Lublin: Yeshiva and the ghost of a Jewish community

Lublin's Hotel Ilan was our home for three days. 

This majestic building was once an internationally regarded yeshiva in Poland, Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva.  This Yeshiva, a Talmudic academy, was a grand project first envisioned in 1923 at a Viennese conference.  It took six years to complete this building and its inauguration was a major event attracting tens of thousands of participants.  All of this background is to say that Lublin had been a major center of Jewish learning, not just in Poland, but all over the world.

The Jewish Virtual Library reports that Jews came to live in Lublin early in the 14th century and established a separate Jewish community within the city by the mid-16th century.  A 17th century pogram, led by Muscovite and Cossack armies burned down the Jewish quarter and murdered more than 2000 people.  The Jewish community rebounded, and by the 18th century Lublin had become a Hasidic center, but the Jews lived in a district apart from the rest of the city.

The Jewish community reached over 24,000 people by the end of the 19th century.  There was an extensive range of business, political and cultural Jewish institutions active in the city of Lublin and then, the Germans occupied the city in September of 1939.  Eventually, the Nazis established two ghettos in Lublin, before deporting them to Belzec or "murder[ing them] on the way in nearby forests".

Wikipedia reports, the Nazis "stripped the interior and burned the vast library in the town square. The cries of the Jews watching their yeshiva and holy books burn to the ground were so loud that the
Germans called for the army band to come and stifle their cries of desperation. The building became the regional headquarters of the German Military Police."

Following the war, the building was used by the Medical University of Lublin.  It wasn't returned to the Jewish community until 2003, and the synagogue in the building was reopened in 2007.  I had asked about the possibility of attending services but we learned that the Jewish community of Lublin is currently quite small and not terribly interested in notoreity.  Regardless, we did get the chance to tour the synagogue on the third floor of the hotel.

The classroom features benches:

but not much more.  The library, which once contained some 13,000 volumes, is considerably smaller.


There are a number of photographs commemorating the re-opening of the synagogue as a religious center.

There are also photos from the the brief time the yeshiva was functioning.

The facility now boasts 44 guest rooms,

health club, sauna, a meeting/conference room, restaurant and bar.  The  four star hotel is a comfortable walk's distance from the old city and, more importantly for our purposes, the old and new Jewish cemeteries.