HISTORY

The Fate of the Jewish community in Bodzentyn

Written by Stefan Rachtan     

Fate of the Jewish community in Bodzentyn

The town of Bodzentyn was founded in the middle of the XIV century by Bodzanta Jankowski the Bishop of Krakow as an estate of the bishops of Krakow. It remained so up till the time of the liquidation of church lands in 1789 when it was subsequently taken over by the state treasury.

During this period no Jewish families lived within the area of the town.  It was not until 1792 that the first Jews were able to settle in Bodzentyn. This was because Bodzentyn as a bishop’s town had the privilege of “de non tolerandis Judeis” an exclusionary charter denying Jews the right to reside in church towns. Consequently Jews set up homes in the neighbouring villages of Leśna, Wzdół, Psary, Dąbrowa and Bronkowice where they leased manor farms, ran taverns and fostered trade in general. In 1820 the population   of Bodzentyn numbered 1100 which included 47 Orthodox Jews, even though there was an order forbidding them to purchase property. Despite the pervasive anti-Semitic policies of tsarist authorities this number rapidly increased. Over a period of 95 years (up to 1915) the number of resident Jews in Bodzentyn increased 36 fold to 1,710 whilst during the same period the number of Christians increased twofold to 2,090.  The Jewish community living in Bodzentyn in the XIX century was very industrious and coped extremely well with the apparent discontentment of the local Polish bourgeois mentality.

Up till 1834 around 20 percent of traders and merchants in Bodzentyn were Jews, however in the second half of the century this percentage rose sharply to the point where commerce and even more so industrial enterprise became almost exclusively the domain of Jewish entrepreneurs and tradesmen.

Aside from being engaged in trade Jews were also involved in other areas of the local economy.   They ran the only tannery in town, opened  the first fizzy  drinks company, became  the owners of  lumber mills and flour mills, ran a bookshop, with books in Russian Polish and German and to a greater extent dominated the professions of auxiliary medics and barber- surgeons. Chaim Silberberg was one of the most enterprising Jews pf the XIX century is said to have organised many business ventures for his co-followers.

 Initially the Jews of Bodzentyn belonged to the Szydłowiec synagogue district, and this meant taking the dead for burial there. This was of course extremely burdensome and lead to successive attempts to set up a separate Bodzentyn synagogue district. In 1867 the Russian authorities finally gave their consent to the request for a separate synagogue district and a cemetery. The Kirkut was created on the so called Krakowiec land  from the estate belonging to the Mansjonarzy priests .

  A bathhouse with a ritual Mikvah was built in Kielce Street (ul Kielecka) The Mikvah survived through to the interwar period. The fist prayer house was created in the upper market square and after being burnt down was rebuilt in Wesoła Street. The  synagogue  which was built with a  great deal of effort was destroyed in the great fire of Bodzentyn in 1917 and after being restored  it survived up till  the liquidation of the ghetto  in 1942 when it was burnt down and demolished.

Along with the creation of the Bodzentyn synagogue district it was decided to attend to the matter of education.  Since Jews were banned from sending their children to Christian primary schools, they themselves established their own schools known as  Cheders in which the children were  taught by a Melamed.  Towards the end of  the  XIX  century there were four  up-and-running  Cheder schools, attended by 50 boys and  15 girls.  However from 1912  Jewish and Christian children alike  were allowed to attend the same primary schools.

In the XX century Polish – Jewish relations started to improve. The longstanding association between two diverse cultures, working and living together, evidently started to bear fruit for the first time with the inclusion of 15 Jews into the  local voluntary fire brigade unit and the creation in 1909  of the  first jointly financed  and run cooperative „Nadzieja” (Hope). Apparent culture differences and traditions prevented any further assimilation of Poles with Jews. However both communities worked and co-existed alongside each other creating a distinctive type of Polish-Jewish town, Jews by no means limited themselves to trade and business activities. They organised guilds and associations, propagated adult education, organised vocational training courses, ran a library of Jewish language books as well as a local amateur theatre and drama group.

 In the inter-war period the Religious Community Council, consisting of eight members elected each fourth year was the official authority and ruling body of the Jewish community. In the 1930s the Bodzentyn Jewish community was headed by people such as Josek Sztarkman, Josek Federman, Majer Szachter and  Nusyn Szachter. Besides maintaining   the rabbinic office the religious community was responsible for the upkeep of the synagogue, the Mykvah and cemetery. The cemetery–Kirkut was a place of the utmost reverence and respect.  The makeva headstones erected there were richly ornamented. In the 1930s the cemetery was fenced in and had a wooden gatehouse built for its warden. The smooth running of the of the Jewish religious community management board depended to a greater extent on its political constitution. In Bodzentyn it was predominately orthodox.

  During the first weeks of the occupation a council of Jewish elders was appointed headed by M. Silbersztajn. Deprived of all civil rights Orthodox Jews were forced to work in the nearby towns of Starachowice and Skarżysko Kamienna. The Germans assigned all displaced Jews to Bodzentyn from the outlying villages and towns; even from as far afield as Płock. Amongst them was the author of the diary Dawid Rubinowicz and his family. Before the II World War 1,000 Jews lived in Bodzentyn, making a living from trade and commercial activities. During the occupation years the number of Jews rose from 1,400 in 1940 to over 3,700 in 1941. As expected the living and sanitary conditions were appalling. Many suffered from malnourishment.  The German authorities strictly forbade all Jews from leaving Bodzentyn at any time, thus making the whole town a ghetto.  Toward the end of September 1942 all the Jews from Bodzentyn were driven out and marched to the railway station in Suchedniów. There they were loaded on to waiting cattle wagons into which powdered lime had been scattered. From there they were sent off via Małklina to the Treblinka extermination camp. Very few Jews from Bodzentyn survived, but even so,  some of them are still alive today.

