TARNOGROD

TARNOGROD (Rus. Tarnograd), village near Bilgoraj, Lublin province, E. Poland. Tarnogrod was founded in 1567. In 1569 King Sigismund II Augustus granted the village a charter which banned Jews. In 1580 King Stephen Báthory allowed Jews to settle in the village, buy houses, and run businesses, especially in the liquor and beer trade, justifying this permission as essential to the development of the locality. In 1648 the Cossacks massacred all Jews in Tarnogrod. The community was later renewed, and by the end of the 17th century there were Jewish merchants from Tarnogrod who traveled to fairs at leipzig . In 1686 an attractive stone synagogue was erected which still stands. In the 17th and early 18th centuries representatives of Tarnogrod held important positions in the councils of the lands . They included Solomon, Abraham b. Isaac, and R. Azriel b. Moses ha-Levi Ashkenazi, author of Naḥalat Azri'el (Frankfurt, 1691). Azriel's successor in the rabbinate of Tarnogrod, R. Nathan Nata b. Jacob of Lublin, participated in council meetings from 1718 to 1733. In the 1750s Aryeh Leib b. Samuel served as rabbi of Tarnogrod. The 1765 census records 1,606 poll-tax paying Jews in Tarnogrod and neighboring villages. The village passed to Austrian rule in 1772, and in 1815 it was included in Congress Poland. The Russian government limited Jewish settlement in Tarnogrod between 1823 and 1862. In the early 19th century Moses Joshua Heshel b. Mordecai Orenstein, author of Yad ha-Talmud (Lvov, 1827/28), was rabbi of the community. Some 1,260 Jews lived in Tarnogrod in 1827 (32% of the total population); in 1857 there were 1,673 Jews (41%); in 1897 there were 1,635 (32%); and in 1921 there were 2,238 (47%). All the Jewish parties were active in Tarnogrod between the two world wars. (Nathan Michael Gelber) -Holocaust Period On the outbreak of World War II there were about 2,500 Jews in Tarnogrod. The Jewish community was liquidated on Nov. 2, 1942, when 3,000 Jews from Tarnogrod and its vicinity were deported to the belzec death camp. After the war the Jewish community was not reconstituted. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Halpern, Pinkas, index; B. Wasiutyński, Ludność żydowska w Polsce w wiekach XIX i XX (1931), index; M. Berensohn, Dyplomataryusz dotycący żydów w Polsce (1910), no. 184; M. Baliński and T. Lipiński, Staro zytna Polska, 2 (1845), index; I. Schiper, Dzieje handlu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich (1937), index.