Meeting with Jolanta Kruszniewska from Jagiellonian University about the Jewish cemetery in Mszana Dolna

On 28.04.2022 in the Municipal Library in Mszana Dolna a meeting with Jolanta Kruszniewska, a PhD student of the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University took place. This was the third event in our project "A story about Mszana Dolna, a bi-cultural, pre-war town". We would like to bring closer to contemporary town residents a part of Mszana Dolna's history which was lost during the Holocaust. This time, we will do so by reading traces of former residents of the town, which are inscribed in stone matzevot. An invited Judaist talked about how a Jewish cemetery was established, its function and halal regulations related to the place and the burial. She described the characteristics of matzevot, who made them and how letters and ornaments were forged. She presented the oldest preserved matzeva in the Jewish cemetery in Mszana and examples of other matzevot: female, male, belonging to Levites, prematurely deceased. She familiarized us with the scheme of inscriptions on matzevot: funeral formulas, lamentations, laudations - epithets, praise phrases and phrases usually placed at the end of inscriptions.

We could not fail to mention also other dead buried there - victims killed during World War II, whom we want to commemorate with a stone tombstone. We also announced that a guided tour of the cemetery will be organized as part of the 80th Anniversary of the Shoah in August. We also plan to publish a guidebook to the cemetery, which will include the results of Ms. Jola's work - a detailed reading of the inscriptions of the surviving matzevot.

The meeting was attended by a large group of local residents and guests.

The event was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage within the framework of the National Center of Culture program: EtnoPolska. Edition 2022, under the honorary patronage of the Mayor, Ms. Anna Pękała, and hosted once again by the Director of the Library, Ms. Agnieszka Orzeł. The meeting was broadcasted on our FB profile, and the recordings of this and previous meetings can already be found on our Youtube channel.

Photo Agnieszka Józefiak Lewandowska and Urszula Antosz-Rekucka

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator