Pioneering rabbi evicted from historic Krakow building rendered ownerless by the Holocaust
12 Jozefa Street was a set in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List,’ half a century after the Nazis murdered its Jewish owners
Rabbi Tanya Segal stands in the courtyard of 12 Jozefa Street in Krakow, Poland, as she is evicted from her apartment, July 31, 2025. Courtesy of Marta Kalamar
(JTA) — When Rabbi Tanya Segal landed an apartment at 12 Jozefa Street in Krakow a decade ago, she was thrilled.
Segal knew that the building had appeared in the movie “Schindler’s List,” that it had once housed a rabbi and a Jewish house of study, and that the Jewish family that owned it in the 1940s was murdered in the Holocaust. She set out to create a pulsing heart of Jewish life where it had been extinguished.
“It was an open house,” said Segal, a Moscow native who, as the founder of the Beit Krakow congregation, is the first woman to work full time as a rabbi in Poland. Sometimes she hosted services, seders and Shabbat meals from her apartment.
“Everybody knew where I lived, where you can come, where you can ask to meet,” she said.
Then, last month, Segal was forced to move out, under police supervision. She had been evicted at the behest of a Polish bureaucrat charged with stewarding the building. In what watchdogs say is an extreme outcome of Poland’s lack of a Holocaust restitution law, the building is officially “ownerless,” leaving tenants in perpetual limbo.
”Poland remains the only member state of the European Union that has not passed national legislation to provide restitution or compensation for private property seized during the Holocaust or nationalized by the postwar Communist regime,” Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
While some Jews who were stripped of property during the Holocaust have been able to reclaim them or obtain compensation under what Taylor’s organization said were “narrow technical circumstances,” there has never been a broad and transparent effort at restitution like those undertaken in other countries.
Not only has WJRO been fruitlessly pressing successive Polish governments for decades to address the issue, the situation has actually grown worse, Taylor said.
He noted that the Polish government passed a law in 2021 that “prevents challenges to administrative decisions older than 30 years — even if those decisions were made without legal basis or in gross violation of the law,” Taylor said. The new law blocked countless ongoing claims from moving forward.
That law was passed while the country was run by the Law and Justice Party, which also criminalized statements suggesting Polish collaboration with the Nazi regime. It returned to power this summer, with a Holocaust revisionist historian at the helm.
Over the years, non-Jewish Poles could apply for the return of properties with relative easy; all they had to do was cross the street and go to court. But for Jewish heirs, strewn around the world, the process “is very cumbersome,” said the country’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.
And when Jews do try to seek restitution, the lack of a comprehensive restitution law gums up the works, he said. He noted that the problem was most acute in Krakow: In Warsaw, where he lives, most property was destroyed during the war, and there was little to reclaim in the way of structures.
“In Krakow,” Schudrich said, “everything is standing.”
12 Jozefa Street is a case study in what can go wrong.
Before World War II, it had been owned by Salomon Fendler, who transferred ownership to his daughter, Annie Isenberg. Both were killed in the Holocaust.
It provided a backdrop in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning “Schindler’s List” to a dramatic depiction of what befell nearly all of the neighborhood’s residents. In the movie, Nazis chase Jews from their apartments, throwing their belongings from the balconies into the picturesque courtyard below.
The neighborhood, the Kazimierz district, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 because of its density of Jewish sites.
After the end of communism, Poland’s democratic government, founded in the 1990s, placed unclaimed properties — including 12 Jozefa — in the hands of custodians, known as “curators.”
Curators are supposed to protect unclaimed properties but they also have to “seek clarification of the heir’s identity and notify the heirs of the opening of the estate,” said a spokeswoman for the city of Krakow.
In 25 years, no progress was made in that department for Jozefa 12 — even though descendants of the Fender and Isenberg families can be found.
“It was a giant family,” said Marta Kalamar, president of Beit Krakow and of the Foundation for the Center for Progressive and Reform Judaism in Krakow. “And we could find some traces of people, after spending an hour on the Internet.”
