The Jewish Quarter in Nowy Wiśnicz

The former Jewish quarter (16th to 20th century) of Nowy Wiśnicz (henceforth: Wiśnicz, Yid. ווישניצא Vischnitsa) has so far only been mentioned on a few occasions and with little precision, in the books by Stanisław Fischer (1927/28), Mieczysław Książek (1976, 1979, 1988, 1990), and Adam Bartosz (1992). The last decades saw a handful of publications regarding this subject. The first one to touch upon it was Iwona Zawidzka, who described the cemetery and gave a brief account of the town’s history. She was followed by Elżbieta Ostrowska, who focused on relations between Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the town from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Adam Bartosz, Stanisław Fischer, Mieczysław Książek and Iwona Zawidzka incorrectly ascribed the lack of any photographic record of both synagogues and the public buildings to having been demolished by Germans during the Nazi occupation. I. Zawidzka1 mentions an essay by Julia Goczałkowska2 in which the author describes what she refers to as the Wiśnicz “Jerusalem.”