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 17^th 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 17^th and early 18^th 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 19^th 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.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.