It is in one of five Polish-Belarusianbilingual regions 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.[3]
The village has Polish Catholic and Belarusian Eastern Orthodox churches.[citation needed] It used to have a synagogue, but it was burned down by the local Jewish population in 1940, angered after the Red Army, which had invaded Poland in 1939, desecrated the synagogue by turning it into a storage building. The vast majority of Narewka's once predominant Jewish community were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust in 1940.[4] In 2018, almost 80 years after the burning of the synagogue, a plaque was placed at the site in memory of Narewka's Jewish community. This came about as a collaboration between a local Polish high school and one in Israel.[4]
Narewka, due to its position near the Belarus–Poland border, has been a site of movement of migrants during the Belarus–European Union border crisis that began in 2021. A site in the woods near the village has served as a meeting point with drivers who hope to be able to drive migrants to other European Union countries.[5] There is no actual border crossing in the area, but it continued to be a node for refugees during the Ukrainian refugee crisis that began in 2022 as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[6]
Notable people
Leon Leyson (1929–2013), Polish-American Holocaust survivor