The Jewish people with their unique culture and customs had a significant impact on the character and functioning of Bodzentyn in the XIX and XX centuries. The Second World War however put an abrupt end to the harmonious coexistence of Poles and Jews and brought about the extermination of thousands of Bodzentyn Jews, of which only the Kirkut now remains.                                                                 

Stefan Rachtan     

Chairman of the Society of Friends of Bodzentyn  

                                                                                              Photo shows the Jewish Council ©Yad Vashem      

The fate of young Dawid Rubinowicz  

Dawid Rubinowicz was born on 27 July 1927. His father Josek (Josef) was a milkman in the small village of Krajno close to the city of Kielce. His mother Tauba, ran the family home, brought up her children and often gave medical aid to neighbours and local residents. She acted as a midwife, was able to dress wounds and gave advice on how to cope with minor ailments. Dawid had a younger sister Mania and brother whose name is not known. The villagers of Krajno got on well with the Rubinowicz family. There were not many Jewish families living in the villages neighbouring Kielce. Up to 1942 there were as few as seven Jewish families in Krajno.

Dawid attended classes at a Polish school. From his surviving school report of 21 June 1939, we know he completed the sixth grade of the Polish education system and that he was a good pupil. His friends remember him as a being forthright, friendly and helpful, but above all, as someone who was fascinated by the outside world.  He was well liked by his peers and teachers. At school he was seen as a model pupil. The outbreak oft the war on 1 September stopped him from going on to  the seven grade . He was twelve at the time.

For a boy who was naturally inquisitive the new occurrences were particularly intriguing, prompting him to keep a diary of his thoughts and observations.  The diary notes were written with almost daily regularity in five separate school exercise books. Entries from 1940 cover just eight and half pages of the first notebook. Though the lettering style is somewhat clumsy the notes were written down with great care and are clearly legible. While terse and childlike they are extremely frank and revealing. The diary starts on 21 March 1940 at the time when he was not quite 13 years old. 

In 1941 the notes made by Dawid are more frequent and regular: they describe events in more detailed and his reflections are more personal.  His handwriting is less meticulous but more stylised and smaller. On the cover of the fifth notebook there is a pink ink stamp bearing his name and address “D. Rubinowicz Bodzentyn ul. Kielecka nr 13” - the family’s new address in the ghetto in Bodzentyn to which the family was forcibly relocated. The last notebook which contains entries made during five months in 1942 has six of the last pages missing. It ends with an unfinished sentence about the events of June 1942. Did David continue to write his diary….? Alas this we do not know.

What exactly happened to the family afterwards, we can but speculate and try to reconstruct the course of events from sparse and uncorroborated sources. On Saturday 19 September the Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto in Bodzentyn. The Jewish populace from the ghetto was herded to the town of Suchendiów 17 kilometres. Like in most of the other small ghettos within the district of Radom the operation was conducted with unyielding and extreme physical brutality.

Jan Fafara a resident of Bodzentyn at the time  and an on the spot eyewitness recalls,   “The alarm was sounded  at 8am with the pounding  of bells. Gendarmes and Jewish police went from house to house, chasing out unfortunate Jews from their homes[...]The sick, infirm, the elderly and children were carried out  on the backs of family members.  Along with Jews from Słupia Nowa they were marched through the villages of Wzdół Rządowy and Michniów to Suchedniów. How many hour of sheer hell did they have to endure? After that  the roadside ditches were  strewn with the corpses of the  murdered, mainly women,  children and the elderly.  Alongside the bodies lay abandoned bundles of personal effects” The sole purpose of the brutal regime of terror was to paralyse any attempts at resistance by the deportees. People hounded in this way, terrified and disorientated, became quickly apathetic and subservient to the will of their would be executioners.

On the day of the Jewish feast of Jom Kippur, Monday 21 September; all the people consigned to the railway station at Suchedniów were packed into goods wagons. The deportee train left on schedule, according to the German train timetable no 587, destined for Treblinka. Among those taken to Treblinka on 22 September 1942 was Dawid Rubinowicz, his parents and siblings. Without doubt the family was split up - the son and father from the mother and younger siblings. David was 15 years old at the time and certainly perished along with the men. After 4 hours and 35 minutes the train which had brought the Jews to Treblinka was sent back empty for the next group of deportees.  

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Dawid’s diary is a noteworthy testimony of the fate of a Jewish boy at the time of the holocaust. Why did Dawid decide to write a diary? Did he do it for the same reasons as Anne Frank did?  With no family tradition of interest in literature, what motive did the son of a milkman from the village of Krajno have to pick up a pen and record day after day his experiences of mounting terror? There are no clear cut answers to theses and other questions in the diary notes. We can however speculate or look for them elsewhere. One thing is certain he wanted us to read them.

 Dawid’s written account make us aware, right up to the final moment of the gas chambers in Treblinka, how the noose was steadily tightened around the Kielce Jews. The language of the diary, the way it tells the story together with Dawid’s own feelings and emotions make it an invaluable source for realizing and understanding what happened. We owe our thanks to Dawid for this truly invaluable testimony of the fate to which hundred’s of thousands of Jewish children were subjected, who like him, were not allowed to grow up.