City in Wielkopolska province, Poland; known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Pozna and in German as Posen. Poznań’s Jewish community was one of the earliest to be established on Polish soil; the first reference to Jews living in the town comes from 1379. While tradition dates the town’s synagogue to 1367, there is no documented evidence of its existence until 1449 (the cemetery, however, was first mentioned in 1438). In the second half of the fifteenth century, a legend declared that in 1399 some Jews in Poznań had committed a Host profanation. The same period also saw the establishment of Poznań’s famed yeshiva, known as Lomde Pozna.
