski, cmentarze-zydowskie.pl)

“It was located at Theodor Müller Strasse (now Królowej Jadwigi Street). It occupied an area of ​​approximately 0.75 ha. It may be assumed that it was not the first Jewish cemetery in this city, as the beginnings of Jewish settlement in Wałcz date back to the second half of the 16th century. In 1623, the Wałcz staroste settled a group of Jews in the suburbs, thanks to which the Żydowska Street (now Tęczowa Street) was established. At the end of the 17th century, the Jews of Wałcz already had a synagogue and, it should be believed, their own cemetery. The number of adherents of Judaism was constantly growing – in the 1770s there were about 240, a hundred years later almost 650, in some periods accounting for almost 25% of the city’s population. It was not until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that this number started to drop steadily – when the Nazis took power, there were still about 250 Jews in the city, in 1939 only 60.
The cemetery was devastated during Kristallnacht, and during World War II, the Germans built an air raid shelter there. Some of the matzevot ended up in the Protestant cemetery, and some were used to strengthen the shores of Lake Raduń. However, the necropolises were liquidated after the war and in the mid-1960s, a cultural centre was built in the area of ​​the cemetery.
(West Pomeranian Encyclopedia; http://pomeranica.pl)