Leaving the Grodzka Gate, we cross the bridge leading towards the castle. In the past, Zamkowa Street used to run in its place and the Jewish Quarter in Podzamcze stretched around it.The space in here looks completely different than it used to. There is a huge oval car park, Plac Zamkowy (Castle Circus), to the north of the bridge. On the south, there is a green lawn, cut through with a path running in the place of the former Krawiecka Street. The Lamp of Memory is situated here, still lit as a ner tamid, to commemorate the memory of the destroyed Jewish quarter and its inhabitants.It is not known when Jews came to Lublin. According to tradition, this happened during the reign of King Casimir the Great (1310-1370), yet the oldest known document testifying the presence of a Jewish community in the city comes from 1453, when King Casimir IV Jagiellon (1427-1492) granted the Lublin Jews the right of free trade. The Jews had the status of “servants of the Royal Treasury'' in medieval Polish class society, and thus the Jewish Quarter sprang up in the proximity of the castle, on land owned by the King, and outside the city walls. The Podzamcze quarter, where the Jews settled, (the word Podzamcze means “by the castle” in Polish) was a so-called jurydyka (from Latin iurisdiction, or jurisdiction), an administrative entity, privately owned, that was exempt from the town’s jurisdiction. With time, Podzamcze gained its own town privileges and had its own council and mayor. It was also inhabited by Christians, yet Jews made up a prevailing majority of its residents.