Kosher and Jewish Life in Grodno

Jews began to settle in Grodno in the 14th century after the approval given to them by the Lithuanian prince Vitland, after being thrown out and readmitted several times by 1560 there were 60 Jewish families in Grodno, the Jews were concentrated on the "Jewish street" with their own synagogue and "hospital". In the year 1578 the great synagogue of Grodno was built by rabbi Mordehai Yaffe (Baal ha-Levush). The synagogue was severely damaged in a fire in 1599. By the 20th Century the Jewish population had grown and when the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland happened in 1942 there were about 25,000 Jews in Grodno out of 50,000 total population. A ghetto was established and deportations to camps enacted by 1943 only 1 Jew remained in the ghetto. Today there are several hundred Jews in the city with most of community's activity centralized in the main synagogue that had been returned to the community by the authorities in the 1990s. The head of the community is Rabbi Yitzhak Kaufman. A memorial plaque, commemorating the 25,000 Jews who were exterminated in the two ghettos in the city of Grodno was placed on a building in Zamkova Street, where the entrance to the ghetto once was. On November 12, 2012, the memorial plaque was vandalized, allegedly as an anti-Semitic act.