WÃ Âodawa () is a town in eastern Poland, situated on the Bug River and on the border with Belarus and Ukraine. It is the seat of WÃ Âodawa County, within the Lublin Voivodeship. it has a population of 13,500.
The town lies along the borders of Poland with both, westernmost Belarus and Ukraine, on the banks of the Bug River, from Cheà Âm in Poland and Brest in Belarus; from Terespol, from Lublin, and from Liuboml in the Volyn Oblast of Ukraine. It is close to the Belarusian southernmost strip of the Brest Raion within the Brest Region bordering with north-western Ukraine.
Wà Âodawa was first mentioned in historical records in 1242. The first written mention of the town in an Old Slavonic chronicle which speaks about Prince Daniel staying there, escaping from the Tartars in 1241. In 1446âÂÂ1447 the surrounding territories were annexed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the river Wà Âodawka marked the border between the Duchy and the Polish Crown within the PolishâÂÂLithuanian Union. In 1475 Michaà  and Aleksander Sanguszko received the town in exchange with the Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon. For the next 100 years the town became the home for the Sanguszko family. They built their castle here and developed the town's prosperity. The Sanguszko profited from the border crossing which was bringing good income. In 1534 the town received city rights, confirmed in 1540. At that time the influx of the Jewish population started, which promoted commerce and crafts. The location on the large river, Bug, favored the rapid development of the city as a commercial and transit center.
By the end of the 16th century, Wà Âodawa passed into the hands of Andrzej Leszczyà Âski and from that time belonged to the Leszczyà Âski family for next generations. As Leszczyà Âski was a Calvinist, Wà Âodawa soon became an important center of Protestantism. In 1624 a Calvinist church and a school were built here. Between 1633 and 1648, the minister of the Calvinist congregation in Wà Âodawa was Polish historian and poet Andrzej WÃÂgierski. In 1634 a Calvinist synod was held in Wà Âodawa, which was attended by delegates from the entire PolishâÂÂLithuanian Commonwealth. Protestants from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia also settled in Wà Âodawa at that time.
In 1648, the Cossack-Tatar army plundered and destroyed the city, killing almost the entire population, including all Jews. In 1657 the city was devastated again, this time by the Swedes during the Deluge. John III Sobieski and the subsequent Polish kings granted the right to four annual fairs. Horses and, above all, oxen from nearby Volhynia were sold at these fairs, with the latter being even sold to Kraków, Poznaà Â, Berlin and Vienna. These fairs, as well as the staple right for salt contributed to Wà Âodawa's wealth. In the 17th century, Rafaà  Leszczyà Âski, father of the future Polish King Stanisà Âaw Leszczyà Âski, became the owner of Wà Âodawa, but due to debts he sold it to Ludwik Pociej. Pociej brought the Paulines from the Jasna Góra Monastery in CzÃÂstochowa to Wà Âodawa and built their monastery. In the 18th century, the city was the property of the Pociej, Flemming, Czartoryski and Zamoyski families.
After the Partitions of Poland, WÃ Âodawa was annexed by Austria in 1795. Following the Austro-Polish War of 1809, it was regained by Poles and included within the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw. In 1815 it became part of Congress Poland, initially autonomous, but later forcibly integrated within Imperial Russia. The inhabitants of WÃ Âodawa actively joined the January Uprising in 1863. After the fall of the uprising, bloody repressions began and the attempts at Russification intensified. During World War I, from 1915 to 1918, the city was occupied by the Germans.
Following Poland's return to independence, Wà Âodawa became a seat of the Wà Âodawa County. During the PolishâÂÂSoviet War, it was briefly occupied by the Russians, and then recaptured by the Poles on 17 August 1920. In 1939, before the onset of World War II, the population of Wà Âodawa was 9,293. There was a garrison of heavy artillery regiment and the division of the field artillery in the town, used by the Pomorze and the Modlin armies in the defence of Poland against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Wà Âodawa was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 3 September 1939. Future Polish war hero Witold Pilecki fought against the invaders near Wà Âodawa. Under German occupation, Wà Âodawa was the location of a subcamp of the Stalag 319 prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs.
The existence of a Jewish community in WÃ Âodawa is first recorded in connection with the Lublin fair of 1531. By 1623 WÃ Âodawa had a representative in the Council of the Four Lands. The community's prosperity was due to the granting of a city charter in 1534. For much of the early modern period, a time when the Polish-speaking community of the region was predominately engaged in agriculture, Jews appear to have composed much of the population of the city, engaged in all forms of craft production and trade. The community was devastated by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, but afterwards re-established and rebuilt. By 1765 the town had 630 Jews. In 1693, the town had 197 dwellings, 89 owned by Jewish families. The census of 1773 records Jewish physicians, butchers, millers, barbers, goldsmiths, tailors, furriers, merchants, and carters, in addition to one Jew in each of the trades of coppersmith, cobbler, glazier, chandler, and wheelwright. There were also 8 schoolmasters, 2 educators, a cantor, a bass player and a cymbal player. There were 2,236 Jews in 1827 and 6,706 in 1907.
