Map - Izbica

Izbica (איזשביצע Izhbitz, Izhbitze) is a town in the Krasnystaw County of the Lublin Voivodeship in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina administrative district called Gmina Izbica. It lies approximately 13 km south of Krasnystaw and 59 km south-east of the regional capital Lublin. It has a population of 1,933.

First mentioned in a church document from 1419, Izbica became a town in 1750, granted location privileges by Augustus III of Poland including the right of a Jewish settlement. Previously, the unconcluded city rights were issued in 1540 to Hetman Jan Tarnowski, who gave them back to the crown. In 1662 some 23 Catholics lived there. In 1744 the Jews of Tarnogóra were brought to Izbica by Antoni Granowski who secured the town privileges for them independently of the preexisting old settlement.

A notable centre of trade and commerce, with time the town became a shtetl inhabited almost entirely by Polish Jews. In 1760 the city charter was reaffirmed. After the partitions of Poland in 1772 Izbica was annexed by Austria-Hungary and then purchased back from the Austrian government by Ignacy Horodyski in 1808. It remained part of the Duchy of Warsaw until the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. Following the Congress of Vienna in June 1815 Izbica joined the Russian-controlled Congress Poland. The town was consumed by fire in 1825. In 1827 it had 51 houses and 407 inhabitants, all of them Jewish. By 1860 the population tripled to 1,450 Jews. In the 19th century the town was a notable centre of Hasidic Judaism, particularly thanks to the tzadik Grand Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, who was a disciple of Mendel of Kotsk, and his son Grand Rabbi Yaacov Leiner who established the Hasidic dynasty of Ishbitz. The Grand Rabbi Yaakov Leiner was the author of Beit Ya'akov and father of the Tzadik Gershon Chanokh Leiner of Radzyn. After the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russian Empire, in which many of the local inhabitants took part, the town was stripped of its city rights in 1869 for punishment, and attached to the nearby commune of Tarnogóra.