The Germans occupied the city of Lodz, Poland on 8 September 1939. Later on, the city was included in the Warthegau, an area in Western Poland that was annexed to the Third Reich. On 30 April 1940 the ghetto was sealed; 164,000 of the city's Jews were crammed into an area spanning 4 km2.
After the German occupation of Poland, Nazi policy regarding communal prayer was not consistent, and the matter was left to the discretion of the local authorities in each location.
Initially, communal prayers were permitted inside the Lodz ghetto, and many Jews flocked to the synagogues as havens of prayer and spiritual sustenance as well as venues for social interaction. In light of this, new houses of prayer and learning were opened. In October 1941 Hans Biebow, the administrative head of the Lodz ghetto decided that the weekly day of rest in the ghetto would be Sunday as opposed to Saturday, thus preventing the ghetto inmates from holding Sabbath prayers in the synagogues. Furthermore, communal prayer was outlawed and prayers starting taking place clandestinely, despite the inherent danger.
During the High Holidays of 1941, thousands of ghetto inmates participated in prayers in the synagogues and work was halted for six days. The main prayers were held in the Great Hall at 31 Franciskanska Street, which had been a cinema before the war. Rumkowski and his senior staff were present at the prayer services, as were Hans Biebow and other Gestapo personnel.
Before Rosh Hashanah 1942 the infamous "Sperre" was perpetrated, a brutal aktion in which over 15,000 Jews were rounded up and deported from the ghetto. That year, prayer minyanim (quorums) were banned, but many prayer services still took place before dawn in the ghetto, and the shofar (ram's horn) was even blown once. Yom Kippur was a regular workday and the synagogues were all closed. The following year, 1943, High Holiday prayers were outlawed once again. Nevertheless many Jews took part in clandestine prayer quorums, inside houses and in the "resorts": factories where forced laborers prayed while ostensibly working. On Yom Kippur, Rumkowski succeeded in convincing Hans Biebow to grant a day off.
Jerakhmil Bryman was one of the archivists in the Lodz ghetto. In a secret document entitled, "Where and How to Pray in the Ghetto" he described the prayer quorums that convened in the ghetto despite the restrictions. From his document, we learn that the prayer quorums were organized according to different groupings: Hasidic quorums, prayer quorums at workplaces and prayer quorums of different parties and movements. Birman copied small notices that were stuck on the walls of the rooms where Jews gathered to pray, such as a notice requesting that sick people not attend prayer services, to avoid the spread of disease. In one list, Birman described prayer venues with few tables and benches but many prayer shawls left by the dead and deported. Some places even provided special clothes for the leader of the prayer services. Birman added to his document a prayer written by an anonymous ghetto inmate.
!["Where and How to Pray in the Ghetto", Jerakhmil Bryman](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/00005_2.jpg ""Where and How to Pray in the Ghetto", Jerakhmil Bryman")
_2.jpg?itok=gYdTa_Sy "The Siddur (Prayer Book) that Gabriele Kohn Received after Liberation")
