[4] The cemetery was opened in 1780 by Szmul Zbytkower, a Polish Jewish merchant and financier, who donated the land for that purpose[1][4] (though he benefited from selling burial rights and other "arbitrary exactions" afterward).

[2] Since the 1870s the cemetery was administered by the local Jewish council, which refocused it on the burials of impoverished Jewry; this marked the beginning of the deterioration of the facilities.

[2] The cemetery suffered from a lot of destruction during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II, both due to the German administration's purposeful use of the cemetery as a source of building material and due to collateral damage from the war.

[1][2] After the war it was the site of the mass burial of Jewish fatalities exhumed during the rebuilding of Warsaw; it was officially closed in 1950.

City council representatives in 2010 noted that their first priority is protecting the cemetery from vandalism, and restoration is secondary to that.