Lwow

Jews apparently lived in Lwów since its founding in the mid-13th century. The first Jews in Lwów probably belonged to the Sephardic rabbinic and the Karaite communities and were migrants from the Byzantine Empire. In the mid-14th century Lwów became part of the Kingdom of Poland. At that time Ashkenazi Jewish refugees from German lands settled in the town and became the dominant element in the Jewish life of Lwów.

From the beginning Jews played an important role in the economic life of Lwów. The main occupations of Lwów's Jews were trade, crafts, the leasing of estates, tax collecting, and providing credit to the Polish kings. The Jewish community of Lwów was well represented in the Council of the Four Lands, the central institution of Jewish self-government in the Kingdom of Poland from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

The relations between Jews and non-Jews in Lwów were tense. The former suffered from blood libels, which were accompanied by outbreaks of violence. The Jews also suffered greatly from violence on the part of the soldiers of the local garrison, who used to attack Jewish quarters, plunder Jewish property, and kill Jewish residents. Non-Jewish townspeople of Lwow also tried hard to restrict the rights of Jewish merchants in Lwow.

The Jewish population of Lwow suffered greatly during the uprising (1648-1649) of Bogdan Chmelnitsky and during the armed conflicts of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as from religious violence. About 200 Jews lost their lives just in two riots that occurred in May and June 1664.

The Jewish communities in Lwów of the 17th and 18th centuries were torn apart by the false-messianic Sabbatean and Frankist movements, named after Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank respectively.

After the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Lwów became part of Austria and, later, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was renamed Lemberg. Jews played a prominent role in the economic life of the city.

Starting in the late 18th century secular education expanded widely among Lwów's Jews. The Society for the Promotion of the Progress of Israelites of Galicia made Lwów into an educational and cultural center for Austrian Jews, as well as for Jews outside the Austrian Empire. The limitations imposed for centuries upon the Jews were gradually lifted from the mid-19th century. This led to structural changes in the social and occupational profile of local Jews. The opening of secondary schools and university to Jews in 1846 led to a constantly increasing number of Jews engaging in the liberal professions. From 1848 Jews of Lwow could also participate in municipal elections. In the second half of the 19th century integrationist tendencies became widespread, especially among the Jewish intelligentsia in Lwów. These Jews were divided into those who identifed with German culture and those who identified with Polish culture.

In 1910 57,387 Jews lived in Lwów, where they comprised 27.8 percent of the total population. At the turn of the century there was a rich Jewish communal life in Lwów. The community had numerous synagogues and welfare institutions, and operated a hospital. With its Yiddish theater and many Jewish libraries and schools Lwów was a hub of Jewish cultural life and of education, both religious and secular. From the late 19th century until the World War II Lwów was one of the centers of Jewish book-printing.

On the eve of World War I the majority of lawyers, doctors, and members of the Trade and Industrial Chamber in Lwów were Jewish. Jewish students constituted over one quarter of the students of Lwów University and were united in several student associations. A number of Jewish scholars were among the teachers at the University in the city.

Lwów was a birthplace of the prominent historian of Polish and Galician Jewry Meir Balaban and of the prominent Israeli legal and political figure Gideon Hausner.

Lwów's Jews were active politically, belonging to various Jewish parties, such as Zionist and autonomist ones, and also to general parties, such as the Polish Socialist Party.

At the start of World War I many Jewish refugees from the areas bordering on Russia fled to Lwow. The Jews in Lwów suffered greatly during the Russian occupation of the city in 1914-1915. In a pogrom carried out by Russian Cossacks in late September 1914 several dozen Jews lost their lives. Russian troops looted Jewish property and took hostages from the Jewish population. The restoration of Austro-Hungarian rule in 1915 led to renewal of Jewish communal and cultural life in Lwów and organization of relief for the refugees.

The Jews of Lwów suffered greatly during the chaos that followed the defeat and disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, and the conflict between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. The Polish takeover of the city was accompanied by violent assaults against Jews and their property. The Jewish self-defense force created in late 1918 was ultimately disarmed. In November 1918 Polish forces carried out a pogrom in Lwów that lasted for about a week and claimed the lives of about 100 Jews. Jewish women were raped and Jewish property looted or destroyed.

Between 1920 and 1939 Lwów was part of Poland and assumed its former name of Lwów. The local Jewish community was the third largest in the Polish Republic, after Warsaw and Łódź. In 1931 99,595 Jews lived in the city, where they constituted 31.9 percent of the total population. In the 1920s-1930s Jews continued to engage in traditional Jewish occupations, such as trade, crafts and industry. Aslo during this period the Jews in Lwów suffered from official discrimination in various spheres and from progressively stronger anti-Semitism and anti-semitic violence. In 1924 Polish nationalists attacked the publishing house of the Jewish Polish-language newspaper Chwila ("The Time"), brutally beating its workers. In 1924 Jews of Lwów were falsely accused of complicity in the attempt on the life of Polish President Stanislaw Wojciechowski and a pogrom atmosphere prevailed in the city. Antisemitic discrimination and violence reached its peak in the second half of the 1930s, when Jews were assaulted on the streets, Jewish businesses were boycotted, a numerus clausus was introduced in the institutions of higher education, and Jewish students were forced to sit on special "ghetto benches."

There were a number of Jewish general, vocational, and religious schools in the interwar period with Polish and Hebrew as the languages of instruction.

