From ‘New Jerusalem’ To Lost Shtetl: Inside The Twin Souls Of A Polish Town

GORA KALWARIA, Poland — The Vistula, Poland’s longest river, snakes 650 miles (1,047 kilometers) north from the Tatras Mountains past Krakow and Warsaw to the Gulf of Gdańsk, where it empties into the Baltic Sea. Upstream from the capital, the river flows past Góra Kalwaria, a place the country’s Catholics revere as Nowa Jerozolima (or “New Jerusalem”).

It’s now largely a dormitory suburb of burgeoning post-Communist Warsaw, which has evolved into Eastern Europe’s hub for high tech, skyscrapers and high-speed trains. But medieval Góra Kalwaria was destroyed in 1666 during the devastating Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Thirty Years War is memorialized by Poles, while Eastern European Jews remember the conflict because of the genocidal Cossack pogroms in Ukraine led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

The landscape of rubble became the domain of Stefan Wierzbowski during the 1600s. Going for Baroque, the bishop of the diocese of Poznan replaced the ruins with a pilgrimage center dedicated to Passion Plays, then (and still) in vogue in Catholic parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Góra Kalwaria’s 100-actor spectacle is performed annually on Palm Sunday on the town’s streets.

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Construction of the new town center began in 1670. Its layout was inspired by a Crusader map of Jerusalem, the street grid forming a Latin cruciform. The bishop invited the Dominican, Bernadine and Piarist orders to settle, and the town was soon hallowed with 35 chapels, six churches and five monasteries.

Though few of Wierzbowski’s buildings still stand, faith remains strong today throughout this area. Residents venerate Saint Stanislaus Papczyński, who lived in the 17th century and founder of the local religious order of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception. Beatified in 2007, he was canonized nine years later.

He is now buried at the Church of the Lord’s Cenacle, consecrated in 1674, where the Marian Fathers maintain their shrine. The Multimedium Museum of Blessed Stanislaus Papczyński, which opened in 2015, details the saint’s miracles. The church and the tomb of Father Stanislaus continues as a place of pilgrimage for Catholics.

The Jewish cemetery

A 20-minute walk northwest from the Lord’s Cenacle along Marianki and Budowlanych streets brings one to Góra Kalwaria’s twilight zone — the town’s Jewish cemetery. Located between just behind the Catholic necropolis, the burial ground covers an irregularly shaped plot of 1.23 hectares.

Though not as popular an ultra-Orthodox pilgrimage destination as the Ukrainian gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman or the Baal Shem Tov in Medzhybizh (or Prague’s storied Old Jewish Cemetery), haredi visitors from Israel and the United States are not uncommon at the ohel (literally tent in Hebrew, but meaning mausoleum).

For more than a century after Góra Kalwaria’s rebuilding, Jews were barred from Wierzbowski’s Catholic utopia. In 1802, Napoleon abolished the medieval “de non tolerandis Judaeis” law restricting residence by religion.

Yiddish became the predominant language in the multilingual town. Jews called their shtetl Ger in Yiddish and Gur in Hebrew. The community grew rapidly after 1859, when hasidic grand rebbe Yitzchak Meir Rothenburg, the founder of the Gerrer sect, settled here. After the 1831 Polish Uprising against Czarist rule, Rothenburg changed his surname to Alter.

Known affectionately as Reb Itche Meir, or more formally as the Chiddushei HaRim after the multi-volume Torah commentary he authored, R. Alter established the powerful Ger dynasty after the death of his brother-in-law, R. Menahem Mendl of Kotzk. The overwhelming majority of the Kotzker Rebbe’s disciples chose the charismatic R. Alter as their new spiritual leader. Many moved to Góra Kalwaria to join his entourage.

He died in 1866 and was succeeded by Rabbi Chanoch of Aleksander who moved the growing court to Aleksandrów Łódzki, a shtetl near Lodz. Four years later, Rebbe Alexander died. His successor, R. Alter's grandson, R. Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, returned to Góra Kalwaria. The third grand rebbe is best known as the Sfas Emes (the Language of Truth in the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew). His seminal posthumously published five-volume collection of homilies stretching over 34 years is considered a key work of hasidism. All of Ger’s dynastic leaders since have been his descendants.

Since 1996, the sect has been led by its eighth Grand Rebbe, a man named Yaakov Aryeh Alter who was bor in 1939. The Brooklyn-based The Jewish Press estimates his personal worth to be between $95 million and $135 million. That wealth primarily comes from real estate investments made by his father.

Despite the current rebbe’s wealth, he lived in an ordinary apartment in Bnei Brak until 2011 when he moved to Jerusalem. In 2019, his cousin, Rabbi Shaul Alter, the son of the seventh Grand Rebbe, Pinchas Menachem Alter — known as the Pnei Menachem — became leader of the Ger schism Kehilas Pnei Menachem.

