Plac Icchaka Lejba Pereca, Wrocław

Plac Icchaka Lejba Pereca is a triangular Gajowice square named for the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Icchok Lejb Perec. Its surviving tenement façades, Jewish educational history, postwar rebuilding and 1964 tower block reveal several distinct layers of the neighbourhood’s past.

Plac Icchaka Lejba Pereca is a compact, roughly triangular square in Gajowice, with a green space and playground at its centre. Its name honours Icchok Lejb Perec, the Polish-Jewish writer who became a classic of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The square first appeared on a planning map in 1895, was laid out in 1903, and gained its surrounding run of tenement houses by 1910.

Notice the older residential façades along the northern and eastern edges: a small part of that original streetscape endured. Behind the frontage at number three, a Jewish orphanage was built between 1907 and 1909, designed by Paul and Richard Ehrlich; it also contained a prayer house. A Jewish school operated there from 1921, and the building later became a primary school named for Sholem Aleichem before the Lauder Etz-Chaim School was founded there in 1998.

War badly damaged the square, and the neighbourhood was rebuilt during the 1960s. The tower block at the Żelazna and Pereca corner dates from 1964. In the 1980s this area became a scene of demonstrations and clashes with militia; people nicknamed it “Gaz plac” after the tear gas used to disperse crowds.