A photo catalog of the burials of this cemetery is available at the link

Polonne is a small regional center in the Khmelnytskyi region, which has a long and, at times, tragic history associated with Jewry. This place owes its formation and development to a large Jewish community, which in the mid-1600s was cфonsidered one of the most numerous in the Volyn region of the Russian Empire. The first documentary mention of Polonne Jews dates back to 1601, and by the beginning of the 18th century the town was already considered a major trade and craft center of this part of the empire, largely due to its Jewish inhabitants. The status of Polonne in this capacity increased significantly in the 19th century, when the Jewish population in it made up about half of all inhabitants. Local Jews owned 95% of all commercial enterprises there. There were 15 synagogues in the town, and at that time it was a classical shtetl, as well as one of the centers of Hasidism in Volhynia.

But time is inexorable, and the events of the 20th century led to the fact that from the once large Jewish community, in fact, only a cemetery with a mausoleum of two Hasidic tzadiks remained, miraculously preserved to this day. They say that the history of any settlement can be studied by visiting its cemetery. Perhaps today it is this old Jewish cemetery that is the real "book of history" of the former Polonne.

It is not known for certain when it was founded, however, judging by the dates that can be seen on the surviving tombstones, this is approximately the middle of the 18th century. For the first time it was documented on the maps of the Russian Empire from 1909, later it appeared on the Polish ones dated to the pre-war 1939.

The cemetery is still active today. It is enclosed on three sides by a stone wall approximately 1.5 m high and extends over 600 m, but a fence is required on the north side. It is noteworthy that the boundaries of the cemetery have remained unchanged since 1939. You can enter the cemetery through the metal gates located on the front and right side of the wall. The cemetery has no special sections and consists of an old and a new part. And if the latter is sufficiently well-groomed, then the former needs to be cleared. There are about 600 tombstones in the cemetery, however, there are also quite a lot of fragments - a significant part of the tombstones was destroyed during the Second World War or at different times by vandals. There is also a new ohel dedicated to Rabbi Yakov Yosef and Yehudi Leib. The ohel has three tziunims dedicated to Rabbi Shlome, Rabbi Aria Leib and Rabbi Abraham. In the neighborhood of the cemetery, several old wooden Jewish houses have been preserved, one of them houses the local synagogue.

There is a rumor that if you walk long enough among the old tombstones, then in the silence that envelops the territory of this old cemetery, you can hear sounds similar to the quiet reading of Kaddish, intertwined with the loud singing of a lark, hovering somewhere high above the old Jewish graves...