***A view of the Vistula River. (Wikipedia Commons photo)***

Strained relations and World War II

In 1877, the Vistula River Railroad opened linking Warsaw to Kovel, Ukraine, benefitting Jewish and Catholic pilgrims en route to Góra Kalwaria. As Czarist Russia slowly modernized, so too the town began to prosper. In 1921, 2,691 Jews made it their home, equal to 48.9% of the population. Most toiled in petty trade and crafts. Some were artisans, others peddlers in the town and the surrounding villages. Many provided provisions to the grand rebbe’s court. Wagoneers transported hasidim to and from the train station, porters carried their belongings and landlords rented out rooms to pilgrims, especially during the High Holy Days and Passover, when tens of thousands would flock to the town.

Some of Góra Kalwaria’s Jews were tailors and furriers: Gerrer attire includes a spodik hat traditionally fashioned from fisher tails and worn by married men on the Sabbath and holidays and trousers (hoyzn) tucked into high black socks (zokn).

Parisian journalist Albert Londres described Góra Kalwaria in his 1929 travelogue “The Wandering Jew Has Arrived” this way: “Two thousand inhabitants, but one of the navels of eastern Jewry. Here, the famous zadick [sic] Alter, successor to Baal Shem Tov, the one who took the Zohar across the Carpathian Mountains in a car, sought contact with God, just like our fans of wireless radio seek the airwaves.”

When the Nazis occupied Poland in September 1939, they immediately targeted Góra Kalwaria’s Jews. Ewald Jauke, the town’s newly-appointed German mayor, banned Jewish residents from engaging in trade, crafts and pigeon breeding. They were also forbidden from listening to radio broadcasts. A 100-man forced labor corvée was conscripted daily.

In the spring of 1940, some 400 Jews from nearby Lodz, Pabianice, Aleksandrów and Sierpc, were deported to Góra Kalwaria after those towns were incorporated into the Third Reich. More deportees soon arrived from Włocławek and Kalisz in the Nazi-controlled General-Government.

In June 1940, Góra Kalwaria’s 3,500 Jews were restricted to a ghetto, which was liquidated on February 25-26, 1941. Survivors were deported to the Warsaw ghetto. As a result, hundreds died of starvation and disease. The remainder were gassed in the summer of 1942 in the Treblinka death camp. Only some 35 of Góra Kalwaria’s Jews survived the war. The Jewish community was never reconstituted.

During World War II, the sect’s fourth Grand Rebbe Avraham Mordechai Alter, known posthumously as the Imrei Emes (Sayings of Truth) after his key text, dodged death. So, too, did his fellow admorim (hasidic sages) from Belz and Satmar. The Belzer Rebbe, Aharon Rokeach, and his half-brother, Rabbi Mordechai of Bilgoray, escaped from Poland into Hungary, then to Turkey, Lebanon and finally to what was known then as Palestine in 1944.

That same year, the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest on the “Kasztner train” sent to neutral Switzerland. Postwar, he immigrated to Palestine and eventualy the United States. Together with his son-in-law, three sons and a grandchild, R. Adler fled to Warsaw on Sept. 6, 1939, two days before the Wehrmacht occupied Góra Kalwaria.

Removing his hasidic garb, the rebbe went incognito and moved frequently. Toward the end of 1939, he and some family members escaped Nazi-occupied Warsaw. With financial and diplomatic help of American Jews and, apparently, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, they traveled to neutral Italy’s Adriatic port of Trieste via Kraków and Vienna.

Joining R. Alter was his cousin, Rabbi Moshe Prager, a journalist with Warsaw’s haredi newspaper Yiddishe Tagblat (The Jewish Daily). Calling in a favor from Stefan Porayski, the Warsaw bureau chief of the Lloyd Triestino shipping company, Prager secured tickets on a passenger boat sailing from Trieste, transit visas to pass through Italy, and life-saving Immigration Certificates to enter Mandate Palestine.

Embarking on an Italian steamer named Gerusalemme, they docked at Haifa on May 7, 1940. One month later, Fascist Italy declared war on France, and non-military sailings across the Mediterranean ceased. On Sept. 9, Mussolini’s Regia Aeronautica bombed Tel Aviv, killing 137 civilians.

R. Alter died peacefully in his shtiebl in Jerusalem on June 3, 1948 during the festival of Shavuot. The Imre Emes’s eldest son, Rabbi Meir Alter, who refused to leave occupied Poland, as well as his wife, daughters, sons-in-law and most grandchildren, died in the Holocaust.

