Kazimierz Once the Day Trippers Have Gone Home

The Kraków ghetto was never in Kazimierz.

In early March 1941 the German occupation authorities ordered it built across the Vistula, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states the decision without hedging: the ghetto was to be "situated in Podgorze, a southern suburb of Krakow, rather than in Kazimierz, the traditional Jewish quarter of the city." Half a century later, Steven Spielberg filmed plac Zgody, the square inside the ghetto where Jews were assembled for deportation, on ulica Szeroka in Kazimierz. Kraków's own tourist board puts it flatly: Szeroka "represented" plac Zgody, and the crew set up the ghetto wall and gate at the street's narrow southern end. This was not because Podgórze was unusable. The same page lists the real ghetto streets among the film's authentic locations. It was the square specifically that got recast.

Which means that on any given afternoon a good number of people stand on Szeroka photographing the memory of a place that is a kilometre away, across a river, in a district most of them will never walk into. Meanwhile the ground under their feet, which is older, odder and largely still in use, goes unread.

Kazimierz repays being read. It repays it most in the two or three hours after the coaches leave and before the bars fill, when the buildings are lit, the queues are gone, and the district briefly stops performing.

Two towns inside one wall

Casimir III founded Kazimierz in 1335 as a separate royal city, not a suburb. It had its own market square and its own town hall, and it stayed independent until 1800, when the Austrian administration folded it into Kraków. The town hall is still standing, on plac Wolnica, and since 1948 it has been the main building of the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków, which spent the three years after the war looking for somewhere to put its collection. A museum of Polish rural culture, in the town hall of a town that no longer exists, three minutes' walk from the loudest square in the city.

That was the Christian half. The Jewish half clustered north and east of it, around Szeroka, which is not really a street but a long widening, and which once had four synagogues on it, a concentration the city's tourism office notes was unmatched anywhere in Europe.

What the buildings actually are

Seven synagogues survive within about ten minutes' walk. None of them is a ruin. Each is in a completely different condition of use, and this is the single most useful thing to know before you set out, because it governs everything about how you visit.

The Old Synagogue, Szeroka 24, dates its construction to 1407 and is tied to Jews arriving from Prague after the pogrom there in 1389. It is a two-nave Gothic hall on the Worms and Regensburg model, burnt almost to nothing in 1557, rebuilt with a Renaissance arcaded attic by 1570, gutted by the Germans and used as a store. It was rebuilt between 1956 and 1959, and in 1958 the congregation formally handed it over for museum use. Today it is a branch of the Museum of Krakow holding the permanent exhibition on the history and culture of Kraków's Jews. It is a museum. Nobody prays there.

The Remuh, at Szeroka 40, is the opposite. Built around 1558 by the merchant and royal banker Israel Isserles Auerbach for his son, the Talmudist Moses Isserles, it is what the community treats as its principal synagogue, and prayers are said there every day. The Hebrew over the gate reads, in the community's translation, "This is the Gate to the New Synagogue of Blessed Memory, the Remuh." Behave accordingly.

The Tempel, Miodowa 24, went up between 1860 and 1862, eclectic neo-Renaissance with Moorish detailing, black marble tablets of the Ten Commandments over the door and coloured glass in the arcaded windows dating to around 1900. It has doubled as a concert hall for decades and is the standing stage of the Jewish Culture Festival.

The Kupa, Miodowa 27, was built in 1643 out of contributions collected from the Kazimierz goldsmiths. The name is not theirs, though. A kupa is the pooled contribution of the community, the treasury of the kahal, and the building is named for the fund rather than for the trade that filled it. It now holds the community's offices and is closed to visitors, though members eat Shabbat dinner in it on Friday evenings. The community's own account of the building records that Poland's first post-war pogrom began here in August 1945.

The Isaac Synagogue, Kupa 18, opened in 1644, funded by Izaak Jakubowicz, head of the Kazimierz kahal. Conservation work has been under way inside, and this is the important part: it stays open to visitors while that happens, and in summer it stays open later than anything else on this list.

The High Synagogue, Józefa 38, built around 1556 under a privilege from Sigismund II Augustus, put its prayer hall on an upper floor above street-level premises in the manner of the Venetian ghetto, which makes it genuinely unusual in Central Europe. Part of it returned to community ownership in 2008, and an upper floor now houses the Kraków branch of TSKŻ, Poland's Jewish social and cultural association.

The Popper, Szeroka 16, was founded in 1620 by Wolf Bocian, known as Wolf Popper, one of the richest men in Kazimierz. After the war it spent years as a youth cultural centre. Since 2017 it has been a bookshop.

So: a museum, a working shul, a concert hall, a suite of offices, a conservation project that is nonetheless letting people in, an association's upstairs rooms, and a bookshop. Seven synagogues, seven different answers to the question of what a building is for, all within a few hundred metres. Treating them as a single category is the mistake that produces most of the bad behaviour on Szeroka.

