After July 1941, Warsaw ghetto, Bernard Kampelmacher. Study “Grodzisk
Mazowiecki. Cmentarz żydowski” [Grodzisk Mazowiecki. Jewish cemetery].
[1] GRODZISK MAZOWIECKI
Jewish cemetery
In the western part of the town, on the right side of the road to Błonie on
Traugutta Street, one can see from afar the brick wall of the Jewish cemetery
([approximately] two-and-a-half morgen of land¹¹⁰⁶). In the first section,
the graves are close to one another; this is the old cemetery. When the space
to bury the corpses ran out – the Jewish Community’ reach was vast, as not
only Jews from Grodzisk were buried here, but also Jews from Błonie and even
Wola who paid the community fee to Grodzisk and had the right to be buried
here – 65 years ago the new adjacent cemetery was established.
A converted Jew, Wederman did not wish to sell the land adjacent to the
old cemetery, but Rabbi Majlech Szapiro¹¹⁰⁷ forced him to. Szapiro ordered
all the Jews to go to that field; he took it by force and assigned the extension
of the cemetery. The first corpses buried there were guarded day and night
for a long time. Then the price was agreed upon with the previous owner.
Aside from the ordinary mortals, several members of the family of the
Szapiro rabbis were buried there too, but in a separate little house.¹¹⁰⁸
During this war, the new small cemetery was established in the southern
section of the cemetery. This is where the resettled 700¹¹⁰⁹ Poznań Jews
living in Grodzisk bury their dead, decorating their graves with flowers and
German inscriptions (30 graves).¹¹¹⁰
After their new resettlement from Grodzisk to Warsaw, they bury their
subsequent war victims in the collective graves on Gęsia Street, without asking
whom they are lying next to.
1106 See footnote 327; it is approximately 3.5 acres.
1107 Elimelech Szapiro (1823–1892), rabbi and tzaddik, founder of the Grodzisk Hasidic dynasty, father of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Szapiro (1889–1943).
1108 See footnote 1053.
1109 In Doc. 145, p. [2], the number is 600.
1110 Orthodox Jews, predominantly in central Poland, never placed anything on graves but stones, and engraved inscriptions only in Hebrew on gravestones.
