Tyktin

... Jewish culture in the ghetto. They wrote about other tragic episodes in Jewish history and chronicled the daily atrocities in their own environment. The days, weeks and months in the Bialystok ghetto seemed like an eternity to the inmates forced to . live in severely congested quarters, poverty, hunger and squalor. Thousands of men and women were let out daily to perform slave labor for the Nazis. Tragic news reached the ghetto in grim detail about the suffering and extermination of Jews in surrounding communities such as Slonim, Lomza, Bielsk, Grajewo, Tyktin and other places. These reports were brought to Bialystok by Jews who had managed to escape from these other liquidated towns. Many Bialystoker Jews had relatives in these places, and the news of their annihilation brought even more pain to their lives. ...

... Bialystok, located near the Bialy River (Bialystok means ‘‘White River” in Polish), became a haven for Jews. Bronicki invited them to settle there and build up the town; he provided them with land, lumber and other materials. In 1749 a small number of Jews settled in Bialystok, totaling 765 by 1765. In the next fifty years the Jewish community grew in both numbers and influence. In 1800 the ‘‘new Bet Hamidrash” was estab- lished in the synagogue court. Bialystok replaced Tyk- tin as the dominant city, surrounded by smaller satellite communities such as Choroscz, Horodok, Janowa, Jaszynowka, Knyszin, Odelsk, Sokola, Zabludowa, and Waszlykowa. ...

... Documents in Tyktin, the original capital city of the region, show that Jews already lived in Bialystok around 1658. In 1703, Polish Count Jan Klements Bro- nicki built for himself a wooden palace in Bialystok. ...