The building is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. It was founded in 1533. The oldest preserved tombstones come from 1552. In Poland, older Jewish tombstones have survived only in Wrocław, Lesko, Szczebrzeszyn and Lublin.
In 1572, Moshe, the son of Izrael Isserles, called Remu from the first letters of the words Rabbi Moshe Isserles, was buried in the cemetery. Remu was a Krakow rabbi, an outstanding Talmudist and the author of commentaries to the Szulchan Aruch codex collected in the work Ha-Map, which largely shaped the customs of Ashkenazi Jews.
In 1800, the cemetery was closed by order of the Austrian authorities, which liquidated all old downtown cemeteries in Krakow for health reasons. Despite this, the dead were buried here from time to time until the middle of the 19th century.
During World War II, the cemetery was destroyed. There is a garbage dump on its premises. Only a few of the hundreds of matzevot have survived, including the tombstone of Mojżesz Isserles. Pious Jews took this as further evidence of the miraculous power of the saintly rabbi.
After the war, restoration and archaeological works were carried out in the cemetery in several stages. During this work, about 700 tombstones were found, arranged in a row. Most of them are not at the actual burial site. Fragments of broken matzevot have been incorporated into the wall surrounding the cemetery.
There are two types of tombstones in the cemetery. The first of them are tomb tombstones (also called sarcophagus ones), which attract attention with their hip, trapezoidal shape. There are also those that resemble a lying cylinder (for example, a group of several such tombstones in a row adjacent to the corner of the Remuh synagogue). The second type of tombstones are tombstones in the form of free-standing slabs.
At the back of the synagogue, within a small fence, there are the graves of: Moses Isserles called Remu and his family.
