Stories from Górna Street

Błażej Mysiak, a photographer from the “Przeciw Nicości” (“Against Nothingness”) Photographic Association, is showing pictures of the old Jewish cemetery on Górna Street in Leżajsk at the Museum and Memorial Site in Bełżec. The exhibition opened on 19 September 2026 as part of the European Heritage Days, and the museum announces it until the end of 2026. The quotation below is the museum’s own English text.

The Museum and Memorial Site in Bełżec on the exhibition:

The exhibition is the artist’s personal story of the old Jewish cemetery on Górna Street in Leżajsk - a place he has been photographing for years, documenting traces of the multicultural heritage of the Podkarpacie region: abandoned cemeteries, wooden Orthodox churches and chapels, and a world that today has almost faded from memory.

What to expect

The museum gives neither the number of photographs nor where in the building they hang. The show is also missing from the exhibitions list on the museum’s website, which shows only the permanent exhibition “Bełżec - Extermination Camp”; the only announcement is a post in the news section. If you are looking for it on site, ask at the Museum Information Point.

The museum describes the exhibition as the photographer’s personal story of the Leżajsk cemetery, but does not say what the photographs actually show. According to the museum’s account of the opening, Mysiak spoke about leaning matzevot, small stones placed on gravestones, and notes with requests that people still leave at the cemetery. The museum’s description points to photography about a place, not about the Holocaust directly.

The pairing still makes sense. The museum commemorates the destruction of the Jewish communities of the Lublin region and former Galicia, and the exhibition shows a cemetery where one such community buried its dead from the 18th century onwards. Allow 15-20 minutes for the photographs alone, on top of the time for the permanent exhibition and the memorial grounds - that is our estimate, the museum gives none.

Context

The Jewish cemetery on Górna Street in Leżajsk was most probably founded in the 18th century and covers about two hectares. The Germans devastated it during the Second World War and only a few gravestones survived; the cemetery was restored in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the help of the Nissenbaum Family Foundation.

Its most important place is the ohel, a structure built over the grave of the tzaddik Elimelech of Leżajsk (Lizhensk, 1717-1787). He was one of the founders of Hasidism in Galicia, and his book “Noam Elimelech” is one of the movement’s core texts. On the anniversary of his death, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Adar, Hasidic pilgrims come here from all over the world; in 2012 there were about six thousand of them.

Mysiak has spent years photographing Poland’s eastern borderlands and writes about his journeys on his travel blog “Na skraju kraju” (“At the Edge of the Country”).

Tickets and time

Ticket: admission to the museum is free and, according to the museum, covers all its exhibitions, this one included. Self-guided visits need no booking. There is a one-off fee for entering the museum car park: 5 PLN per car. Guided tours are paid too. A guide for a group of up to 10 people costs 100 PLN in Polish and 200 PLN in a foreign language; for a group of up to 30, 250 PLN and 400 PLN. The museum offers guided tours only to visitors over 14.

Opening hours: until the end of October the museum is open 9:00-18:00 (6 PM), with last entry to the exhibition at 16:30 (4:30 PM). From November the museum is open 9:00-16:00 (4 PM). For that period the Polish hours page gives last entry to the grounds at 15:00 and to the exhibition at 15:30. The English page gives only 15:00, so it is safer to arrive before 15:00 (3 PM). The current rules are on the museum’s opening hours page .

When to go: the museum is closed on Mondays, on 1 and 11 November, and from 24 to 31 December. The museum announces the exhibition until the end of 2026, but on our reading the last day you can see it is Wednesday 23 December 2026.

Who it is for: worth it for anyone already coming to Bełżec, and for those who know Leżajsk from the Hasidic pilgrimages or follow the Jewish heritage of the Podkarpacie region. It is not worth the journey on its own, because the museum gives no idea of its size. The museum does not recommend visits by children under 14, and the recommendation applies to the whole site.

In English: the museum has published an English version of its post about the exhibition, but does not say whether the photo captions are bilingual. Museum guides lead tours in Polish, English and German; a guide is booked on the museum’s website .

See also

• The Extermination of Jews in the German “Reinhardt” Operation at Sobibór - a temporary exhibition at the other branch of the same institution, on the whole operation whose first extermination camp was Bełżec.
• Ewa Trafna’s “Memory” in Włodawa - contemporary art about Jewish memory in the upper women’s gallery of the Great Synagogue, until May 2027.
• Windows of Memory in Chełm - portraits of Chełm’s pre-war Jewish residents displayed in the windows of a tenement house, a second photographic story of a pre-war Jewish community, until the end of 2026.

Museum profile: Museum and Memorial Site in Bełżec .