About Tarnow
Tarnów is a city in southeastern Poland with 115,341 inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of 269,000 inhabitants. The city is situated in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship since 1999. From 1975 to 1998, it was the capital of the Tarnów Voivodeship. It is a major rail junction, located on the strategic east–west connection from Lviv to Kraków, and two additional lines, one of which links the city with the Slovak border. Tarnów is known for its traditional Polish architecture, which was strongly influenced by foreign cultures and foreigners that once lived in the area, most notably Jews, Germans and Austrians. The entire Old Town, featuring 16th century tenements, houses and defensive walls, has been fully preserved. Tarnów is also the warmest city of Poland, with the highest long-term mean annual temperature in the whole country. The first documented mention of Tarnów occurs in the year 1309, when a list of miracles of Kinga of Poland specifies a woman named Marta, who was resident of the settlement. In 1327, a knight named Spicymir (Leliwa coat of arms) purchased a village of Tarnów Wielki, and three years later, founded his own private town.
Jewish History, POI & Kosher Establishments in Tarnow
The first mention of Jews in Tarnów dates back to 1445, while the first written record of a synagogue can be traced to the 16th century. In 1667, Stanisław Koniecpolski, who then owned what was still a private city, officially granted Tarnów’s Jewish population the rights to a place of worship and their own cemetery. Tarnów’s vibrant Jewish community included large numbers of both Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, and the city remains a pilgrimage site for many modern Hasidic Jews. Tarnów’s Jews formed a large part of the city’s intellectual and cultural elite, among them several of the most prominent lawyers, doctors, musicians, teachers and entrepreneurs, although the vast majority were generally poor. On the day WWII broke out in Europe there were about 25,000 Jews living in Tarnów, making up about 45% of the city’s population. The Nazis formed a ghetto for their internment in the area directly east of the Rynek, where the majority of the Jewish population already lived. Between June 1942 and September 1944 virtually the entire Jewish population of Tarnów was either shot or deported - almost certainly to their deaths, ending almost exactly 500 years of Jewish cultural life in the city. A sinister footnote in the history of the Holocaust relates to Tarnów; as early as October 20, 1939, Tarnów's Jews were forced to wear Star of David armbands, making this the first town in Poland to do so.
