Tidying up the tombstones
Project begins to restore largest Jewish cemetery in Europe
WARSAW, Poland — Wielding axes, rakes and shears, young European volunteers with sweat on their brows have been sprucing up the continent’s largest Jewish cemetery, a Warsaw site largely neglected since the Holocaust.
“At the cemetery’s entrance, the pathways are rather well kept and the graves well preserved, but the rest of it, like this spot here, is more of a jungle,” said Polish volunteer Stanislaw Knapowski.
“There’s a lot of wild vegetation and trees that have been growing since the end of the World War II.”
Over nine days last month, he cleared the cemetery grounds with around 60 other volunteers from a dozen countries, among them Belarusians, Danes, Finns, Germans and Spaniards.
They were recruited by Civil Service International, a global nonprofit organization, and its Polish branch, One World Association, to get involved in the cemetery project which was launched three years ago by the Cultural Heritage Foundation, a Polish nonprofit.
A witness to the prewar greatness of Warsaw’s Jewish community, the cemetery dates back to 1806 and spans 33.5 hectares. It is the resting place for about 250,000 people, mostly Warsaw elites, according to its director Przemyslaw Szpilman.
In 1939, Jews made up more than 30 percent of Warsaw’s population of around 1.2 million people, and numbered 3.5 million in Poland as a whole, or 10 percent of the country’s population.
Only 200,000 to 300,000 of them survived the Holocaust.
Today, the cemetery is still in operation, with about 20 burials each year.
Huge influence
“The Jewish community was an important part of Warsaw and had a huge influence on everyday life,” says for whom the cemetery is “a magical place”.
“It’s our job to take care of these sites, especially since the community today has neither the financial means nor the people to do it.”
Wearing work gloves, 18-year-old Zofia Dziekan, a Warsaw high-school student, uses pruning shears to cut down young maple trees and shrubs and to remove the ivy that has taken over — and sometimes entirely obscured — the tombstones, known to the Jewish community as “matzevot”.
“The vegetation makes it difficult to access a lot of the cemetery’s square footage. This year, thanks to the volunteers, we managed to clear up nearly three hectares,” said Aleksandra Waszak, 24, who is coordinating the project.
“The trees do damage to the tombstones. The roots cause them to overturn for example. On top of that, the vegetation makes the cemetery humid, which is really bad for stone.”
Another project on Facebook calls for volunteers every month or so to come help clean the cemetery grounds.
“Between 10 and 30 people come each time. Some are just interested in Jewish culture, others have ancestors buried here,” said Jacek Dehnel, a writer and group co-organizer.
“There’s so much left to do,” he said.
Szpilman says only about a quarter of the cemetery has been tidied up and restored so far, despite the volunteer work and interest from several organizations.
“It’s a really long process that will take decades. I hope I’ll be around to see it through.”
It’s a really long process that will take decades. I hope I’ll be around to see it ...” Przemyslaw Szpilman, the cemetery’s director