POLONNOYE:

By: Herman Rosenthal, Peter Wiernik

Town in the district of Novograd, Volhynia, Russia. It was a fortified place in the middle of the seventeenth century, when about 12,000 Jews found there a refuge from the neighboring towns at the time of the Cossacks' Uprising.

Polonnoye had two well-known rabbis in the seventeenth century, Solomon Ḥarif and his son Moses, who later became rabbi of Lemberg (see Buber, "Anshe Shem," p. 160, and D. Maggid, "Zur Geschichte und Genealogie der Günzburge," p. 221, St. Petersburg, 1899); but the best-known occupant of the rabbinate was undoubtedly Jacob Joseph ha-Kohen (d. 1769), whose principal work, "Toledot Ya'aḳob Yosef" (Miedzyboz and Koretz, 1780, and numerous other editions), in which the teachings of R. Israel Ba'al Shem were first set forth in literary form, was burned in the synagogue-yard of Wilna when the war against Ḥasidism was commenced there.

Polonnoye had a Hebrew printing-office at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. The earliest work which is known to bear the imprint of that town is the responsa collection "Me'ir Netibim" (1791), by R. Meïr b. Ẓebi Margoliot; and the latest is Ḥayyim ibn 'Aṭṭar's "Rishon le-Ẓiyyon" (1809), on a part of the Bible.

At present (1905) the population of Polonnoye exceeds 10,000, about 50 per cent of whom are Jews.

H. R. P. Wi.