DABROWA GORNICZA

DABROWA GORNICZA (Pol. Dabrowa Górnicza), industrial town in Katowice province, S. Poland. Jews settled in Dabrowa Gornicza in the middle of the 19th century. They mainly engaged in small trade and metal crafts. There were 4,304 Jews living in Dabrowa Gornicza according to the 1921 census (11% of the total population). (Arthur Cygielman) -Holocaust Period The German army entered the town on Sept. 3, 1939. In the fall of 1940 several hundred young Jewish men were deported to slave labor camps in Germany. Several hundred more were deported in the course of 1941. At the end of that year a ghetto was established. On May 5, 1942, the first deportation took place in which 630 Jews were taken to Auschwitz and exterminated. In the second deportation, conducted on August 12, 1942, another few hundred Jews were sent to their death in Auschwitz. On June 26, 1943, the ghetto in Dabrowa Gornicza was liquidated and all its inmates were transferred to the ghetto in Srodula (a suburb of Sosnowiec), the only ghetto still existing in Upper Silesia. It too was liquidated and all its inhabitants, including the Jews from Dabrowa Gornicza, deported to Auschwitz and killed. After the war the Jewish community in Dabrowa Gornicza was not reestablished. (Stefan Krakowski) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Yad Vashem Archives, 0-16/154, M-1/E/1064, 03/1246, 03/2728; B. Wasiutyński, Ludnosć żydowska w Polsce… (1930), 29. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: N. Gelbart (ed.), Sefer Kehillat Yehudei Dabrowa Gornicza ve-Ḥurbana (1971); Y. Rapaport (ed.), Pinkas Zaglembie (1972), 81–87.