Narewka
Narewka is a village in Poland's Podlasie Province, Hajnówka County, Narewka Commune. The village is located near Poland's border with Belarus. Many of its residents belong to Poland's Belarusian minority.
The village has Catholic and Orthodox churches. It used to have a synagogue, but it was destroyed by the local Jewish population, angered after the Red Army, which had invaded Poland in 1939, desecrated the synagogue by turning it into a storage building. Most of the Jewish population perished in the Holocaust.
There was also a large population of Belarusians and/or the Eastern Orthodox and Jews. Jews first came into the area in 1690 and there were two Jewish cemeteries in the vicinity, one to the north of the marketplace and one in the district of Jałówka.
It is in one of five Polish/Belarusian bilingual Gmina in Podlaskie Voivodeship regulated by the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Languages, which permits certain gminas with significant linguistic minorities to introduce a second, auxiliary language to be used in official contexts alongside Polish.
