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| SIERPCER BRANCH The Town of Sierpc |
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| In what follows we present several facts on Sierpc. These facts have been extracted from the Memorial (Yzkor) Book of Sierpc. That document was prepared after the war to leave a testimony for all descendants of Sierpcers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The T in Sierpc  Probably the first T to live in Sierpc was Chaim Jonas Turkieltaub. Chaim was born in Plocz in 1805 and married in Sierpc in 1827. Records prior to 1826 have not been reviewed. When Chaim arrived to Sierpc the place was, as seen in Table I, a small, mostly Jewish town. Although some T left Sierpc, four generations of the family stayed there during a full century. A notable exception is Gedaliah Leibus Turkeltaub. He was a son of Chaim but was reported as born in Plock. There is no way to tell whether he was actually born in Sierpc or Plock. Gedaliah is important because most of the members of the branch who live in the USA are his descendants. Communications in the 19th century were poor. Further, there is no big place, apart from Plocz, near Sierpc. Plocz wasn't big either. Thus, to put the situation bluntly, while the T lived there, Sierpc was a tiny place in the middle of nowhere. |
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| A Brief History of Sierpc Sierpc is a very old town. As seen on the map, it is located 71 miles north west of Warsaw. In 1155, a document of king Boslav states mentions a castle in Sierpc. The Mazovian government operated in that castle. Mazovia is the name given to the region surrounding Plocz As regards to the control of Sierpc, the most important events and periods in the 19th and 20th century are shown in the chart that follows. |
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Control of Sierpc in the 19th and 20th century |
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| The Jews in Sierpc Jews identified the town with the name “Sheps”. This complicates genealogical searches. Indeed, one must first discover that "Sheps" is the same as "Sierpc". The first reference to Jews in Sierpc is
found in 1739 at the “Slownik Geograficzny Krolestwa Polskiego”
(Geographical dictionary of the kingdoms of Poland). This book says, among other things,
the following. An additional information about Jews in Sierpc can be found at the Jewish Encyclopedia. It states that in 1830 a government comitee decided to allow only those Jews that owned a house in Sierpc. The others had to leave. This prohibition was canceled in 1862. The Total and the Jewish populations of Sierpc are shown in the table that follows |
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| Table I: Sierpc Population | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The table shows that Sierpc was a Jewish place. Two thirds of the population was Jewish in 1800. Apparently, inhabitants of neighboring towns visited Sierpc because of the churches and because of the market. Jews settled in the town and opened businesses and factories there | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sierpc Today Jews from Sierpc were murdered during the war. Today, Sierpc is a 20,000 inhabitant city, with few vestiges of its Jewish past. |
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