Although Wadowice was settled around the 900s CE, centuries of the local Polish nobility prohibited Jewish families from living there by obtaining the “de non tolerandis Judaeis” privilege from the king. After Wadowice became part of the Austrian Empire in 1772, the Austrian emperor upheld the privilege.

In the 1860s Austria passed laws guaranteeing the equality of all citizens regardless of religion. Story holds that the first Jewish resident of Wadowice arrived at the town gate bearing a musket and demanding his right of residence. By the end of the century, the Jewish population had grown to approximately 975 (about 15 percent of the total population).   

The first Jewish families who migrated to Wadowice in the late 1800s came from a region of Austria known as Silesia. They spoke German and identified with German culture. Jews traded flour and grain and opened a number of businesses and factories. Trade benefitted from the construction of railroad networks linking Wadowice to other cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

Wadowice’s official Jewish community organization, or kahal, purchased land for a Jewish cemetery in 1882. A few years later construction began on a brick synagogue designed in the Reform style popular with German Jewish congregations. By the time it was completed in 1889, the layout had changed to accommodate the rapidly growing number of Jewish migrants from the eastern region of Galicia. These more traditional Hasidic Jewish families spoke Polish and the Jewish language of Yiddish. Unfamiliar with customary Jewish clothing, some Polish teenagers threw stones at men on the street.

Before the Jewish community of Wadowice established its own religious educational system, children in the late 1800s and early 1900s attended public schools. Over the years Jewish schools for boys were founded and a tutor affectionately known as “Bubele” taught girls to read and write in Hebrew.

When World War I started in 1914, Jewish and Polish young men fought and died for the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Jewish community of Wadowice also prepared meals for Russian-Jewish internees of a local prisoner-of-war camp. In exchange, prisoners spread the Zionist movement which fought for the creation of an independent Jewish state.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved at the end of the war in 1918 and Wadowice became part of the newly re-established country of Poland. Numerous Jewish charities were founded before the war and continued to provided crucial relief to families devastated by the conflict and its aftermath. For example, cooperative credit unions offered low-interest loans to families who lost their businesses. Other organizations included sports clubs, a Jewish library and a proliferation of Zionist associations.

By the 1930s, most of the approximately 500 Jewish families in Wadowice practiced Hasidic traditions and earned their living through trade. Feeding off of resentments over Jewish economic competition,  antisemitic groups organized boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. Some Jews were physically assaulted.

German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and reached Wadowice three days later. Nazis and Polish citizens looted Jewish property and in October the synagogue was burned down. Over the next few years, thousands of Jews were conscripted for forced labor. In one factory, Jews made uniforms and clothing for the German army.

The first mass deportation of Jews from Wadowice to the killing center of Bełżec took place on July 2, 1942. It included those too young, old or sick to work. Skilled workers were sent to a labor camp while around 1,400 were enclosed in a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire. In August 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and all remaining residents were sent to the gas chambers.