The history of Jewish settlement in Nowy Wiśnicz was directly connected with the situation in Bochnia at the turn of the 17^th century. In 1600, a group of men was tried for stealing the host from the local church. One of the accused was a Jew, Jakub, who had fled the town before the trial started. The entire Jewish community was chastised. They were ordered to find Jakub and bring him back to Bochnia. However, this proved impossible as nobody knew what had happened to him. Some said he had fled abroad and disappeared without a trace. In 1606, the townspeople of Bochnia asked King Sigismund III to issue a decree banishing the local Jewish community. The Jews were given 12 weeks to settle their affairs and leave the town. Most of them found shelter in Nowy Wiśnicz, where they were taken under the custody of the owner of the town, Duke Lubomirski.

At the time, many private towns sought to attract Jewish people, wishing to give a boost to the local trade and develop crafts. Stanisław Lubomirski encouraged people of all classes to settle in Nowy Wiśnicz. For those who decided to settle on his estate, he provided free wood from his forests for house construction.

The Jews quickly accommodated to their new location. They erected a synagogue and formed an official Jewish community. The kehilla employed rabbis, judges, and teachers. Unfortunately, frequent conflicts broke out between the Jews and the local Christians, at times escalating to theft or even murder. In 1646, Jewish butcher Icek was accused of murdering Wojciech Paducha. As the Jews were under the jurisdiction of the owner, the trial took place at the castle. The culprit was to pay 59 grzywnas to the victim’s widow and child and was prohibited from practicing his former profession.

In the second half of the 17^th century, the town owner introduced restrictions on Jewish trade in furriery. At first, the local Jews lived in the specially designated Żydowska [Jewish] Street, but very soon they started to buy plots in other parts of the town, including the Market Square. Eventually, Helena Lubomirska decided to ban Jewish people from settling in the main square of the town. The prohibition did not remain in force for long, as mere several years later Jews once again started to buy plots of land outside the designated quarter. Over the following years, further restrictions were imposed on the Jewish population, e.g. on the production of vodka. Despite these obstacles, Nowy Wiśnicz soon came to be the most Jewish town in this part of Galicia, often referred to as the local Jerusalem.

Just like in other towns in the region, the Jews of Nowy Wiśnicz were mainly involved in trade and crafts. A man called Giec gained fame as the personal jeweller of Duke Lubomirski. The Christians often took issue with the economic activities of the Jewish population, with their complaints resulting in various restrictions imposed on the latter. One of them was a ban on making purchases at fairs and markets before Christians.

In 1765, Nowy Wiśnicz had 979 Jewish residents. No information has been preserved on the local Jewish education, but it can be assumed that it was poorly developed, as was the case for the entire region of Galicia in the 18^th century. There were just a handful of localities with chadarim which offered a very limited education, consisting mainly in reading and writing in Hebrew and basic religious knowledge. Nonetheless, Wiśnicz was home to a well-known rabbi, Eliahu ben Yehuda Loeb. He received his education outside the town and abroad. At the end of the 17^th century, he left for Fulda (Germany) and wrote commentaries to the Talmud.

Jews were also hampered by their lack of knowledge of Polish. They used Yiddish among themselves and very few spoke the language of their neighbours fluently, among them Jewish teachers.

The situation of Jews worsened after the First Partition of Poland in 1772. The Austrians targeted them with numerous restrictions, including limitations on the number of marriages and ban on wearing headgear.

There are no preserved sources documenting the life of the Jewish community in Nowy Wiśnicz in the first half of the 19^th century. The earliest event mentioned in documents was the fire which broke out in the Jewish district in 1863. The blaze consumed many Jewish houses, the post office, the church, the vicarage, the town hall, and two synagogues. Many families were left with no roof over their heads. Numerous Jews moved to Bochnia, whose previous ban on Jewish settlement had been lifted in 1860. In addition, Bochnia had much more potential for growth and a better economic standing than Nowy Wiśnicz.

