In this location a wooden house stood til the 1950’s. It is where Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, the creator of the artificial language Esperanto, was born in 1859. At the time the street’s name was “Zielona” (“Green”), but it was renamed to “Zamenhofa” after the I World War to honour Zamenhof’s work. His family house can be viewed on an archival photograph on a memorial plaque. Next to the location, on a post-war tenement (Zamenhofa 26 Street), is a grand mural by Andrzej Muszyński painted in 2008. On the building there is a memorial plaque in Polish and Esperanto.

The black plaque commemorates one of the heroes of Białystok Ghetto, Icchok Malmed. While being arrested in February 1943 he poured acid on a German soldier’s face and the soldier then mistakenly shot another soldier. Malmed was able to run away and hide. He came forward when the Germans shot 100 people in reprisal and threatened to kill the rest of the Ghetto. He was hanged next to the Judenrat building which was where the plaque today is. The street was also named after him.

The Białystok Ghetto was established by the Germans at the end of July 1941. On the night of 16 August 1943 liquidation of the Ghetto started, with some of its inhabitants actively resisting it. The uprising leader was Mordechaj Tenenbaum (Tamarof). The uprising failed because of a great power disadvantage. Most of the Jews died in combat or were sent to concentration camps in Treblinka and Majdanek. The memory of the uprising is still alive. Every year, on 16 August, a solemn appeal is held at the site of the Ghetto Uprising Heroes Monument. A nearby street was named after “the Ghetto Uprising Heroes” (“Bohaterów Getta” Street). The memorial site on Żabia Street is also the place of a mass grave with remains exhumed from a Ghetto cemetery, which was located here until 1960’s.

The Cytron Beit Midrasz Synagogue was built in 1936. It was named after its funders – the Cytron Family of Jewish industrialists. The synagogue’s interior was elaborately decorated with exotic wooden moulding. Floral and zoomorphic motifs dominated the space, along with Judaic symbols of a lion and the Star of David. The adornment survived until 1970’s when it was removed during renovation. After the war, until the 1960’s, the building functioned as a Jewish meeting place and a funeral home.

In this Art Nouveau villa built at the beginning of the 20th century a Jewish manufacturer of hats and cloth Chaim (Całko) Nowik lived with his family. Nowik’s cloth factory was located in a different part of the town, but there was a shop in a tenement on Lipowa Street, where one could have bought cloth, wool materials and hats. The business deteriorated when in 1926-1927 all 3 family successors – Eliasz, Salomon and Chanon – died. Already then a part of the palace was leased by the army and made into the Military Draft Office, which is located there to this day.

Before the war, a Hebrew school led by the Tarbut organization was located in this building. The organization aimed to popularise resurgenting secular Hebrew culture (“tarbut” means “culture” in Hebrew). The building is one of the best preserved examples of Białystok masonry style, characterized by the use of yellow and red brick.

Today’s square in front of the “ZUS” building was a Jewish choleric cemetery in the middle of the 19th century, located on the outer edge of the town at the time. The cemetery functioned during an epidemic and later, until 1892. It was liquidated by communist authorities in 1964, some of the matzevahs were relocated then to the Jewish cemetery on Wschodnia Street. For years a makeshift parking lot was here until the terrain was finally commemorated with an information board and a square with a Star of David made of boxwood.

There are only several houses left in these old Jewish districts where before the war the less rich members of the community lived. The districts were established in the 18th and the 19th century. They consisted mainly of single-storey wooden houses, however, some buildings were built from brick, just as the 23 Młynowa Street one – a two-storey building where a nail factory used to be before the war.

The cemetery was established in the middle of the 18th century, outside of the town’s premises at the time, behind the Suraska Gate. This Jewish necropolis was described by a prewar local history enthusiast Jan Glinka. According to his account, important Jewish figures and rabbis were buried here, like Rabbi Kalman (died 1789) or a rich merchant and philanthropist Izaak Zabłudowski (died 1865). In 1941 Germans destroyed the cemetery, covering it with the debris of the burnt down Jewish district. After the war, the remains of the cemetery were covered with ground and a park was created here.

It is one of three synagogue buildings in the city that survived and it was built in 1891. The name of the synagogue derived from the name of the district “Piaski” (“Sands”). Destroyed during the war, then partially renovated, in the 1950’s it was home to a cinema, a theatre and a community centre. Until 1970, the headquarters of The Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland was here. After a renovation in 1995, Białystok Esperanto Society became one of the building’s users.

The impressive building of the Great Synagogue was raised in the centre of a Jewish district “Szulhof” in 1913 according to the project of Szlomo Rabinowicz. It featured oriental elements in Moorish style and a characteristic central dome mounted on a metal construction. On the “black Friday”, 27 June 1941, the German troops forced around 700 Jews into the Synagogue and set the building on fire. What remained of the Synagogue was the metal dome construction, crumpled because of the heat. The statue, built in 1995 by the city authorities and sponsors from the USA and Israel, resembles that shape.