6. Miejsce, gdzie stała Synagoga Maharszala

Lublin became a centre of Talmudic studies in the 16th century, one that was famous in the whole Ashkenazi world. Historian Salo Witmayer Baron even claims in his monumental A Social and Religious History of the Jews that Lublin was the most intellectually influential Jewish community in the world at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. It could boast a prominent yeshiva, established by Shalom Shachna (c. 1495-1559), the son of Josko Shachnovitz, a tariff leaseholder and supplier of goods to the royal court, who had moved from Lviv to Lublin around 1500. Shalom Shachna, having completed rabbinical studies in Poznań, Krakow and northern Italy, returned to Lublin around 1530 and founded a yeshiva, or a Talmudic academy. One of his students and later a son-in-law was Moshe Isserles (1525-1572), known as the Ramah (or Remuh in Yiddish). Other heads of the yeshiva included such outstanding rabbis as Shlomo ben Yechiel Luria (1510-1573), known as the Maharshal, or Meir ben Gedalia (d. 1616), known as the Maharam. It was after Maharshal (acronym for Moreinu ha-Rav Shlomo Luria, or Our Teacher Rabbi Shlomo Luria) that the biggest Lublin synagogue was named. Located at 5 Jateczna Street, the synagogue was founded at the foot of the castle in 1567. The brick monumental building was most probably the first synagogue with a central bimah, so typical of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Maharshal himself worked out the instructions for its construction, having analysed the Talmud and perhaps having drawn inspiration from the architecture of the nearby Gothic castle chapel with a central pillar.The Lublin circle of educated Talmud scholars and their disciples stimulated demand for Hebrew books. Thus a Hebrew printing house was set up in the town by Chaim ben Yitzchak Shachor in 1547 and developed by the Jaffe family. It was the second Jewish printing house in Poland, competitive with the one in Krakow. It published the whole of the Babylonian Talmud (1559-1577), the first edition of Tsene Urene (c. 1590), an exceedingly popular religious book in Yiddish, and the Zohar, the foundational book of Kabbalah (1623, for a third time in Europe). One of the first Lublin printers, Eliezer ben Yitzchak, left for Safed in 1576, where he founded the first printing press in the Middle East.The Jewish Town, along with the synagogue and the castle, were destroyed by the Cossack and Muscovite troops besieging Lublin in 1656. Over two thousand Jews were killed at that time. The quarter and the synagogue were gradually rebuilt, yet Lublin did not regain its previous significance as a centre of rabbinical studies. Another considerable redevelopment of the synagogue took place after a construction disaster in 1854. As Meir Balaban wrote: The synagogue makes a great impression. It is very spacious and has galleries for women on the western and northern sides. The prayer hall is bright, the high windows must have been put in during the recent reconstruction, as windows were made smaller in the old days, even if for security reasons. Big candlesticks would be lit for the prayer leader, as well as a beautiful menorah, placed to the right of the pulpit.In addition to the main synagogue, called the Maharshal Shul, the synagogue compound also comprised the smaller Maharam Shul and the small Shiva Kruim house of prayer (Hebrew “Shiva Kruim” means “the seven called [to read Torah]” in English). A communal beit midrash (a study hall), a Talmud-Torah school and a mikveh (a ritual bath) were also located in the vicinity.

The synagogue, which witnessed the splendor of Lublin's Jewish community, also witnessed its annihilation.Lublin was bombed in the first days of September 1939, and German troops entered the city in mid-September. Harassment and persecution began.In November 1939, Jews living in the inner city were ordered to move to the Jewish quarter.Gradually, its area was restricted and restrictions intensified. Prayers were banned in the synagogue, which from then on served as a shelter for Jews resettled in Lublin from areas incorporated into the Reich and as a people's kitchen for the poor. On March 24, 1941, the governor of the Lublin District, Ernst Zoerner, issued a decree establishing a closed Jewish quarter, from which all Christians were ordered to be evicted. "The boundaries of the ghetto in Lublin are defined by the following streets: from the corner of Kowalska through Kowalska, Krawiecka along the block of houses marked on the plan, crossing the vacant field of Sienna to Kalinowszczyzna up to the corner of Franciszkańska, Franciszkańska through Unicka up to the corner of Lubartowska, Lubartowska up to the corner of Kowalska." The ghetto was initially unfenced, but going outside the area was forbidden. Jews who were caught outside the ghetto boundary without permission were subject to the death penalty, as were those who helped them.In February 1942, the ghetto was partially fenced off with a fence and divided into part A - the larger one, encompassing most of the Jewish quarter - and part B - occupying the area between several streets in the Old Town (including Grodzka and Rybna). On the evening of March 16, 1942, the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto began.This was also the beginning of the "Reinhardt" action, whose headquarters were located in Lublin. Every night, about one and a half thousand people were gathered in the synagogue building, and then, escorted by armed guards with dogs, the procession, formed into a column, was driven several kilometers to the railroad ramp at the city slaughterhouse. From here, in freight cars, Lublin Jews were taken to the Belzec extermination camp.The deportations lasted until April 14, 1942.During them, more than 28,000 people were murdered. The few thousand surviving Jews gathered in Ghetto B were resettled in a new ghetto in Majdan Tatarski, in the eastern part of the city, between the area left by the Plage-Laśkiewicz airplane plant (Flugplatz) and the KL Lublin camp at Majdanek. In November 1942, this ghetto, too, was liquidated and its residents murdered in the Majdanek camp. Over the next few months, Lublin's deserted medieval Jewish quarter was gradually demolished - about 320 buildings were wiped off the face of the earth in this way. About one hundred and fifty Jewish artisans were left alive along with two hundred Christian prisoners who were forcibly working in the Gestapo prison in the castle.These people, however, did not live to see the end of the war. On July 22, 1944, on the eve of the liberation of Lublin by the Soviet army, all the inmates of the castle were shot by the retreating Germans. Today, at the site of the former Maharshal synagogue, there are several commemorative plaques, and the tragic history of the ghetto inhabitants is commemorated by the Trail: Lublin. The memory of the Holocaust was created on the initiative of the "Grodzka Gate - NN Theater" Center for the 2017. 75th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto and the beginning of the "Reinhardt" action.