The Jews who stayed in Nowy Wiśnicz struggled to rebuild their houses for several years. Seven years later, there were two synagogues in the town – one that had partially survived the fire and one erected at the site of the destroyed one. There were also several houses of prayer organised in private flats. The new synagogue was a stone and brick three-nave building with a groin vault supported by four pillars. The women’s gallery was located in the side aisles. The community also ran a hospital for the poor and a mikveh at Berka Joselewicza Street. Water was delivered to the bathhouse through wooden pipes.

The local Christian population would snide at and ridicule the use of the Jewish language (Yiddish). However, the unpleasantries hardly ever escalated to acts of active aggression. Only a handful of isolated incidents were recorded in the 1870s, among others in Wiśnicz Nowy and in Mielec. In the summer of 1870, Nowy Wiśnicz witnessed two cases of “holidaymakers assaulting Jews,” but thanks to the intervention of the local gendarmerie, the conflict was nipped in the bud and order was restored.

Throughout its history, Nowy Wiśnicz was divided into a Christian town and a Jewish town. However, their lives intertwined constantly. It was the Jews who supplied paper to the town chancellery, candles to light the town hall, and stone for paving roads. For the first time in 1905, they introduced their representatives to the Municipality Council, which was quite a novelty. Among the 24 councillors, 10 were Jews.

One of the most difficult tasks of the Municipality Council was to reconcile the interests of both social groups, the Christians and the Jews. When the Jewish community asked for money from the fine fund to renovate their hospital, priest Andrzej Sękowski protested. He believed that it was not right to allocate common money for the renovation of a building belonging to only one group of residents. He suggested filing an application with the Bochnia District Department to grant Nowy Wiśnicz twice the amount needed, so that it could be divided equally between Christians and Jews. This solution was eventually adopted. The relationship between the two ethnic groups is also reflected in the legal regulations concerning the Jewish community. Jews were forbidden to conduct trade on church holidays and obliged to remove Sabbath wires – the so-called eruvim – stretched along the streets of the city, which, according to the Catholics, obstructed their religious rituals, such as processions and funerals. The issue of eruvim resurfaced many times. Jews were eventually allowed to run the wires along the roofs of Jewish houses on side streets.

In 1880, Nowy Wiśnicz had a population of 3,773 people, including 1,394 Jews. The last decade of the 19^th century saw a large wave of Jewish emigration, especially from small Galician towns. Nowy Wiśnicz experienced the same phenomenon. As many as 75 families, most of them Jewish, left the town in the 1890s. The average family size in a Galician town was five people, so we can estimate that about 350–400 people left Wiśnicz in the years 1891–1900, 35–40 inhabitants per year on average, which constituted ca. 1% of the whole population. Ca. 250 people emigrated to Germany (to Bavaria and Brandenburg) and found employment in trade. The rest moved to the Karwińsko-Ostrowskie Basin, where they ran public houses. Entire families were leaving the town for good, which resulted in many houses in Wiśnicz being deserted. The trend persisted in the early 20^th century. The main cause of migration was the dire economic situation of the town. Preserved consistory surveys from the Tarnów Diocese, conducted in the years 1907–1910, reflect the scale of emigration from Nowy Wiśnicz. According to the documents, in 1907, 47 people permanently migrated overseas and 152 more left for seasonal work, among them 30 went to Denmark and 100 to Cieszyn Silesia.

In the 1880s, only 40% of the local Jewish children subject to compulsory education attended public school. Most of them were only educated in chadarim, with about ten such schools operating in Nowy Wiśnicz. The cheder teachers were only allowed give classes on religion and the Talmud. They were punished for teaching children to read and write in Polish. As a result, Jewish children generally did not know Polish at all. Seeking to remedy this state of affairs, Maurycy Hirsz became active in Galicia and Bukovina at the turn of the 20^th century. His goal was to promote education among Jews. His foundation helped open 40 schools, including a three-grade school in Nowy Wiśnicz. In 1900, its headmaster was Mojżesz Fruchtman, and among the teachers were Iziasz Nadler and Celestyna Gutwald. According to information from the years 1913–14, the school had its own building. Operating in a three-grade system, it was attended by 134 students. The headmaster at that time was Salomon Rosshandle, the assistants were Berisch Mechlowicz and Szymon Stendig.

