Kraków קראקא
The capital of Little Poland and one of the two chief cities of Jewish learning in the Commonwealth: the Rema, the Bach, Tosafot Yom Tov.
Jewish Kraków is Kazimierz, a separate little town beside the capital, where the Jews were moved at the end of the fifteenth century. There stand the Old Synagogue, the Remuh synagogue and its cemetery, still visited on Lag ba-Omer.
The list of those who lived here speaks for itself: Rabbi Moshe Isserles — the Rema, whose Mappah made the Shulchan Aruch a book for the whole Jewish world; Rabbi Yoel Sirkis — the Bach, head of the court and the yeshiva from 1619; Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller, who came in 1643; Maharam of Lublin, called to the Kraków rabbinate in 1587. Pilpul began here too: Rabbi Yaakov Pollak taught in Kraków at the start of the sixteenth century.
Kraków was a city of printers as well: the Prostitz press printed the Talmud and books of halakhah here, which went out over all Poland. In the Council of Four Lands, Kraków represented Little Poland — one of the four lands.
The community lived here some five hundred years and was destroyed in the Shoah: the ghetto in Podgórze, the deportations to Bełżec, Płaszów alongside.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Responsa of the Rema — the Kraków community in its rabbi's correspondence
Documents of the period
- Pinkas Vaad Arba Aratzot — Kraków as the capital of one of the four lands
Basis: documents and evidence.