The cemetery on Pakosz Dolny Street was established in the second half of the 19th century due to the rapid growth of Jewish settlement in Kielce, the local religious community was confronted with the need to arrange a new burial site. Previously, the few Jews of Kielce buried their dead in the cemetery in nearby Chęciny. To this end, the land was purchased in 1868 within the Pakosz grange, at the junction of today's Pakosz Dolny and Kusocińskiego Streets. At the time, it was a plot of land outside the built-up area.

The first documented burial took place two years after the land for the cemetery was purchased. The Chevra Kadisha was responsible for burial arrangements and managed the cemetery. There was also a Chesed Shel Emes society in Kielce, which covered the funeral fees of the poorest and single people. In time, the pre-burial house, called Bet Tahara in Hebrew, was built, the caretaker's and gravedigger's flats were arranged, a fence was erected, and the access road was paved. The initially small graveyard was enlarged in the 1920s.

It is the final resting place of many people who played a significant role in the life of Kielce. In 1915, Chaim Shmuel Horowitz, known as the Tzadik of Chęciny, great-grandson of the great Seer of Lublin, was buried here, followed two years later by Motele Twerski (Mordechaj Kuzmirer), descended from the Chornobyl Hasidic dynasty. The graves of the two tzadikim have become a pilgrimage destination for many religious Jews.

In 1931, A book entitled Dom żywych (The House of the Living) was published, containing a list of tombstones from the Jewish cemetery in Kielce, made by Mosze Menechem Mendel, together with information on the prominent people who rest there.

During the Second World War, the Germans carried out numerous executions of the Jewish population in the cemetery. Jews who were murdered or died in the Kielce ghetto were also buried there. Let us quote a passage from Adam Helfand's memoirs, published in Eugeniusz Fąfara's book Gehenna ludności żydowskiej (Gehenna of the Jewish People). Helfand, forced by the Germans to collect the corpses of Jews shot during the liquidation of the ghetto from the streets, saw in the cemetery "feverish digging of huge pits to accommodate the bodies of the victims of this operation. (...) Before the corpses were buried, we had to strip them naked. Clothes were torched, and Nazi minions searched for gold in the ashes. Some of our comrades were coerced by terror and the threat of death to knock out the gold teeth of corpses"[1.1]. After the liberation, the remains of Jews, exhumed between 1945 and 1946 at various sites around the city, were buried in the cemetery.

On 8 July 1946, the burial ceremony for 37 victims of the Kielce pogrom took place at the cemetery. The coffins with the bodies were placed in a mass grave. The memorial service was attended by several thousand people, including representatives of domestic and foreign Jewish organizations, political parties, the army, militia and businesses. The state authorities were represented by Minister Stanisław Radkiewicz.

After the pogrom, Jews gradually left the city. Devastated during the occupation, the abandoned cemetery fell into obscurity and declined with each passing year. Mordechai Tsanin wrote the following about the involvement of the people of Kielce in the destruction of the cemetery in Księga Pamięci Kielc (The Book of Kielce): "After the Germans were driven away, they took upon themselves to destroy what the Germans had not yet destroyed. The latter had made it into an execution place. They had polluted the fence with Jewish gravestones. After the driving away of the Germans, Polish hooligans took to the fence and, in the course of several days, completely wrecked it.  Now the Jews have built a new fence and erected at the cemetery a memorial for the murdered Jews during the German occupation and during the pogrom"[1.2].

In 1954, the "22 Lipca" Worker Cooperative (Polish: Spółdzielnia Pracy "22 Lipca") in Kielce asked the local Presidium of the Provincial National Council (Polish: Prezydium Wojewódzkiej Rady Narodowej) to "transfer to it the Jewish cemetery in Kielce to be used, initially the part with a dilapidated building, for the storage of coal and raw materials and later developing this site by constructing factory buildings." The Head of Religious Affairs granted this application, stating: "The cemetery is fenced, with half of it occupied by graves; it is adjacent across the street to the factory, the factory is cramped, and there is no room for expansion on other lands apart from the cemetery. A brick building in the cemetery – the former cemetery management office – is in good condition and usable with a bit of renovation. Only a handful of graves are in the part of the cemetery immediately adjacent to the factory, where the building is located. It would not be too difficult to move the gravestones and bones"[1.3]. The letter advises of plans to erect a memorial made of tombstones, and its author asks that at least some of them be made available for use by the cooperative.

