Parczew ' is a town in eastern Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, with a population of 10,281 (2006). Situated in the Lublin Voivodeship

Lublin Voivodeship

- Administrative division :Lublin Voivodeship is divided into 24 counties : 4 city counties and 20 land counties. These are further divided into 213 gminas....

 (since 1999), previously in Biała Podlaska Voivodeship (1975-1998). It is the capital of Parczew County

Parczew County

Parczew County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Lublin Voivodeship, eastern Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat and only town is Parczew, which lies north-east of...

.

History

The town is one of the oldest in the Lublin region. A settlement known by the name existed already in the 12th century, and was granted a town charter in 1401. An organized Jewish community existed in the town since the early 16th century. Just before the outbreak of World War II the Jewish community numbered 5,000, more than half of the town's population. During the German occupation, in the course of the Holocaust, the Jewish population was first confined to a ghetto, then its inmates were deported to Treblinka in September, 1942 and murdered there. A number of Jewish partisan groups operated in the forests around the town.

After the war, Parczew was one of the very few shtetl

Shtetl

A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until The Holocaust. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania...

s in which an attempt was made to re-establish the Jewish community. About 200 Jews were inhabiting the town by early 1946.