Jewish center slated for Polish town whose Jews died in Holocaust

WARSAW, Poland — A Jewish center will be built in a central Poland town that has been empty of Jews since the Holocaust.

The foundation stone for the center in Radomsko, a town of about 48,000 approximately 115 miles from Warsaw, was laid Monday. It is being built to host the hundreds of Hasidic visitors to the cemetery who each year make pilgrimages to the grave of Shlomo Chanoch Hakohen Rabinowicz, the fourth and last rebbe of the Radomsk Hasidic dynasty.

Funded by the Polish Jewish community, the center will rise next to the Jewish cemetery. It will include a room of memory dedicated to the history of Radomsko Jews. Some 7,500 Jews lived there prior to the Holocaust.

Town officials expect the center, the first such facility in the Lodz region, to attract tourists and investors.

Rabinowicz built a network of 36 yeshivas across Poland and Galicia that enrolled over 4,000 students by 1939. He and his entire family were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942.