But she said the curators are not as motivated or able to find possible claimants.
“Those curators almost never find those descendants, [and] there is no way to control if they’re effective in it,” she said. “For example, this curator doesn’t know English or Hebrew. How do they find even those descendants? So they are known for being very ineffective in that main thing.”
What the curators are good at, Kalamar said, was managing the properties to keep them full with rent-paying tenants. The original curator at Jozefa 12 leased the apartment some 25 years ago to a Jewish family that would later become members of Segal’s community, she said. They were required to undertake some necessary renovations, which they did, she added. In 2015, Segal sublet the apartment from the family, who have declined to comment publicly.
The first curator was dismissed about six years ago, after Kalamar’s foundation reported he had been carrying out unauthorized renovations of the historic building’s façade, she said.
The replacement curator, Marcin Trzeciak, quickly petitioned the court to bar her foundation from “intervening in this building’s heritage preservation.”
He was unsuccessful in this attempt, but he did manage to have the original lease declared invalid. An appeals court issued the ruling on May 22 and sent its explanation to Segal on July 14.
“In Poland when you find any significant error in the contract, you can invalidate it even 25 years back,” said Kalamar.
She said she wrote to the curator on behalf of her foundation but never heard back.“The curator never responded to any of the letters sent by the rabbi or the foundation, never picked up a phone from anyone nor replied to any email,” she said.
Trzeciak did not respond to JTA’s requests for comment.
Segal had to move out. The eviction took place July 31 without incident, in the presence of police – as requested by the curator, Kalamar added.
“It was really painful, and it was, of course, sad,” said Segal.
The city spokeswoman said that because Jozefa 12 was transferred to the Municipal Building Authority more than 20 years ago, the city has no information on “who occupies the premises located in this building, nor whether any eviction or enforcement proceedings are pending against the residents.”
She noted that there are many cases of claims on property still open in Krakow.
The Foundation for the Center for Progressive and Reform Judaism in Krakow, established in 2017, is in the process of renovating of a synagogue in a courtyard on the corner of Mostowa Street and Trynitarska Street, three blocks from 12 Jozefa, as a potential permanent home for the congregation.
For now, they rotate between various sites for prayer services. The building on Jozefa Street where the rabbi lived was “very meaningful to us” as part of the rotation, Kalamar said, noting that most of the congregation members “were born in Krakow and feel connected to its Jewish history.”
Like Schudrich, Segal came from abroad to serve in Poland. She received her rabbinical ordination at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Israel in 2007 and moved first to Warsaw before beginning to build a Reform congregation in Krakow in 2009. She said she had visited Poland occasionally as a student and “really felt this emptiness from the Jewish point of view.”
Today, the community has 30 official members but can draw hundreds on holidays, said Segal, who also serves a Czech Republic congregation. In 2012 she helped officiate at her congregation’s first bat mitzvah ceremony, and she also launched what she called the Midrash Lab, which reinterprets Jewish texts using music, dance, and theater.
Since her eviction, Segal has filed a complaint against the bailiff to the court, “for turning what should have been just a voluntary handoff of a flat to a forced eviction with police assistance,” Kalamar said. “The forced eviction had no legal grounds at that time, as the regulatory deadline for handing off the flat had not yet passed and also the rabbi agreed to hand off the flat voluntarily.”
No date has yet been set to hear the complaint, said Kalamar, who said she is also looking into whether Trzeciak had the court’s permission to seek Segal’s eviction. If not, she said, “we will file a complaint against the curator to the court.”
Whatever happens now, Segal says she will not be deterred in her efforts to grow Jewish life in a city where it neared extinction, even if she has lost the ability for now to teach from an epicenter of Jewish experience: a home in a historic Jewish neighborhood.
For now, she has moved into a small apartment originally purchased for her son, who died during the Covid pandemic. The apartment is also in Kazimierz, but it is too small to host more than two or three guests.
“We will not sit and we will not cry about it. I didn’t sleep a few nights, but it’s OK,” Segal said. “I’m back.”