The Palestine Post noted the rebbe’s followers lined Jaffa Road as R. Alter’s cavalcade entered Jerusalem. The Imre Emes knew Palestine well. During his five visits there between 1922 and 1935, he invested extensively in real estate in north Tel Aviv, Arsuf and Jerusalem.

As a result of those visits to Palestine, which included a meeting with Chief Rabbi Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in 1927, the Imre Emes encouraged his followers to immigrate there. The bulk followed his directive to settle in Tel-Aviv because the new city had few churches or mosques. He further directed that the Tel Aviv beit midrash teach in Hebrew rather than Yiddish.

Among the few Jews from Góra Kalwaria to survive the war was Feliks (Wolf) Karpman, who died in 2014, aged 87. As a youth, he was sheltered in Warsaw by Wacław and Maria Konarzewski and later honored by Yad Vashem by the Righteous Among the Nations.

In the post-war years, Karpman devoted his life to restoring the city’s desecrated graveyard and searching out broken pieces of looted matzevot. Today’s well-tended cemetery is his memorial. It preserves 360 tombstones standing in situ, 80 which are toppled and 100 which are fragmentary.

In the early 1990s, Karpman, the Eternal Remembrance Foundation, the Nissenbaum Family Foundation, local authorities, students from nearby schools and volunteers from the Kyiv-based European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative cleaned up, fenced and documented the surviving section of the original cemetary of what was left after the Germans stole the graveyard’s Hebrew tombstones to pave the appellplatz (roll-call square) in a nearby Red Army POW camp.

The Nazis also destroyed the red-brick cemetery wall and the mortuary house. Karpman also helped reconstruct the brick mausoleum housing the grave of the esteemed R. Yitzchak Meir Rothenburg and his renowned grandson, R. Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter.

Two buildings in the town center are vestiges of the now-vanished hasidic community. In 1903, an imposing brick beit midrash at ul. Pijarskiejj 5 replaced the wooden synagogue that had burnt down. Called Dom Modlitwy Ger (Ger House of Prayer), Google Earth laconically notes the Orthodox synagogue is now closed.

After the Holocaust, the beit midrash became a soda-water factory and store. In 2000, it was returned to the Jewish community in Warsaw. The original surviving elements in the building’s interior are the cast-iron pillars supporting the women’s gallery. The missing chandeliers and aron kodesh evoke a ghostly presence. The large brick building contains a matzah baking oven in the attic. Across the street — at ul. Pijarskiejj 10-12 — is a metal gate at the yard that marks the mansion and house of prayer of R. Yitzhak Meir Alter.

Like the Admor’s priceless library, the ritual bathhouse (known as a mikvah), religious school for boys (cheder) and large prayer house (beit midrash) attached to the court have all disappeared. Decades of detective work undertaken by the New York-based Committee for the Search of the Góra Kalwaria Library have proven fruitless. Some books and manuscripts were likely used at the time as kindling to heat apartments.

Above the erstwhile synagogue’s entrance is a Magen David rosette window replicated in the Gerrer Jerusalem mausoleum on Yehosef Shwartz Street, an alley near the Mahaneh Yehuda food market. Incongruously, Rebbe Avraham Mordechai Alter is buried there in the heart of modern Jerusalem.

When the Imre Emes died on June 3, 1948 — shortly after Israel declared independence — Jerusalem was being besieged by Jordan’s Arab Legion. The rebbe’s disciples were unable to bury their sage in the historic Mount of Olives Cemetery, where the pious have been laid to rest since Biblical times. Unwilling to bury their master in the improvised graveyard in the abandoned Palestinian village of Sheikh Bader (today Givat Ram), they instead turned the modest courtyard of his shtiebl into a tomb.

R. Alter founded that seminary in 1924 during his six-week tour of Mandate Palestine. He named it the Sfas Emes Yeshiva in honor of his father. The prestigious Ger institution closed in 2016. The group's headquarters was later moved to Ralbach Street in Geula.

In the late 1990s, the Great Beit Midrash Gur was inaugurated on Yirmeyahu Street, near the former Schneller Orphanage complex. In 2015, an extension was begun. In 2022, the two wings were joined making the building the largest synagogue in the world. The main sanctuary seats 20,000.

R. Alter’s son, Rabbi Pinchas Menachem Alter, who was named a gerrer rebbe, also resided in the Sfas Emes Yeshiva compound and was buried alongside his father after dying on March 7, 1996. Thousands of hasidim flock to the pilgrimage site on the yahrzeits of the two rebbes. The decision to entomb R. Pinchas Alter, known as the Pnei Menachem, beside his father sparked opposition from the Jerusalem municipality. But the funeral went ahead.

Today, Ger constitutes Israel’s largest, wealthiest and most influential hasidic group — numbering more than 100,000 members concentrated in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and Ashdod. Coincidently, that’s the same number who perished in the Holocaust.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.