Ząbkowska Street, eleven

Today Ząbkowska Street is filled with restaurants, bars, and small shops, but its name points to this place’s former activity. As early as the sixteenth century, a road ran here from Praga to the village of Wola Ząbkowska—present-day Ząbki. Houses were built along the road by which peasants brought goods to Warsaw markets.

On June eighteenth, eighteen sixty-eight, a fire destroyed around thirty wooden houses on both sides of Ząbkowska Street. The city authorities agreed to give the fire victims money for rebuilding on one condition: the new buildings had to be made of stone. The owners had either to invest in more expensive construction or leave their plots without housing and premises that brought in income.

The Jewish property owner Icchak Hersz Jarman decided to build. By the following year, a brick house with one upper storey already stood on plot number eleven. The apartments and premises facing the street could be rented out to tenants, shopkeepers, and craftsmen, gradually recouping the money invested. The second upper storey, visible today, was added after the war.

Behind the street-facing building, Jarman erected courtyard wings, and at the far end of the second courtyard he set up a small beit midrash—a room for communal prayer and study of the Torah. Its congregants did not need a separate monumental synagogue: the prayer hall fit within the same house where people lived and earned their livelihoods. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this arrangement suited all of Ząbkowska Street: shops faced the road, apartments and workshops filled the courtyards, and Jews made up a significant share of the property owners, merchants, and craftsmen.

After the German occupiers arrived, collective prayers were banned and synagogues were closed. In the autumn of nineteen forty, Praga’s Jewish residents had to leave their homes and move to the Warsaw Ghetto, created on the other bank. The community at Jarman’s house lost both its street and prayer hall. The room was damaged during the war; later, a carpentry workshop opened there and operated until the end of the twentieth century.

During repairs in two thousand, remains of the former beit midrash’s modest wall painting were discovered beneath later coverings. They cannot be seen from the street: behind the beige façade, you need to mentally count two courtyard depths. In the city’s heritage register, house number eleven is listed exactly as Icchak Hersz Jarman Tenement House with a Jewish prayer hall.