Jedwabne pogrom

Memorial in Jedwabne, Łomża County, Poland

The Jedwabne synagogue accidentally burned down in 1913.

Jedwabne crime scene, compiled from Polish court documents

Jewish children with their schoolteachers, Jedwabne, 1933, including three boys who survived the war by hiding on Antonina Wyrzykowska's farm. Back row, second left: Szmul Wasersztajn (who gave a statement in 1945); third, Mosze Olszewicz; and fourth, Jankiel Kubrzański.

Antonina Wyrzykowska and her husband were beaten by fellow Poles for saving Jews in Jedwabne, and were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.

Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized for the massacre in 2001.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, 2014

77th anniversary, 2018, Jedwabne monument

Massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust.

- Jedwabne pogrom

56 related topics

History of the Jews in Poland

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years.

Reception of Jews in Poland, by Jan Matejko, 1889

Early-medieval Polish coins with Hebrew inscriptions

Casimir the Great and the Jews, by Wojciech Gerson, 1874

Casimir IV Jagiellon confirmed and extended Jewish charters in the second half of the 15th century

Sigismund II Augustus followed his father's tolerant policy and also granted autonomy to the Jews.

Number of Jews in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth per voivodeship in 1764

Late-Renaissance synagogue, Zamość, Poland, 1610–20

Jewish dress in 17th (top) and 18th centuries

Map of Pale of Settlement, showing Jewish population densities

Caricature of Russian Army assailant in 1906 Białystok pogrom

Hasidic schoolchildren in Łódź, c. 1910s, during Partitions

Rabbi Baruch Steinberg before Warsaw Great Synagogue (1933), reading roll call of the fallen, organized by Union of Jewish Fighters for Polish Independence

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Polish: Izaak Zynger), achieved international acclaim as a classic Jewish writer and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978

Shimon Peres, born in Poland as Szymon Perski, served as the ninth President of Israel between 2007 and 2014

Student's book (indeks) of Jewish medical student Marek Szapiro at Warsaw University, with rectangular "ghetto benches" ("odd-numbered-benches") stamp

Demonstration of Polish students demanding implementation of "ghetto benches" at Lwów Polytechnic (1937).

Graves of Jewish-Polish soldiers who died in 1939 September Campaign, Powązki Cemetery

Yiddish election notice for Soviet local government to the People's council of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in Białystok, occupied Poland.

Jewish-Polish soldier's grave, Monte Cassino, Italy

Map of the Holocaust in Poland under German occupation.

Jewish Ghettos in German-occupied Poland and Eastern Europe

Walling-off Świętokrzyska Street (seen from Marszałkowska Street on the "Aryan side")

Announcement of death penalty for Jews captured outside the Ghetto and for Poles helping Jews, November 1941

Ghetto fighters memorial in Warsaw built in 1948 by sculptor Nathan Rapoport

Deportation to Treblinka at the Umschlagplatz

The cover page of The Stroop Report with International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg markings.

34 Mordechaj Anielewicz Street, Warsaw, Poland

Freed prisoners of Gęsiówka and the Szare Szeregi fighters after the liberation of the camp in August 1944

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 saw the destruction of what remained of the Ghetto

Page from a register of several hundred Jewish survivors who returned to Oświęcim after the war; created by a local Jewish Committee in 1945. Most remained for only a brief period.

Chief Rabbi of Poland – Michael Schudrich

President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 26 June 2007

"Shalom in Szeroka Street", the final concert of the 15th Jewish Festival

Examples of Polish attitudes to German atrocities varied widely, from actively risking death in order to save Jewish lives, and passive refusal to inform on them, to indifference, blackmail, and in extreme cases, participation in pogroms such as the Jedwabne pogrom.

Institute of National Remembrance

Polish state research institute in charge of education and archives with investigative and lustration powers.

Archive at the former IPN headquarters at 28 Towarowa Street in Warsaw

He dismissed Krzysztof Persak, co-author of the 2002 two-volume IPN study on the Jedwabne pogrom.

Pogrom

Violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews.

The Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds a Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.