In the late 19th century WÃ Âodawa had a Jewish-owned steam-powered flour mill, tannery and soap factory. Of the 184 stores in the town, 177 were owned by Jews. WÃ Âodawa's first Zionist organization was formed in 1898, the town also had Bund, Agudath Israel and Poalei Zion organizations. There was a Beis Yaakov school for girls also.
Wà Âodawa was over 70% Jewish before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland and the Holocaust. The city became part of the Nazi German Lublin District of the General Government following the invasion. Wà Âodawa Ghetto was set up by the German administration in 1941. Jews from all neighbouring locations were sent there. The Ghetto was overcrowded and lacked food and medicine. Starvation and disease were common. Round ups for the Holocaust transports to the nearby Sobibór extermination camp took place in waves: 1,300 Jews in May 1942, 5,400 in October, 2,800 in November 1942, and 2,000 in April 1943, as well as the last 150 in May 1943. In June, all remaining Jewish children under the age of 10 were deported and gassed. During the ghetto liquidation action, at the end of October 1942 hundreds of Jews escaped to the surrounding forests. Wà Âodawa Jews were mostly deported to Sobibór, but some were executed locally at the German Arbeitslager workcamps such as the one at Adampol. Several Jews from Adampol and the Wà Âodawa Ghetto were able to escape, and joined the Parczew partisans in the forests, fighting actively against the Nazis with Soviet assistance and weapons. The Jewish cemetery was demolished by the Germans who used the headstones as road building material, and turned the Synagogue into military storage.
On the road to WÃ Âodawa there is a memorial to the Jews from WÃ Âodawa who were killed at Adampol. No Jews are known to live in the town today, although the handsome, Baroque, Wlodawa Synagogue serves as major tourist attraction. A WÃ Âodawa landsmenschafte (society) was founded in America for survivors and descendants of WÃ Âodawa's Jewish Community and has members scattered throughout the US, Canada, Australia, England, Israel and elsewhere. London had a Wlodawa Synagogue (London).
In the 1700s, while some Amish families traveled west from Germany and Switzerland in their quest for religious freedom to the colony of Pennsylvania, others would venture to Central and Eastern Europe, largely as a part of the Josephine colonization. In 1781, Austrian emperor Joseph II invited German farmers to move to Galicia, after seizing the region (which today lies in southeastern Poland and Western Ukraine) in the First Partition of Poland. Other Amish however settled the vicinity of Wà Âodawa, which was then still part of the PolishâÂÂLithuanian Commonwealth.
Jerold A. Stahly wrote of this community in the vicinity of WÃ Âodawa in his work, "Mennonite and Amish Identities Among the Swiss Volhynians in Europe":
<blockquote>In the Lithuanian congregation in Urszulin and Michelsdorf in the Wà Âodawa district, one preacher was Christian Graber, ordained in 1790 in Montbeliard to go to Poland. Christian Stucky of Alsace served there as and elder from the 1790s to the 1830s. Graber, Stucky, and Johann Flickinger signed the Essingen agreement for this group. When Austria took control of the Wà Âodawa district in 1795 as part of West Galicia, there was no longer an international border separating the Amish Mennonites in Lemberger and Littauer congregations. The Amish all apparently left Falkenstein and Einsiedel in the next few years. Joseph Mündlein apparently moved to the Wà Âodawa District, where he served as an elder, performing a marriage in 1802. It was in 1804, during these years of Austrian rule that Josef Rohrer wrote about the Mennonites of West and East Galicia. He wrote that they preferred to be called Täufer. He said that one group of Mennonites was stricter and was called Heftler, because they used hooks and eyes on their clothes rather than buttons, like the other group, the Knöfler. He wrote that the strict ones wore bears. He described wives being very careful to avoid a friendly laugh or looking other men in the eye, for fear of being put under a ban for many weeks, so that no Mennonite would speak to her and her husband could not even sit at a table with her.</blockquote>
Wà Âodawa has an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification: Cfb) using the isotherm or a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification: Dfb) using the isotherm.
The town is represented by the local football club MLKS WÃ Âodawianka WÃ Âodawa who compete in the lower leagues.
There are several monuments and tourist attractions worth seeing in WÃ Âodawa: