The first known Jewish community of Grodno settled in the town in the 1100s CE. In the 1300s the community established a synagogue and Jewish cemetery. Over the next few centuries Jewish merchants prospered, but faced period outbreaks of antisemitic discrimination and violence. For example, until 1662 Jews were not permitted to own shops in the market because the square faced the town church and many feared Jews would ridicule Christian worship. In the summer of 1666 Jews were attacked during a violent pogrom.

Nonetheless, throughout the 1600s and 1700s the Jewish community of Grodno achieved a position as one of the wealthiest and most influential in the region. The first stone synagogue in the city was built by 1600 and in 1788 the royal printer in Grodno printed the first Hebrew book in Lithuania.

In 1795 Grodno became part of the Russian Empire. By 1816 roughly 85 percent of the city’s residents were Jewish, numbering more than 8,400 in a city of nearly 10,000. The Jewish community even had its own coat of arms. However, in later decades the Jewish community faced emigration and declining income. Many residents moved away for the economic opportunities available in the nearby industrial city of Białystok.

After World War I (1914-1918) Grodno became part of the newly independent country of Poland. By the 1920s the Jewish community of 25,000 to 30,000 people included two synagogues and 40 prayer houses. Community life organized around charitable and cultural organizations such as the Yiddishe Kunst art union, which included a library and theater.

Survivor Linda Penn was born in 1927 in Grodno, where her family owned a dry cleaning business. She remembered that her family kept kosher and spoke Yiddish at home, although she attended a Polish public school. Penn recalled that “antisemitism was not unusual before the war” and escalated after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. Jewish stores were vandalized and two Jews were killed in a 1935 pogrom. Penn remembered rocks being thrown at Jews in the market square.

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern part of Poland. In Grodno all Jewish property was nationalized and Jewish organizations and schools were banned. Survivor Sam Zaczepinski was born in Grodno in June 1940, an area where his family had been “well established” for generations. One year later, on June 23, 1941, the German army invaded the city. Zaczepinski recounted how his family’s house was “bombed on the second day” of the Nazi occupation.

Soon Jews were forbidden from walking on the sidewalk or going to the market square. Penn recalled how “you had to put on the yellow Star [of David] and they started to strip you of everything.” In November 1941 approximately 25,000 Jews were forced into one of two ghettos in the city. Penn remembered “three or four families in one apartment.”

Deportations to the killing centers at Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau began at the end of 1942. Sam Zaczepinski and his family were saved by a German soldier. Linda Penn and her family were not as fortunate. They were deported to Treblinka, where Penn’s father and brother were killed upon arrival. The final liquidation of the city’s remaining Jewish population took place in March 1943. Of a prewar Jewish population of more than 20,000, only about 250 remained in Grodno after the war.