News and Events

The Organization Of Zamość Jews and Vicinity
announces that the 67th Yom HaShoa Memorial Convention
will be held on Wednsday 18th pril 2012, 19:30
at the Cinemateque of Tel Aviv

70 Years to the Final Solution

The Organization Of Zamość Jews and Vicinity
announces that the 66th Yom HaShoa Memorial Convention
will be held on Sunday 1st May 2011, 19:00
at the Cinemateque of Tel Aviv

As always we cordially welcome new members of the next generations !!!

Please help the important continuation of our Organization by financial donation.
The annual membership fee is 120 NIS

September 2010

Dear Friends,

On August 2010 my son Ori Schek and I visited Poland. During our stay we visited the towns and shtetls Zamość, Chełm, Hrubieszow, Horodło, Piaski, Bilgoraj, Hrubieszów, Izbica, Szczebrzeszyn, Wojsławice, Rejowiec, Krasnystaw, Tomaszow Lubelski, Bełzec, and Lublin. Together with the historians Dr. Robert Kuwałek and Krzysztof Banach we surveyed the death camps of Majdanek and Bełzec. In Bełzec we attended an international seminar supervised by Dr. Kuwałek, who also established the museums in these two camps.

Everywhere we have looked for remains of synagogues and cemeteries (along with the local cultural sites). Most synagogues and cemeteries are ruined, and in part new monuments were erected, commemorating the murdered Kehiles.

In Zamość we had a cordial appointment with Pan Marcin Zamoyski, the Mayor (a descendant of Hetman Jan Zamojski, the founder of the town). We discussed some points concerning our community:

1) Erecting a memorial site in the Rotunda of Zamość (part of the fortifications), where already are rooms dedicated to parts of the Polish Christian murdered people

2) A brief signpost near the Synagogue

3) A brief signpost near the ruined cemetery

4) A signpost on the rampart from where our beloved ancestors were sent to death in Bełzec death camp on April 1942

5) A sign on a house where the great writer Y. L. Peretz lived.

Later we got a positive answer from Pan Zamoyski.

We have met our dear fried, Maria Fornal, a citizen of Zamość, who endlessly works with high devotion to preserve the memory of our community in Zamość, Hrubieszow and other shtetls.

Shana Tova,

Israel Schek

About the efforts to sue the War criminal Samuel Kunz and his death, read here:

Death of the War Criminal Samuel Kunz_Nov 2010.doc

January 2010

Shalom to the Members of the Zamość Organization,

The 65th Yom HaShoah Memorial Convention was held on Sunday 11th April 2010 (immediately after Pessach).

Everyone should perceive the crucial importance of conveying the heritage of the Jewish Community of Zamosc and its Vicinity, and of the whole European Jewish Community which was erased by the Nazis.

Consider that it is very easy to abadon and earse our work, but would be extremely hard to rebuilt it.

If a member has passed away, please let us know in order to commerate his/her name.

We thank our member Acountant Tzvika Live (of family Lemberger) who voluntarily does the auditing for the Organization for many years

The process of scanning pictures and documents is being held at the Yad VaShem Institute in Jerusalem, and we hope to complete soon.
This data base will serve as a preliminary body for a book of our community. Still we hope to get more pictures from members.

We deeply thank the persons at the Yad VaShem Archive for their kind cooperation, mostly Daphna Sehayek and Dr. Dani Uziel.

The photo archive of our Organization was initiated by the Late Eva Bar-Zeev, the previous chair person, who dedicated all her faculties to activities for the Organization. Let it be dediacted to her beloved memory.

We have sent pictures to The Multimedia Museum of the Zamość Jews which is being established in the Zamość Synagogue by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ).

We are grateful to our kind Contributors.
Their names appear in “Contributions”.

We deeply appreciate the great coprehensive scientific research dedicatively worked out by the historian Dr. Adam Kopciowski of Lublin about the History of the Jews of Zamość, which is vastly used in this wesite.

We heartly thank Maria Fornal of Zamość, who endlessly works with high devotion to preserve the memory of our community in Zamość, Hrubieszow and other shtetls. For years she has been looking after the Synagoge and the Cemetery in Zamość. Maria had collected smashed pieces of gravestones, kept it in the garage of Artur Witkowski, and after a generous contribution of Marcin Zamojski, Mayor of the City of Zamość, a fence was built around the Cemetery Memorial, where these collected pieces were laid in.

We hope to cooperate with the Museum of the History of the Jews in Polad being established in Warsaw.

Greetings, Israel Schek

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to the Claims Conference for the generous support in funding this very site, including the virtual archive. Special thanks to Adina Shudofsky who guides us through the bureaucratic labyrinth.

