Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland - FODŻ

Ogólne informacje

At the beginning of the 20th century, Poland was home to over 3.5 million Jews and by the outbreak of World War II Jews made up over a third of populations in many parts of the country including Warsaw, the capital. Half of all Jews who perished in the Holocaust were from Poland and approximately 80% of American Jews trace their roots to Poland. The Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage (FODŻ) is today one of the most important organizations involved in the protection of monuments and sites of Jewish pre-War culture in Poland. We were established in 2002 by the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO). Our primary mission is to protect and commemorate the surviving sites and monuments of Jewish cultural heritage in Poland, principally represented by synagogues and cemeteries. We have had and continue to have synagogue rehabilitation projects in a number of Polish towns which historically had high pre-War Jewish populations. These include Kraśnik, Łańcut, Przysucha, Rymanów, Jarosław, and Przemyśl, as well as Zamość. The Zamość synagogue is the only Renaissance-style synagogue in Poland. We are proud that in 2014 the synagogue hosted the first bar mitzvah in Zamość since the Holocaust. Beautiful color brochures of several of these synagogue rehabilitation projects, including Zamość, can be downloaded from our website. Our cemetery projects (clean-up, repair, fencing, gating, marking, re-dedication) have...