[4] Administratively part of the Lesser Polish Voivodeship, it is situated 18 kilometres (11 miles) west of Gorlice and 83 km (52 mi) south-east of the regional capital Kraków.

By 1346, the town already had a parish church, and Bobowa at that time belonged to the Gryfita family (Gryf coat of arms).

In the mid-16th-century Bobowa emerged as a local center of the Protestant Reformation, and some time in the early 17th century, the town was purchased by the Jordan family.

Before the Holocaust in Poland, the town was home to a yeshiva, notable as a historic centre of Hasidism, created and led by the tsadik of the Bobov dynasty.

One of the few survivors, Professor Samuel P. Oliner of Humboldt State University, California, describes these events in his autobiography Restless Memories.

After the war Grand Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam (1907 – August 2, 2000) re-established the Bobov Hasidic dynasty in America.

Initially based in the neighbourhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York, it now has branches in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn; Monsey, New York; Linden, New Jersey; Montreal; Toronto; Antwerp; London and Israel and is under the leadership of Rabbi Shlomo's son Rabbi Ben-Zion Aryeh Leibish Halberstam.