Journeying Through 1000 Years of Jewish Life in Poland

Jews today tend to associate Poland exclusively with the horrors of the Holocaust. Poland has been called the world's biggest graveyard, because on its soil was where most of the systematic murder of Jews took place during World War II . However, it is very shortsighted to view Poland as little more than the darkest corner of Europe into which the Nazis concentrated the Jews before exterminating them.

Jews have lived in Poland for over a thousand years. In fact, for centuries, Poland was the most Jew-friendly state in Europe. Countless thousands of persecuted Jews throughout Christian Europe found refuge in Poland. For hundreds of years, Poland was the largest, most significant, most intellectually vibrant Jewish community in all of Europe. In fact, at its peak in the 17th century, the majority of the world's Jews lived in Poland, a land referred to in Latin as, paradisus Iudaeorum: Jewish paradise.