In 1910, as many as 33% of the members of the Nowy Wiśnicz religious community lived outside the town. In 1921, this percentage decreased to 30%. Preserved statistical data includes information on the percentage of the Jewish population in relation to the town’s total population. In 1910, Jews constituted 55% of all inhabitants (1,278 people), and in 1921 – 48% (1,812). In the interwar period, ca. 1,300 Jews lived in Nowy Wiśnicz, constituting 47% of the total population. The community maintained two synagogues.

In 1910, most of the local craftsmen were Christians (76.7%), with Jews constituting 23.3%. However, trade was a chiefly Jewish domain, as the community was responsible for as much as 96.8% of the entire commercial activity in the town. Throughout the interwar period, Jews from Nowy Wiśnicz bought 18 trade certificates and two industrial certificates in the Kraków Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Jewish kehillot, which were primarily religious communities, were only able to function well when it had rabbis, scribes, teachers, mohalim, and other officials at its disposal. This was the case in Nowy Wiśnicz. The so-called rabbinical house stood opposite the synagogue until the outbreak of World War II. It was inhabited by Naftali Rubin, son of the rabbi of Korczyn. He was appointed chief rabbi of Nowy Wiśnicz in 1892. Among other people providing religious services was also Dalaman Halbersztam, member of the famous Hasidic dynasty. The majority of rabbinical officials in the Krakowskie Province were Hasidim, associated primarily with the Halbersztam or Horowitz tzaddikim. The religious life of the Jews of Nowy Wiśnicz was not limited to observing the Sabbath, holding common prayers, and celebrating holidays. They also contributed to fundraisers for the construction of synagogues in poorer religious communities. On New Year's Day and the Day of Atonement, they made pilgrimages to Nowy Sącz, where the manor house of Rabbi Chaim Halbersztam, renowned in entire Galicia, was located.

A tally of election results in Jewish religious communities in the years 1919–1926 includes information on the 1925 vote in Nowy Wiśnicz. A total of 79 people were eligible to vote. Orthodox Jews won nine seats and unaffiliated candidates – six seats. The other groups, that is the Zionists and the Reform Jews, did not manage to win any seats. Chaim Dräger and Koper Spira sat on the municipal committee during the election.

Before World War II, there were ca. 1,000 Jews living in Nowy Wiśnicz. During the Nazi occupation, a forced labour camp operated in the town. It was established in December 1939 on the premises of the former jail. The prisoner population included people of Jewish origin, transported to Nowy Wiśnicz from Kraków, Jasło, Tarnów, and other localities. Most of the camp inmates were doctors, lawyers, students, academic workers, and priests. They were exploited as free labour in camp workshops and on estates outside the camp. As a result of harsh living conditions and periodical executions, over a hundred prisoners died or were killed. The camp was liquidated in June and July 1940. The prisoners were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in several rounds. The Jewish community of Wiśnica was annihilated in the summer of 1942. Some Jews were murdered on the spot, others were deported to the extermination camp in Bełżec. After the deportations, the occupier started to erase all remaining traces of their presence in the town. Both local synagogues were pulled down in 1943.

The restrictions and repressions against the Jewish population were met with resistance, especially among the youth. In 1941, the Jewish Combat Organisation started to train its members to conduct partisan operations against the occupiers. They did so under the pretext of running a farm in Kopaliny. Their headquarters were in Kraków, but the Bochnia cell, which also included people from Nowy Wiśnicz, remained in constant contact with their superiors. However, the organisation was denounced in 1943.