The Developing Kraśnik Town Fund Project in the Lublin Area
As researchers have quickly come to know, each town or group of towns and their former Jewish communities have their own record collections and unique character. Kraśnik is an excellent example, and we hope will provide new insight when thinking about your own towns and their vicinity if you are not already interested in this Lublin area town .
Most JRI-Poland researchers who are interested in Kraśnik probably do not realize that until 1975, this town was actually two separate but related towns, one called “Kraśnik Lubelski” and the other called “Kraśnik Fabrczny.” The Jewish community was officially established in 1584 in the more ancient Lubelski part of the city (which dates to the 13th century). Prior to WWII, Jews comprised 50% of the Kraśnik population.
Nearby Jewish communities include the villages of Zakrzowek, for which only 1939-1941 vital records survive, Chodel, for which JRI-Poland has acquired extracts of the Jewish vital records from 1826 to 1940, and Urzędów, which is located about midway between Kraśnik and Chodel. Therefore, researchers who are interested in one of these four towns should also consider the JRI-Poland collections in the other three towns and investigate all four of these nearby towns by contacting the volunteer town contacts for help. Note, fundraising is ongoing for these records and so the data is not yet searchable in the JRI-Poland Database.
Our Kraśnik and Chodel projects were lovingly tended by Jim Feldman for over two decades – and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts, Jim! Following Jim’s retirement during the pandemic, we engaged a professional researcher in Poland to further extract the following records for Jewish residents of Kraśnik:
- Kraśnik Vital Records – Births 1867-1921; Marriages 1871-1941 and Deaths 1867-1941
- Kraśnik Books of Permanent Residents – 1890-1931
- Kraśnik Register of Residents (Citizen Registry) – 1933-1950
With Danny Shiff, our volunteer Kraśnik town leader to help with correspondence, we are delighted to advise Kraśnik area researchers that we now have a detailed and comprehensive, extracted collection of Kraśnik Jewish records to round out the official records of this major Jewish community. Please contact us to learn more about the surviving Kraśnik Jewish records from 1826 through the Shoah (Holocaust). To make a donation to this comprehensive project, please go to:
https://www.jri-poland.org/town/krasnik/ 9
Donations of any size will be greatly appreciated, and we also hope to find a champion to make a lead contribution to this major project. The fundraising target is $14,750 of which we have already raised $2200, so it’s early in this fundraising campaign and we hope interested researchers will step up to the challenge!
Meanwhile, the Chodel project has another $316 to go before reaching its target of $850 and the Zakrzowek 20th century project has another $170 to raise in order to reach its target of $250. Urzędów has been fully funded and is being prepared for conversion to the new NextGen database!
We thank you again for your support of JRI-Poland!