Victims of a pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1903

Map of pogroms in Ukraine between 1918 and 1920 per casualties

A massacre of Armenians and Assyrians in the city of Adana, Ottoman Empire, April 1909

Jewish woman chased by men and youth armed with clubs during the Lviv pogroms, July 1941

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which destroyed the wealthiest black community in the United States, has been described as a pogrom.

Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iași pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland.

Jedwabne

Town in northeast Poland, in Łomża County of Podlaskie Voivodeship, with 1,942 inhabitants (2002).

Jedwabne synagogue destroyed in a 1913 accidental fire

It is notable for the Jedwabne pogrom of 10 July 1941, during the World War II German occupation of Poland.

Jan T. Gross

Polish-American sociologist and historian.

His 2001 book about the Jedwabne massacre, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, caused controversy because it addressed the role of local Poles in the massacre.

Bielsk Podlaski

Town in eastern Poland, within Bielsk County in the Podlaskie Voivodeship.

Castle Hill, the site of the former medieval stronghold

Baroque Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

A historical house from 1909. Preserved wooden architecture can still be found in some parts of the town

Grave and memorial of 49 Poles massacred by the Germans on July 15, 1943

A wooden inn called Słuszna near the marketplace and town hall

Catholic Basilica of Saints Mary and Nicholas

Orthodox church of the Assumption of the Archangel Michael

Orthodox cathedral of the Lord's Resurrection

Former monasterial building complex. Presently, The School of Music

A pogrom took place in Bielsk Podlaski from July 5–7, 1941, in a series of pogroms in other towns including the Jedwabne pogrom.

League of Polish Families

Conservative political party in Poland, with many far-right elements in the past.

The performance of League of Polish Families in the September 2001 elections, has been partly attributed to its well publicized and uncompromising attitude towards Jedwabne pogrom.

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is a 2000 book by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross exploring the July 1941 Jedwabne massacre committed against Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Holocaust

The genocide of European Jews during World War II.

From the Auschwitz Album: Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were "selected" to go to the gas chambers. Camp prisoners are visible in their striped uniforms.

The 23 defendants during the Doctors' trial, Nuremberg, 9 December 1946 – 20 August 1947

Antisemitic Christian Social Party placard from the 1920 Austrian legislative election: "Vote Social Christian. German Christians Save Austria!"

Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses: SA troopers urge a boycott outside Israel's Department Store, Berlin, 1 April 1933. All signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"

The poster (c. 1937) reads: "60,000 RM is what this person with hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read Neues Volk, the monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the Nazi Party."

Czechoslovakian Jews at Croydon airport, England, 31 March 1939, before deportation

March or April 1938: Jews are forced to scrub the pavement in Vienna, Austria.

Potsdamer Straße 26, Berlin, the day after Kristallnacht, November 1938

Jewish women were stripped, beaten and raped in Lwów, occupied eastern Poland (later Lviv, Ukraine), during the Lviv pogroms, July 1941.

Jews arrive with their belongings at the Auschwitz II extermination camp, summer 1944, thinking they were being resettled.

Jewish women wearing yellow badges in occupied Paris, June 1942

Greek Jews from Saloniki are forced to exercise or dance, July 1942.

SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, pleads not guilty during the Einsatzgruppen trial, Nuremberg, 15 September 1947. He was executed in 1951.

Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph: Einsatzgruppe shooting a woman and child, near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942

The "stairs of death" at the Weiner Graben quarry, Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria, 1942

Bodies being pulled out of a train carrying Romanian Jews from the Iași pogrom, July 1941

11 December 1941: Adolf Hitler speaking at the Kroll Opera House to Reichstag members about war in the Pacific.

Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia on the selection ramp at Auschwitz II, c. May 1944. Women and children are lined up on one side, men on the other, waiting for the SS to determine who was fit for work. About 20 percent at Auschwitz were selected for work and the rest gassed.

A mass grave at Bergen-Belsen after the camp's liberation, April 1945

Heinrich Himmler inspects a POW camp in Russia, c. 1941.

Romani people being deported from Asperg, Germany, 22 May 1940

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials, 1945–1946

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2016

During the Jedwabne pogrom, on 10 July 1941, a group of 40 Polish men, spurred on by German Gestapo agents who arrived in the town a day earlier, killed several hundred Jews; around 300 were burned alive in a barn.