Konferencja "Historia i Kultura Żydów w Zamościu i na Zamojszśćyźnie"

Following the renovation of the Old Synagogue at Zamość by FODZ (Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland) we shall exhibit there some of our pictures in a permanent show.

We thank our members Yoram and Dita Golan for their deep commitment.

We thank Monika Krawczyk, FODZ Dyrektor, for her perpetual work.

The 64th annual Zamosc Kehila Commemoration Meeting

took place at Yom-HaShoa evening at the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum on 20th April 2009.

“EVERLASTING NAME” Second edition

In April, 1940, apparently, the Judenrat, on its own initiative, began to record all the Jews living in the city, thereby creating an invaluable, and fairly accurate, document on the Jewish population of Zamość at the start of the occupation. The census gave the following personal details: name, surname, occupation, date and place of birth, and address. It recorded 10,086 men, women and children.

On the basis of the place of birth specified in the census, apart from Zamość, most of the Jews hailed from Izbica, Krasnobrod, Komarow, Tomaszow Lubelski, Szczebrzeszyn, Bilgoraj, Grabowiec, Hrubieszow, Krasnystaw, Tyszowiec, Chelmno, Warszawa, Wojslawice, Tarnogrod, Laszczow, Skierbieszow, Jozefow, Frampole, Turobin, Lodź, Piaski, Janow, Krzeszow, Rajowiec, Labun, Wlodźimierz Wolynski, Wlodawa, Gorzkow, Chomeciski, Źolkiewka, Krasniczyn, Ploskie, Pulawy, Annopole, Dubienka, Sitno and Siedlce.

Cost of book includes postage and handling:

Please make cheque out to the

The Organization of Zamosc Jews and Vicinity

and send them to:
The Organization of Zamosc Jews and Vicinity
PO Box 16090, Tel Aviv 61160, Israel

Memorial Service,

Eve of the Holocaust Remembrance Day
The annual Zamosc memorial service, the 62th will be held on the eve of Holocaust Day,
Wednesday, 30.4.08 at the Tel Aviv Art Museum,
27 King Shaul Blvd., Tel Aviv at 18:30.
The service will begin at around 20:00

In the pram: Ahuva Shamir and her brother Ya’akow Szwarc 1948 (from families Brondwajn/Wajntraub - Zamosc and Szwarc/Sapian - Komarow L.).

Ya’akow & Ahuva – Summer 2007

'Between borders, over the
mountains''

On June 29, 2007 a ten-day crossing of the Alps from Austria to Italy took place along the route taken by Jews from DP camps with the help of members of the Bricha organization. Among the participants were Ya’akow Szwarc and his sister Ahuva Shamir (from families Brondwajn/Wajntraub from Zamosc and Szwarc/Sapian from Komarow L.). They are the children born in summer 1947. The places where they were born mark the route along which the Holocaust refugees wandered at the time.

From a Salzburg newspaper

100 tombstones
in the Czenstohowa Jewish
cemetery were desecrated in 6.8.2007

''The Jews are Coming, the Jews are Coming''

– thus was the ominous title of a March 2005 article by Adam Javorski, a Polish journalist from Zamosc.
''They want their property, but you can profit from it}. We mean Jews. More and more are coming to Zamosc District…'', thus begins the article.

Purging itself of the purges?
/ By Adi Schwartz Haaretz 10.8.07

The Six-Day War caught Vera Lechtman quite far from Israel. At that time she was a young pediatrician from Mragowo, a small provincial town in northeastern Poland not far from the border with Belarus and Lithuania (at that time part of the Soviet Union). At the end of June She celebrated her 29th birthday 1967. Vera invited a number of colleagues from work for coffee and cake. But there was somebody who did not like all this very much…

IZBICA - project of the cemetery gate

The borders of the Jewish cemetery in Izbica were determined and a fence for the cemetery was designed. This undertaking was realized thanks to the support of the Embasssy of the Federal Republic of Germany as a part of the Izbica Jewish Cemetery Commemoration Project. We are currently seeking for partners who will help to complete it.

Czestochowa, Poland, 6.8.2007

ANTI-SEMITISM IN POLAND
– Frampol, Lubartow etc a list of anti-Semitic incidents reported by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland to the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the Police in 2006 (Summary).

May 2007
Dear Friends, Natives of Zamość and its Environs, and the Next Generations,

We invite you all

to a multi-generational memorial meeting,

including the launching of our archival website,

on Wednesday 30.5.07, 18:30 at the TelAvivMuseum,

27, Shaul Hameleh Street, Tel Aviv.

Supporting Institutes:

Claims Conference

Yad VaSham,
Jerusalem