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Formerly, Warsaw Jewish community was one of the biggest in Europe. After World War II in Warsaw there is one of the biggest Jewish cemeteries in the world. The Old Jewish cemetery hidden behind the high brick walls is situated in Okopowa Street, next to the Protestant Cemetery and not far from the Powazki necropolis. It is still in use and is gradually being restored after the devastation of World War II. The cemetery was established between 1799 and 1806. Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is one of the few that have survived after the World War II. It occupies the territory of 82 acres.
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Soon after the invasion in Poland the Nazis organized Warsaw Ghetto, where they confined 400,000 Jews. There the Jews were doomed to dye from starvation and diseases, to be executed or deported to concentration camps, as they were to vanish from the face of the earth. Under the threat of being shot on sight, they were forbidden to leave the area, surrounded by 10 feet high wall with barbed wire. The cemetery was enclosed inside the ghetto but to enter it one needed a special permit. In the beginning of the war those who died were buried in individual graves, but soon the cemetery ran out of space and the bodies were thrown in mass graves or burnt.
There are some monuments, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. The stone for the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto immortalizes the memory of those whose spirit wasn't tamed by the horrors of the war. Near the cemetery entrance you can see a wall made of pieces of tombstones overturned and desecrated by the Nazis. The memorial for the children of the Ghetto murdered by the Nazis consists of a brick structure symbolizing the ghetto wall, in front of which there is a pile of stones with embedded photos of children. On the memorial one can read a poem by Henryka Lazowert "The Little Smuggler", devoted to all the children who risked their lives to get out of the Ghetto and bring food from the city to their relatives.
There is a monument to Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), a writer and pedagogue, that can be considered as his symbolic grave. He devoted to children all his life, and even preferred the death with a group of Jewish orphans for whom he was caring. He died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz.
The cemetery contains about 250,000 individual graves and mass graves where thousands of residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were buried. Unfortunately, the burial records were burnt by the Nazis during World War II, so it is difficult to determine the exact number of graves and the names of the buried.
The cemetery is a final resting place for many outstanding Jewish Polish personalities. Amongst them one should mention the inventor of the artificial language Esperanto Ludwik Zamenhof, wealthy banker Wilhelm Landau, actress Esther Rachel Kaminska, great Rabbis, such as Rav Chaim Soleveitchik and Rav Avraham Mordechai.
In spite of the fact that the cemetery has suffered greatly during the years of war, it is still a very beautiful place. Carved symbols and ornaments lavishly decorate the tombstones. On most of the marble and sandstone tombstones it's practically impossible to make out Hebrew lettering because of destruction and rampant ivy.