The clock is the whole problem

Two rules do more work than any itinerary.

The first is that the municipal museums shut in the late afternoon, the Old Synagogue among them. The one substantial exception is Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory at Lipowa 4 in Zabłocie, which the Museum of Krakow keeps open until eight in the evening for most of the week. If you want a single heavy indoor thing after office hours, that is the one, and it has the advantage of standing on the actual site of what it describes. Book it days ahead. It is the most oversubscribed museum in the city, online sales stop six hours before your slot, and the box office sells only for the same day, for whatever time is left. Turning up at seven without a ticket is how people spend an evening looking at a locked door.

The second rule is Shabbat. Everything held by the Jewish Community, the Tempel, the Remuh, the Isaac, the Remuh cemetery and the New Cemetery on Miodowa, is closed on Saturdays and on Jewish holidays. This is stated plainly on the community's website and is still the most common wasted day in Kazimierz. Put the buildings on a weekday. Keep Saturday for the streets, which are free and always open.

How to be in a cemetery

Two burial grounds, both a short walk apart, both routinely misread.

The Remuh cemetery, immediately behind the synagogue on Szeroka, has been in use since 1551. The oldest surviving stone is from 1552 and the latest from 1850, which is half a century after the Austrian authorities closed the ground in 1800, along with every other burial place in the city centre, on sanitary grounds. A few burials happened anyway. The war left almost nothing upright. Clearing and excavation from the second half of the 1950s brought roughly seven hundred stones back up out of the soil, and 711 now stand in the cemetery; the fragments too broken to re-erect were set into the inner face of the Szeroka wall as a mosaic, which Kraków's tourist board calls the Wall of Tears. Moses Isserles lies there, in the one grave the war did not damage, and people come from a long way to leave kvitelach on it.

The New Cemetery, Miodowa 55, was established in 1801 on land bought from the Augustinians and is the only Jewish cemetery in Kraków still operating. Not "still standing". Operating. Burials happen. Among the graves are Rabbi Ozjasz Thon, the painter Maurycy Gottlieb, the photographer Ignacy Krieger and Leopold Kozłowski, whom the community calls the last klezmer of Galicia. A funeral home designed by the Kraków architect Władysław Kleinberger, opened in 1903, stands inside the walls.

The practicalities are short. Men cover their heads at both. You leave a small stone on a grave, not flowers. You do not eat, drink or smoke inside, and you do not photograph mourners, which in the New Cemetery is a live possibility rather than a theoretical one. Neither place is a garden of atmospheric ruins, whatever the light at seven in the evening suggests.

The community is not a historical topic

At Miodowa 24, alongside the Tempel, sits JCC Krakow, opened in April 2008 by the then Prince of Wales. It is not a heritage exhibit, and despite the label it usually gets, it is not a secular institution either. Its own year in review describes its members as "orthodox, progressive, secular, and simply Jewish", which is a harder thing to run than any one of those. The 2025 figures there count more than 1,200 members originally from 24 countries, and a food pantry visited over 33,000 times in that year alone, most of that going to Ukrainian refugees rather than to anyone's heritage.

The Tempel has for years been the stage of the Jewish Culture Festival, whose closing concert happens outdoors on Szeroka, and it also hosts what the community lists as the "Days of Judaism in the Catholic Church", staged jointly with the Kraków archdiocese. That last one tends to surprise people who have arrived expecting a quarter frozen in 1943.

None of this is a re-enactment. It is a small, functioning community that happens to live inside a very heavily visited postcode, alongside several thousand neighbours who are not Jewish and who mostly want to sleep.

The night has a manager

Kraków takes that last point institutionally seriously. The city has a Night Mayor and a Sustainable Night-Time Economy Commission, and since 1 July 2023 shops across the entire city have been forbidden to sell alcohol between midnight and half past five in the morning. From 1 September 2026 that window widens at both ends, to ten at night until six in the morning, under a resolution the council passed on 8 July 2026. Bars and restaurants are exempt throughout. By the rule's third year, city hall counted alcohol-related police interventions and municipal guard citations down by close to seventy per cent against the equivalent period before it came in.

The mechanism is the part worth understanding. The ban is aimed at the bottle bought in a shop and drunk on a doorstep, not at the bar you are sitting in. Kazimierz did not get quieter by accident, and it did not get quieter because visitors were asked nicely.

Where people eat afterwards

In the middle of plac Nowy stands a round brick building, the Okrąglak. It went up in 1900 as a market hall, with rows of traders' stalls inside it and a Jewish poultry slaughterhouse among them. The site passed to the city's Jewish community on a lease in 1927, and the butchery was rebuilt a great deal larger. Today its hatches sell zapiekanki, the split baguette under grilled cheese and mushrooms. You may think what you like of the zapiekanka. The building has been feeding this square in one form or another since 1900, which is longer than any of the bars around it have existed and through a stretch of the twentieth century that removed the people it was built to feed. The market outside still runs: farm produce, antiques, second-hand clothes, and on Sundays, pigeons.

