Honoring the Dead

Market Square, Leżajsk, Poland(Courtesy Ewa Kedzierska)

Tombstones (Courtesy Ewa Kedzierska)

From the medieval period to the twentieth century, there was a thriving Jewish community in the Polish market town of Leżajsk, and beginning in 1635, its dead were buried in the town’s Jewish cemetery. But in 1939, the Wehrmacht occupied Leżajsk, deported its Jews to the Soviet Union, and began to destroy the cemetery. In recent months, during reconstruction of the town’s Market Square, man