Nowy Targ, Poland

• Location and Maps
• Background Information
• Other Sources of Information
• Contributors of Material
  

Location and Maps

Background Information

Nowy Targ is a city situated in southern Poland,in the Malopolska province,the county seat of Nowy Targ.  Nowy Targ was once one of the many towns in the area known as "Galicia." It is 85 km south of Krakow, and 433 km south of Warsaw.   The full name of Nowy Targ in Polish, is Królewskie Wolne Miasto Nowy Targ, which translates to "Royal Free City of Nowy Targ."

You can find information on the general history of the town of Nowy Targ from various sources, especially on the internet. Very few mention anything about the Jews who once lived there. But see some of the sources below.

The following section describes some pieces of history of Nowy Targ as it pertains to the Jews who came to live there in the middle of the 19th century and onward.

On JewishGen, in the Town Finder, you can key in Nowy Targ, and you will see a map and a list of nearby towns and how far they are from Nowy Targ.  After World War I, families appeared to have moved from Nowy Targ, either further into Poland; parts of what is now Ukraine; as well as into what is now Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Virtual Shtetl, a Polish language website for the most part, has some portions that are in English.  One of these is on the local history of the Jewish community in Nowy Targ, adapted from various sources. Click on the footnotes there to see the sources.

Virtual Shtetl has on-going updates to its websites, so links to what was found at the time of creating this site may vary. At one point, in reading about important people in Nowy Targ's Jewish community, I noted the following with these excerpts, highlighting the names of the people in bold lettering:
  
"...Dr. Abraham Blumenfeld, who in 1847 came into the possession of an agro-industrial complex specializing in brewery[1.5].. He owned: a flourmill, a sawmill, a house, farm buildings and arables. In 1871 he sold his vast estate for the sum of 21,500 Rhine ducats. To conclude the purchase the town hall had to incur a debt with the Jewish bankers: Aron Mandl, Salomon Goldman and Józef Herz. In 1875 the property was leased to Józef Goldman and in 1894 it was taken over by Józef Herz. "

"...They actively participated in town life and financed many social initiatives, such as the establishment of the fire-brigade. Jakub Goldfinger, who for 15 years held the office of the vice mayor, served as a paragon of a citizen.

"More than 60 congregations fell within the kehilla’s jurisdiction. The office of the rabbi was then held by Jakub Hirsch, and later by the unpopular Hirsch Meislich. The wealthiest members of the local community were part of the congregation’s council, e.g. Jakub Goldfinger and Józef Herz."

"The situation began to deteriorate in the 1930s with a rise in anti-Semitism among Poles ... Nevertheless, Jews still actively participated in town life. The National Defense Fund, which was established by virtue of the decree of April 9, 1936, was supported also by financial contributions made by citizens of Jewish origins. Dr. Zahariasz Goldner was the most generous donor in the town’s history with a contribution to the amount of 100 golden koronas."

• Video

In this 17:32 minute YouTube Video of Nowy Targ, you can see where some Jewish sites (The synagogue, prayer houses, cemetery, mass grave, a monument to victims of the Holocaust, many gravestones) once existed as well as places that are memorials to those who once lived there. 


The video with mournful music starts off with a memorial wall for Holocaust victims. The synagogue is now a "kino" -- a movie theater, called Tatry.  The video appears to show the back of the theater and you can see four arches, filled in, that were probably windows, even stained glass perhaps, of the former synagogue.


The video focuses on a building of a former Beit Midrash (study hall); and a store front that was the site of a former Hasidic stibl.


Most of the video (15 minutes worth) covers the cemetery, starting with a memorial stones for those former residents of Nowy Targ and Podohalie who were killed during the holocaust and have no actual burial place.  There is a mass grave of those rounded up and murdered in the cemetery itself. 


Many stones are unreadable and either missing or have fallen down.  The first readable stone appears at 7':15".  While the film makes reading these stones difficult, photos taken by Sally Mizroch, June 2016, and the Hebrew inscriptions translated by Madeleine Isenberg, we can now identify these with relative certainty.  See more about this on the "Religious" menu option. 


This is a Youtube "Roadtrip" that takes you to the central square, about six minutes long, it is accompanied by music that sounds very "Country and Western!" 


• Books

• Among the Yizkor Books (Memorial) of Jewish communities that once existed prior to World War II, is that of Sefer Nowy Targ ve ha seviva ("Remembrance Book of Nowy Targ and Vicinity"), edited by Michael Walzer-Fass, Israel, 1979. It's subtitle includes a list of additional towns: Zakopane, Charni Dunaietz, Rabka, Yordanov, Shchavnitza, Kroshchenko, Yablonka, Makov Podhalanski.  (A partial translation from the Hebrew into English, is also available on a JewishGen website,  Nowy Targ, Poland.)  Movement between any of these towns and Nowy Targ proper was common, such that someone born in one place might live in another.
  
  This book of over 500 pages was written in Hebrew, although there are some pages translated into English at the back of the book. The book can be paged through image by image via the New York Public Library's selection of Yizkor Books. Selecting either Nowy Targ, or Neumarkt, will yield the same book.  Images in that book 441-536 are written in English, but you will need to start the book from page 536 and page to "previous" to get to the next page!  Included in this book are memorial pages for individuals or families who were killed in the Holocaust.  One such page is shown in the "Family" tab for the FEIT family.


• Czarny Dunajec i Okolice - Zarys dziejów do roku 1945, Pod Redakcja Feliksa Kiryka, Wydawnictwo I Drukarnia Secesja, Krakow. Translated: Czarny Dunajec and Vicinity--A Sketch of its Annals up to 1945. Edited by Feliks Kiryk. Secesja Publisher and Printer, Kraków, 1997, 586 p. For some information, including names and occupations of people from Czarny Dunajec in this book see "Other."


• Additionally, while some countries might have only one large Yizkor Book volume to incorporate a wealth of Jewish Communities, Poland had so many communities, that eight volumes are required to cover the Jewish communities.  Nowy Targ falls into Volume III, Pinkas Hakehillot Polin - Galicia Hamaravit Veselesia, (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland - Western Galicia & Silesia (Volume III)). At the time of creation of this KehilaLinks site, the pages for Nowy Targ (pp. 252-256) have yet to be translated.

• Websites