In 1956, the Social and Cultural Society of Jews in Poland, in a letter to the Presidium of the National Council of the City of Kielce, alarmed: "The cemetery is in deplorable condition; the wall is systematically dismantled, many of the graves were broken and scattered, the tombs are profaned, and the monument to the victims of the pogrom is desecrated with graffiti [1.4]. In the same year, Stefan Jarosz of the Department for Religious Affairs (Polish: Wydział do Spraw Wyznań) of the Kielce National Council reported in a confidential letter to the Religious Affairs Office that "the Jewish cemetery in Kielce was illegally occupied by the "22 Lipca" Work Cooperative, which set up a coal, coke, slag, sand and clay warehouse on the cemetery grounds. The management of the Cooperatives transformed the mortuary (...) into a model workshop" [1.1.4]. In 1965, the cemetery was officially closed by the authorities. A carpentry workshop was set up in the ohel where Kuzmirer and his nephew Moshe Yehuda Leib were buried.

In 1981, Monika Krajewska and Jan Jagielski described the condition of the site as follows: "The cemetery located on Pakosz Street, next to suburban houses. The cemetery must have once occupied a large area, now in ruins with a footpath bearing evidence of drinking bouts. A dozen standing tombstones, a polychrome bas-relief with four candles can be seen on one, otherwise few symbols. A large number (about 100?) of gravestones, their fragments and pieces of stone and concrete, collapsed in one place on something like a wall base made of concrete with protruding iron spikes. Broken pieces of the red sandstone monument commemorating the Kielce pogrom: 'Here lie the ashes of the 42 victims of the Kielce incident of 4 July 1946. Let them never be forgotten!' A fragment of a broken menorah carved in red sandstone is visible. The cemetery was overgrown with grass and some bushes, polluted. Not fenced"[1.5].

Krzysztof Kąkolewski vividly described the devastation of the cemetery in an article entitled Umarły cmentarz (Dead Cemetery), published in Tygodnik Solidarność  (no. 51, 16 December 1994): "In the 1970s, a second, terrible issue was unfolding: the order of the authorities – the Kielce communists referred to an order from Warsaw to desecrate the Jewish cemetery by transporting all the remaining matzevot (...). During martial law (...) a nearby military unit, on Sundays as a communal act, transported the matzevot in trucks to an unknown destination. The money for this came from the state defence budget. The tombstones were probably used as material in the construction of foundations, stairs; as pavements in the villas of the communist dignitaries."

In the spring of 1986, The Nissenbaum Family Foundation made efforts to have the boundaries of the cemetery surveyed and get permission to fence it off. Work began on 15 September 1986 and was completed in May 1987. The Foundation's staff cleared bushes, weeds and some trees and cleaned up rubbish and debris from the cemetery. A metal fence of approx. 1,000 running metres was built on a concrete foundation, and the monument to the victims of the Kielce pogrom was renovated. In addition, the Foundation has put up two other memorials of Holocaust victims. The opening ceremony of the restored cemetery in Kielce was scheduled for 23 August 1987, combining it with the 45th anniversary of the liquidation of the Kielce ghetto. It was attended by several hundred people, including representatives of the Catholic Church led by Bishop Henryk Muszyński. Later still, in 2007, thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Leib Surkis, among others, the ohel of Kuzmirer was restored. The funeral chapel building has been renovated and fenced off, tombstones placed inside, and an information board installed at the entrance.

To this day, several hundred matzevot and fragments of matzevot have been preserved in the cemetery, which were used to construct the monument and arranged in rows. Various walling and structural elements of destroyed tombs can be found within the cemetery. Attention is drawn to the memorial of the children of the labour camp on Jasna Street and Stolarska Street, exterminated in May 1943. It is a copy of the memorial funded in New York by the Association of the People of Kielce (Polish: Stowarzyszenie Kielczan). It bears the names of 42 victims and an inscription that reads: "Here lie the sacred ashes of our 45 dearest innocent children bestially murdered by German criminals on 23 May 1943. The youngest were between 15 months and 15 years old." There is also a monument in the cemetery with a plaque that reads: "In memory of the 29,000 inhabitants of Kielce of the Jewish faith sent to death camps on 21 August 1942 by the German occupiers." Both monuments have been created thanks to the Nissenbaum Family Foundation. 

The mass grave of the victims of the Kielce pogrom was initially marked with a simple matzeva on which the Star of David and an inscription in Hebrew and Polish were engraved: "Here lie the ashes of the 42 victims of the Kielce incident of 4 July 1946. Let them never be forgotten!" In July 2010, on the initiative of the Jan Karski Society and with the support of private individuals, a new tombstone monument was erected, designed by Prof. Marek Cecuła.

The cemetery is administered on behalf of the Jewish Community of Katowice by Bogdan Białek, President of the Jan Karski Society.