Jews first settled in Belchatow in 1764. By 1939, six thousand Jews, more than 50% of the population, made it their home. Many were engaged in the textile industry. During the Holocaust, most of the Jews in Belchatow were sent to the Lodz ghetto and then deported to the death camp at Chelmno. The Jewish community did not rebuild after the war. (Source: Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 4).

The Belchatow Shtetl CO-OP finished indexing the Jewish vital records for Jewish Records Indexing – Poland utilizing the microfilms in the LDS (Mormon) collection.

Indices for the years 1809-1888 have been indexed and are available for searching at the JRI-Poland web site. The years from 1868-1874 were put onto spreadsheets by previous volunteers and are also available for research on JRI-Poland. Our international Shtetl CO-OP team is made up of: Dr. Lester Bilsky (Arkansas, USA), Pawel Brunon Dorman (Warsaw, Poland), Miriam S. Deitcher (Ohio, USA), Alan Frishman (New York, USA), Jenny Jackson (Victoria, Australia), Roni Seibel Liebowitz, Coordinator (New York, USA), and Steve Rabinowitz, MD (New York, USA).

We are very excited to announce that through the PSA/JRI-Poland project, indices for years 1889-1899 are also now included on the database. These will be updated as additional indexes for more current years become available in the future. If you have family from Belchatow or a nearby shtetl, please consider making
a financial contribution to this project. See the JRI-Poland website for information on how to make your contribution. The donations will also be used to hire people who can extract those brides names writtten in Cyrillic that are missing from the original Polish indexes. These people will have to look at the records themselves to extract the names.

To learn more about the Belchatow Shtetl CO-OP and the PSA/JRI-Poland project, contact Roni Seibel Liebowitz.