Polish Jews Will Build Western Wall Replica
A wall modeled on the Western Wall in Jerusalem will stand at the site of the Jewish cemetery in Bilgoraj, in south-eastern Poland.
The wall, which is being funded by the Isaac Bashevis Singer Association of Bilgoraj, will display the names of Jews who lived in the town.
One name that will be included on the wall is Shmuel Ben-Artzi, father-in-law of Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Artzi was born in Bilgoraj in 1914. He later studied in the town’s cheder and then at yeshiva in Miedzyrzec, Ukraine. He left Poland in the 1930s. He was a writer, poet, educator, who devoted several of his poems to Bilgoraj. He died in 2011.
The cost of the wall is about $15,000.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO