Before World War II, about 25,000 Jews lived in Tarnów.
Jewsish presence was recorded as far back as the mid-fifteenth century.
A large portion of Jewish business in Tarnów was devoted to garment and hat manufacturing.
On September 8, 1939, immediately following the German occupation of Tarnow, German units burned down most of the city's synagogues on September 9 and drafted Jews for forced-labor projects.
Tarnów Jews fled to the east, while a large influx of refugees from elsewhere in occupied Poland continued to increase the town's Jewish population.
In early November, 1939, the Germans ordered the establishment of a Judenrat to transmit orders and regulations to the Jewish community, enforce special taxation on the community and provide workers for forced labor.
During 1941, the Germans imposed a large collective fine on the community.
Jews were required to hand in their valuables.
Roundups for labor became more frequent and killings became more commonplace and arbitrary.
In June, 1942, deportations from Tarnów began, when about 13,500 Jews were sent to the Belzec extermination camp.
During the deportation operations, German SS and police forces massacred hundreds of Jews in the streets, in the marketplace, in the Jewish cemetery, and in the woods outside the town.
After the June deportations, the Germans ordered the surviving Jews in Tarnów, along with thousands of Jews from neighboring towns, into a ghetto.
The ghetto was surrounded by a high wooden fence.
Living conditions in the ghetto were poor, marked by severe food shortages, a lack of sanitary facilities, and a forced-labor regimen in factories and workshops producing goods for the German war industry.
In September 1942, the Germans ordered all ghetto residents to report at Targowica Square, where they were subjected to a "Selektion" (selection) in which those deemed "unessential" were selected out for deportation to Belzec.
About 8,000 people were deported. Thereafter, deportations from Tarnów to extermination camps continued sporadically;
In November 1942, the Germans deported a group of 2,500.
During the 1942 deportations, some Jews in Tarnów organized a Jewish resistance movement, led by young Zionists in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement.
Many of those who left the ghetto to join the partisans fighting in the forests later fell in battle with SS units.
Others tried to establish escape routes to Hungary, but with limited success.
In September 1943, The Germans decided to destroy the Tarnów ghetto.
The surviving 10,000 Jews were deported, 7,000 to Auschwitz and 3,000 to the Plaszow concentration camp in Kraków.
In late 1943, Tarnów was declared Judenrein.
By the end of the war, the overwhelming majority of Tarnów Jews had been murdered by the Germans.
In 1945, Although 700 Jews returned, but some of them soon left the city.