History
Jewish community before 1989 – Ukraina / Івано-Франківська область (obwód iwanofrankowski)
The city of Kołomyja has always been an important center of relations between the Ukrainians and representatives of other nationalities on all stages of its historic development. Diverse communities that lived in Kołomyja travelled a long way of complex and problematic relations. They are characterized by not only prolific cooperation and tolerance, but also sad confrontations during the war, full of unjustified bloodshed of peaceful people.
Ukrainians constituted the majority of inhabitants of Kołomyja, as of other cities in Galicia, right until the middle of the 17th century, but since then their importance diminished.
There was a reason for an Austrian writer and sightseer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) to underline: “… if anyone were to paint a little picture of Galicia, let him go to a fair in Kołomyja. There he will find a forum of a former Roman colony. He will see the country flowing before his eyes in many faces, next to a crowd of merchants, selling and buying, turning from side to side. It will seem as if on a bazaar in Bagdad, or on a churchyard in a village in Schwarzwald. Here and there is a swarthy-faced Armenian beating other’s hands, with a long pipe and white boot tops, clutching a short pipe in his mouth; the traveler will feel joy and see the East and the West before his eyes. No multiethnic country will offer him such a picture, neither Hungary, nor Dalmatia, no other — such a fullness of diversities.”
Jews constituted a large ethnic group in Kołomyja before 1939. The city has been something in shape of crossroads of the Christian and the Jewish worlds since the dawn of time and its inhabitants witnessed the colourful mixture of Christian-Jewish relations.
Ghettos in Kołomyja appeared as ethnic enclaves in the Ukrainian, Polish, Armenian and German districts. With social, ethnic, cultural and religious differences, it was easy for some conflicts to appear between the Christian inhabitants of the city and the Jews.
The tendency to cooperate with the authorities and the drift to alienate characteristic to some group and persons inadvertently lead to the separation of Jews from normal life style, which forced them, on one hand to unite in national and religious matters, but on the other to transform into the most profit-making and flexible group in the medieval city.
The first information on Jews settling in Kołomyja date back to the 13th century - the times when Jews used to be banished from some cities and areas from time to time, and their properties confiscated. They were given, as many other groups, priviliges by the king John Casimir in 1364 and 1367 that validated the privilege given to them in 1264 by the Duke Bolesław the Pious. The Jews of Kołomyja were considered the protégés of the Polish King, as they agreed to pay taxes to the king’s and the city’s treasuries and to provide a number of services. According to the resolutions of the Crown’s Parliament of Lublin in Kołomyja in 1569 Jews from Lviv settled in a separate district next to the Market Square. Since then, the Jews were considered to be a majority in the ethnic structure of the city. This opinion, contrary to the truth in the beginning, reflected the tendency of a growing number of Jews among the city’s inhabitant and, at the same time, formed the pattern of Jewish settlement in Kołomyja: it was not contrary to the Jewish community’s need to form a separate living district that Jewish merchants and craftsmen wanted to live in a commercial area.
The royal commission ordered the district governor of Kołomyja, Piotr Koryciński, during property census in 1616 to build a synagogue and dispense room for a Jewish cemetery, on condition that the districts would be exempt from tax. The inspector act of 1616 defines the economic state of the Jewish community and tells us that they contributed to the court of the district governor with 20 Thalers a year, and Jewish butchers - 40 stones (around 14 lb) of pork fat.
After the city had been devastated as a result of numerous attacks of the Turks in the first half of the 17th century, the city has been moved to the left bank of Prut river in 1629 and the authorities prepared an act which stated that “Jews’ rights and benefits shall be observed.” An evidence of that could be the fact that they paid each year 3000 units of gold do the royal tresury for a mill that they leased. In the meantime the district authorities became the owners of the property of the Polish nobility, great landowners in Pokucie. In the repayment register from 1670 next to 30 regular buildings in the city center, 32 are marked as “poor”, what makes quite understandable, why it were Jews who dominated the city. In the matter of local trade their domination can be explained by the fact that the city had 170 buildings and 1000 inhabitant, most of them of Jewish origin.
The constant growth of the Jewish community made the concentration of administrative functions in Kehilla necessary. Its activity was centered around the administrative, judicative and religious-educational issues. The spiritual life of the community was governed by the recommendations of Halakha, and at the beginning of the 16th century by the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law). The relations, on the other hand, between the local authorities and the Jewish Kehilla, an autonomous creation that became the groundwork of the common system of Jews in the Republic of Poland, were governed by the Province Law from 1527 by the Kraków Province Governor Andrzej Tęczyński.
The townsmen of Kołomyja and the Jewish community agreed in 1715 on the repayment of ¾ of the tax by the Kehilla to the city’s treasury, while the Christians and the Jews signed an agreement in 1771 which stated that license for 25 horsewagons would be paid in 17 ¾ by the latter and in 5 ¼ by the townsmen.
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