BRZEZINY: US Commission No. POCE000222
This name is the Polish rendering. Alternate Yiddish names are Brezin or Brzezin. Brzeziny is located in Skierniewickie region at 51°48 19°45, 19 km from Lodz. Google Earth Location
The first Jews arrived in Brzeziny probably during the first half of XVI century. The earliest known Jewish community was 1557 and was affected by the Polish-Swedish War in 1656. It is a fact that in year 1550 there was a street called Jewish St. However there are not many documents in existence about the Jewish community dating from that time. There is only a mention of a pogrom in 1626 when as a result of a rumour about a ritual murder, 5 Jews were killed. Enyclopaedia Judaica also mentions a massacre of Jews in 1656 carried out by soldiers of Hetman Czarniecki’s army.
The Jewish population in Brzezin increased gradually over the years. Towards the end of the 18th century, there were about 250 Jews, who constituted 24% of the whole population. In 1820 there were 576 Jewish inhabitants. Soon afterwards there were more Jews there than Catholics. In 1860, there were 2,205 Catholics, 658 Lutherans and 2,244 Jews. The biggest increase in Jewish population took place towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. According to a publication by Jerzy Kołodziej entitlted “History of Jewish community in Brzezin”, from the second half of the 16th century to the first half of the 20th century”, 850 new Jewish settlers arrived in Brzeziny in 1907. In 1912, there were 8,214 Jewish people.
Towards the end of the 19th century, thanks to the involvement of recently arrived Jews from Russia, clothes making (in homes) industry was established on a massive scale in Brzeziny. Soon the town became the largest clothes making region in the whole of Central Europe. Over three thousand Brzeziny inhabitants were employed in that industry and their products were sold almost in the whole of Russia. The prosperity of its inhabitants also affected the whole town. During that time up to 100 tenement houses were built. The first World War interrupted that boom, which up until 1939 was still the main source of income for the inhabitants in Brzeziny. The 1921 Jewish population was 4979.
On the day when the second World War broke out, there were about 6,850 Jews living in the Brzeziny shtetl . After the town was occupied by the Nazis, all property belonging to the Jewish people was confiscated and in 1940, a ghetto was founded. Former inhabitant of Brzeziny, Eliezer Zyskind, who was lucky to survive Holocaust, reported that “everything was forbidden to the Jews. We had no rights”. After the war, Eliezer Zyskind’s wife wrote a book “Light in the Valley of Tears” describing her memories from that time.
Those Jews who survived the nightmare of life in ghetto, were subsequently deported to camps in Auschwitz and Chelmno on the Ner. Most of them did not survive.
Present town population is 5,000-25,000 with no Jews.
Google Earth Location: Chelmno Google Earth Location: Auschwitz
