Jews’ burial site revamped

– 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 is more of a jungle,” says volunteer Stanislaw Knapowski.

“There’s a lot of wild vegetation and trees that have been growing since the end of the World War II,” explains this boy scout from Poznan in western Poland.

Over nine days last month, he cleared the cemetery grounds with 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 organisation, 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 organisation.

A witness to the pre-war 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 director Przemyslaw Szpilman.

In 1939, Jews made up more than 30% of Warsaw’s population of 1.2 million people, and numbered 3.5 million in Poland as a whole, or 10% of the country’s population.

Only 200 000 to 300 000 of them survived the Holocaust masterminded by Nazi Germany.

After the war, most of the Jewish survivors emigrated, with the last wave of departures taking place after an anti-Semitic campaign organised by the communist regime in 1968.

Today, there are about 30 Jewish organisations in Poland, which count some 7 000 members.

Poles of Jewish origin number several tens of thousands.

The Warsaw cemetery was partially destroyed during World War II as it was located in the Jewish ghetto where the Nazis conducted mass executions and blew up all the buildings.

“It wasn’t until the fall of communism in 1989 and the start of the revival of Warsaw’s Jewish community that the cemetery began to be looked after,” Szpilman said. –