Września

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Września (German Wreschen) is a town in central Poland with 28,600 inhabitants (1995).

It is situated in the Greater Poland Voivodeship (since 1999), previously in Poznań Voivodeship (1975-1998).

1 History
- 1.1 Jewish Wreschen
2 Education
3 People
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

Września is known in Poland for a school strike by Polish children in May 1901 in response to the intensification of Germanization (i.e. prohibition of the Polish language at school). For refusing to stop speaking Polish, Polish children were flogged and beaten for several hours by Prussian teachers, in a manner so severe that some of the children had their flesh stripped from their arms. Parents who tried to break into the school and protect their children from Prussian teachers were punished later by a Prussian court stating that their actions were "atrocious acts against the state".[1]

[edit] History

[edit] Jewish Wreschen

A town in Provinz Posen, Germany, three miles from the Russian-Polish frontier. Its Jewish community formerly ranked among the largest of southern Prussia, and is mentioned as one of the congregations which suffered severely during the persecutions of the years 1648-1651. Unluckily, however, all the early documents were destroyed in the conflagration of 1873, in which the synagogue, a beautiful old wooden building, also was burned. The gravestones of the ancient cemetery, which has been closed for about 40 years, afford no historical data, since the great majority of the older inscriptions have been obliterated.

Among the members of the community special mention may be made of Rabbi Ẓebi Hirsch b. Aaron Mirels, and his father Rabbi Aaron Mirels (Kaufmann, "Die Letzte Vertreibung der Juden aus Wien und Niederösterreich", pp. 79 et seq., Vienna, 1889), and the Bible commentator Rabbi Meïr Löb Malbim.

Ẓebi Mirels, who was called also Hirsch Aaron London, was the author of the "Mispar Ẓeba'am", and presented a Hebrew hymn to General Möllendorf when the latter was sent by the Prussian king Frederick William II. to receive the allegiance of the new province of southern Prussia ("Das Jahr 1793", p. 16, note, Posen, 1895). Rabbi Aaron Mirels, the author of the "Bet Aharon", is buried in the cemetery at Hirschberg in Silesia. In Wreschen, Malbim wrote his first work, the collection of annotations on the first chapters of the Shulḥan 'Aruk, Oraḥ Ḥayyim, which laid the foundation of his renown as a scholar. In Wreschen, moreover, the musical director Louis Lewandowski was born April 3, 1821.

The population of Wreschen now (1905) numbers 5,435, of whom 490 are Jews.

The present rabbi is Dr. M. Lewin. The community has a religious school and a public school, the former having an attendance of 40 and the latter of 45.