The cemetery, founded in 1800, belongs to a few Jewish necropolises in Poland that still operate. The necropolis was seriously damaged during the Second World War, when many tombstones were used by Nazis as building materials e.g. in Plaszow concentration camp. In the 1950s the cemetery was renovated. Some of the gravestones were regained and put in their original place or built in the cemetary’s wall. Nowadays there are about 7 ,000 gravestones. The oldest ones date back to the 1840s. There are also many symbolic graves to commemorate the victims of Holocaust. Most of the gravestones were made of sandstone and the inscriptions are in Hebrew, Polish and German.