During the interwar period Lwów was a major center of Jewish culture. The city had a Yiddish avant-garde theater called "Maske." In the early 1920s there also existed a Hebrew theater. The famous Warsaw Yiddish theaters New Warsaw Yiddish Theater and The Vilna Troupe performed in Lwow for various periods of time. Numerous Jewish newspapers in Yiddish and Polish appeared in Lwów in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the same period there was considerable ere Zionist activity in the city. The HeHalutz organization trained Jews in agricultural work, while under the aegis of the Tarbut society, Hebrew teachers' and kindergarten teachers' seminars operated.

In the fall of 1938 a number of Polish Jewish refugees expelled from Germany arrived in Lw&#24 3;w. In September 1939 Lwów became part of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jewish refugees from the western and central areas of Poland, which were occupied by Germans, came to the city. All political parties and public organizations, including the Jewish ones, were dissolved. The nationalization of factories, banks, and businesses and the ban imposed by the Soviet authorities on all private economic activity left many Jews in Lwów unemployed and forced them to seek new occupations. Many found employment in industry or in government service. In 1939 many Jews, in the first place refugees from the central and western parts of Poland, were recruited for coal mining work in the Donetsk Basin in eastern Ukraine. Between 1939 and 1941 Jewish culture and education in Lwow underwent full-scale Sovietization. Hebrew was banned in educational and cultural institutions and was replaced by Yiddish. At this time Lwów became an important center of Yiddish culture. In November 1939 a Jewish State Theater in Yiddish was established. This theater was headed by the famous Polish Jewish actress Ida Kaminska, who had escaped from Warsaw to Lwów. The theater's troupe consisted of both local actors and of refugees from other parts of Poland. In early June 1941, shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a newspaper in Yiddish Der Royter Shtern (The Red Star) started to appear and Lwow radio had a daily broadcast in Yiddish.

In 1939-1941 tens of thousands of the Lwów Jews, mainly prominent public figures and politicians, and also Polish refugees who refused to accept Soviet citizenship, became victims of NKVD terror, either being executed or exiled to Siberia or Central Asia.

German troops occupied Lwów on June 30, 1941. The assaults against Jews on the part of the non-Jewish residents of Lwów started in the period of the power vacuum that followed the retreat of Soviet troops on June 24, 1941 and before the city was occupied by Germans. On the day that German troops entered Lwów Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed a Ukrainian state and bodies of NKVD victims were discovered. Even though Jews were among those victims, they were summarily accused by Ukrainians of responsibility for these massacres and were forced to exhume the bodies and to carry them out of the prison, while being brutally beaten or murdered in the process. In the course of the pogrom carried out mainly by Ukrainians and lasting for several days, several thousand Jews of both sexes were murdered in Lwów's prisons and on the city streets. Jewish women were sexually abused. The murders of Jews continued after the pogrom and peaked in late July 1941, when several thousand Jews were murdered by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen and members of Einsatzgruppe C during the so-called "Petliura Days" (named after Simon Petliura, the Ukrainian nationalistic leader who was assassinated in Paris in 1926).

Parallel to these massacres, the Jews in Lwów were ordered to wear white armbands with blue Stars of David on the sleeves of their clothes and their movement was restricted. On July 22, 1941 German military authorities and the local Ukrainian mayor ordered the establishment of a provisional committee for the Jewish community. A lawyer and former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army Josef Parnas was appointed to head this committee. In August 1941, after eastern Galicia became part of the General Government, the German occupation zone of Poland, this committee became a Judenrat. In September 1941 a Jewish order service was organized in Lwów by the commander of Warsaw ghetto police Josef Szerynski. One of the first tasks of the Lwów Judenrat was to hand over to the Germans 20 million rubles as ransom for 1,000 prominent members of the Jewish community who had been taken hostages. However, even though the sum was paid, the hostages were killed.

In September 1941 an SS controlled labor camp was set up on Janowska Street in the northwestern outskirts of Lwów. The Jews incarcerated in this camp were forced to perform various types of labor, primarily metal and carpentry work.

On November 15, 1941 about 110,000 Jews of Lwów were incarcerated in a ghetto set up in the poor, western part of the city. On the same day that the ghetto was created about 5,000 Jews, primarily elderly and ill people, were murdered in and around Lwów. The conditions in the ghetto were poor and constantly deteriorating. Its inmates suffered from overcrowding and poor hygienic conditions and they were starving. The Judenrat tried to ameliorate the situation by establishing soup kitchens and sanitation facilities.

The murder of Lwów Jews continued unabated throughout 1941 and 1942. Thousands of Jews deemed unfit for work were murdered in or around the city by the end of 1941. In the spring of 1942 Jews from Lwów began to be deported to the Belzec death camp. Throughout 1942 thousands of Jews were deported to Belzec. At the same time thousands more Jews of Lwow were murdered locally, mainly in dunes near the city or in the Janowska camp. In 1943 the ghetto of Lwów was transformed into a Jewish labor camp and, after the murder of members of Judenrat, was administered directly by the SS. The inmates of the camp were forced to perform various kinds of work, while large-scale murder operations were periodically carried against its inmates. The final liquidation of the Lwów Jewish camp in June 1943 encountered resistance on the part of camp's inmates. As was the case in the Warsaw ghetto uprising several months earlier, the Germans blew up buildings or set them on fire to force the Jews out. Most of the inmates of the camp were murdered, but several thousand were sent to the Janowska camp, where most of them were murdered after a selection. The Janowska camp itself was liquidated in 1944, with its few survivors being transported to other camps to the west.

Lwów was liberated by the Red Army on July 27, 1944.