The other durable answer is the bar mleczny, the milk bar, propped up, where the operator still bothers with the paperwork, by a state subsidy covering forty per cent of the cost of certain ingredients on condition the business does not widen its margins. Meat is excluded, the rules are strict enough that many milk bars have simply stopped applying, and on the finance ministry's own count only around seventy businesses nationwide draw on it in an average year. Milk bars are canteens, not evening venues, and most shut in the afternoon. Treat them as the lunch answer and stop expecting them at nine.

For actual evenings, the rule is one street back. Józefa and Meiselsa rather than Szeroka. Better still, walk south over the Bernatek footbridge and eat in Podgórze, where the kitchens are aimed at people who live there.

That walk is also the right order to do the day in. You start on the film set and finish on the ground. Come off the bridge, work up to plac Bohaterów Getta, once plac Zgody, and you arrive at the chairs that Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak set across the square in 2005, on a notional grid of about five metres by five, every one of them facing the same way. The chairs come from a line by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who ran the Eagle Pharmacy at number 18 and was the one chemist the Germans allowed to keep trading inside the ghetto, out of fear of epidemics. After the ghetto was emptied, he recorded, what filled the square was "an incalculable amount of furniture which had been carried backwards and forwards countless times", and it was rotting there. Wardrobes, tables, chairs. The little box on the north side, where the Germans identified and counted people, is still there too.

The square has no gate and no closing time, and nobody is queueing for it.

Sources

• The Krakow (Cracow) Ghetto during the Holocaust and WWII, Holocaust Encyclopedia - the March 1941 order placing the ghetto in Podgórze rather than Kazimierz, and plac Zgody as an assembly point during the deportations
• In the footsteps of Schindler's List, Kraków Travel - Szeroka standing in for plac Zgody, the wall and gate at its southern end, the authentic Podgórze ghetto locations used elsewhere in the film, four synagogues on one street, the Bernatek crossing to Podgórze
• Remuh Synagogue and Cemetery, Kraków Travel - the stones recovered from under the soil from 1956, the 711 now standing, the Wall of Tears mosaic of fragments on the inner face of the Szeroka wall, and the kvitelach on Isserles's grave
• Old Synagogue, Museum of Krakow - the Szeroka 24 building as a museum branch with the permanent exhibition on Kraków's Jews, and its late-afternoon closing
• Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory, Museum of Krakow - Lipowa 4 in Zabłocie, opening until 20:00 Tuesday to Sunday, and the ticketing rules: online sales close six hours ahead, the box office sells same-day only for the next available slot, five per person
• Synagogues, Jewish Community of Kraków - dates, founders, the kupa etymology and current use of the Old, Remuh, Tempel, Kupa, Isaac, High and Popper synagogues; the Isaac's visiting hours during conservation; Saturday and holiday closures; the Tempel as festival venue and host of the Days of Judaism
• Cemeteries, Jewish Community of Kraków - the Remuh cemetery from 1551, the 1552 and 1850 stones, the 1800 closure by Austrian order and the few burials after it, and the New Cemetery at Miodowa 55 as the only operating one
• Locations and History, Ethnographic Museum in Kraków - the museum's main building is the Kazimierz town hall at plac Wolnica 1, obtained three years after the 1945 transfer of the collection to the state
• Nowy Square (Plac Nowy), VisitMalopolska - the Okrąglak built in 1900 as a market hall with stalls and a Jewish poultry slaughterhouse, leased and enlarged by the community in 1927, and the produce, antique, clothing and pigeon markets still running around it
• Nocny zakaz sprzedaży alkoholu w Krakowie zostanie wydłużony, krakow.pl - the midnight to 05:30 city-wide retail ban in force since 1 July 2023, the 8 July 2026 resolution widening it to 22:00-06:00 from 1 September 2026, the exemption for bars and restaurants, the near seventy per cent fall in interventions by the third year, the Night Mayor and the night economy commission
• Ghetto Heroes Square, public space - the 2005 chair installation by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak, the grid of about five metres by five with the chairs all facing one way, the surviving police box on the north side, and the Pankiewicz passage about furniture rotting in the square
• Jewish Community Centre, Kraków Travel - JCC Krakow at Miodowa 24, opened in April 2008 by the Prince of Wales
• JCC Krakow Year in Review - the 2025 figures: more than 1,200 members from 24 countries, the Free Shop visited 33,361 times, and the centre's description of its own membership as orthodox, progressive, secular and simply Jewish
• Polish government cuts subsidies for milk bar cafeterias, Notes From Poland - the 40 per cent ingredient subsidy, the condition on margins, the exclusion of meat, the rules strict enough that many milk bars stopped applying, and the roughly seventy businesses that still use it