Nathan’s Holiday Trek 2006
And then, in recent years, new graves appear, reflecting the tentative rebirth of Poland’s Jewish community.
Wroclaw’s Jewish Past
During the day on Dec. 31st, we went for a walk in Wroclaw’s Jewish cemetery. It is probably the best place in Wroclaw to explore the city’s various heritages (for those interested, an excellent reference is Norman Davies’s excellent book “Microcosm: History of a Central European City”).
Wroclaw was a German city until 1945. This part of the heritage is clearly visible in the cemetery. There are even military graves of Breslau’s Jews who served in the German army during World War I. There is a small memorial, and individual graves like the one below, of a Jewish soldier who fell in Flanders in 1917.
Following 1945, the cemetery continued to be used but fell into disrepair, like the chapel here. The first post-war graves are from 1946-47, but now the inscriptions are all in Polish, reflecting the city’s new status as part of Poland. Then there is a period between the early 1970s and the 1990s when hardly any new graves appeared--during that period most of Poland’s remaining Jews emigrated to Israel, the US or Western Europe.
