Polish City of Bialystok Allows High Rise on Jewish Cemetery Site
A meat production plant in Poland can build a high-rise apartment building on the grounds of a Jewish cemetery.
The Bialystok City Council rejected a zoning plan on Monday that would have prevented the plant’s expansion proposal. The vote was 12-8 with one abstention.
“In the center of Bialystok there were six cemeteries,” council member Zbigniew Brozek said at the meeting. “If we want to protect them, it would be impossible to build anything [in the city].”
One of the councilmen said that we are in Poland, not Israel, according to Lucy Lisowska, a representative of the Jewish Community in Bialystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland. Lisowska told JTA that the comment “hurt me.”
“I am Polish, and I am a Pole of Jewish origin. I respect Polish law because it is my law, but there is still our religious law, which does not allow exhumations, the violation of peace of the dead and prohibits digging at the cemetery,” she said.
The plant was built at the cemetery during the communist period. Today it is owned by a private company, Arsa.
“The last burials here were in 1892,” Estera Zablocka of Arsa told JTA. “In 1964, the cemetery was secularized with the consent of the Jewish community.”
The new plan was rejected with the votes of council members from the right-wing Law and Justice party, which according to recent polls has the best chance of winning the October parliamentary elections in Poland.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
