Murowana Goślina is a town cherishing the moving and uplifting history of its multiculturalism - the common life and cooperation of Poles and Polish women, Jews and Jews, and Germans and German women. Before the Second World War, the Jewish community was an important part of the urban area alongside the German community with its own district, synagogue and cemetery. Here, in 1812, a well-known Jewish intellectual - the rabbi of Zielona Góra, Kościan and Opole - Adolf Wiener was born (he was not only an eminent scholar after his doctorate in philosophy in Berlin, but also a pragmatist who valued interfaith cooperation - historical sources state that the funeral ceremony was attended not only by Silesian rabbis, but also by local Catholic and Protestant clergy, city authorities and other residents).

The Jewish residents of Murowana Goślina were involved in trade, were active in the town council and celebrated their holidays. A watershed moment in the history of the Goślin kahal - the Jewish community - was a fire that broke out in the northern part of the town inhabited by Jews. In the "National Journal" (no. 318 of 15 May 1847) we read: "On the night of 5 May, the town of Murowana Goślina in the greater part became a post of flames; there is no further information about this misfortune. None of the people are reported to have lost their lives". Unfortunately, there was no volunteer fire brigade at that time, which was not established until 1888 (for many years its chief was a Pole, his deputy a German and his treasurer a Jew). It was the Jewish community that was most affected by the destruction caused by the fire. After the fire, about half of the Jewish residents left Murowana Goślina within a few years. Among those emigrating were Michael Simon Levy and Mark Meyerstein (born in Murowana Goślina in 1836). The young Michael and Mark found themselves in the United States. Michael Simon Levy settled in New York with his wife and children and created a hat business there. He developed it together with his sons (he had 10 children in total: six sons and four daughters) in Baltimore under the name M.S. Levy and Sons. He then created the world-famous straw hat with a black ribbon (I enclose a photo), which is still famous today. Gosliniak was involved with many Jewish organisations, including the Chizuk Amuno congregation, of which he even became president. He was active in the Hebrew Benevolent Society, helped organise the Hebrew Free Loan Association, and was a director of the Talmud-Torah Society and the United Hebrew Charities. He was a person of strong civic commitment - a true philanthropist, concerned about the plight of the Jewish Diaspora. Perhaps it was he or his peer Mark (who made a career as a lawyer overseas), who found themselves in New York at a similar time - who rescued a valuable document from the Goslin synagogue.

Contemporary fascinated by the history of Murowana Goślina had resigned themselves to the fact that all artefacts related to the Jewish community had been burnt down in the great fire of 1847. And here was a great surprise - more than 6,000 km in a straight line in Manhattan, New York, in the library of the Jewish Tehological Seminary, where I was conducting a scholarly search, I discovered the miraculously rescued Pinkas (Hebrew: chronicle; from Greek: pinaks = board; Yiddish. pinkes) - a manuscript from 1833 containing records of the history of the Jewish community in Murowana Goślina, matters relating to its internal system, minutes of its meetings covering the years 1814 - 1833. The handwritten notes in Yiddish are a tangible 'reminder' of those who were our neighbours and neighbours' and are a valuable source of local history.