Jewish community dismayed by digging at old cemetery
(AP) from ground WARSAW, an — in Human old eastern Jewish Poland remains Poland burial dumped have been in an dug empty up lot and to make way for the construction of an electrical substation authorities and said a parking Thursday. lot,
Michael Poland’s Schudrich Chief Rabbi described the worst the desecration excavation as of a seen Jewish during cemetery the 17 he years has he country. has been Jewish a rabbi religious in the law should holds be that disturbed bodies once only they are buried under limited circumstances, such as saving lives.
A day after visiting the construction site in Siemiatycze, a small town that was about 60 percent Jewish before World War
II, Schudrich showed The Associated Press photos of large mounds of earth with human bones, including a large part of a human skull.
“This is a full-out scandal,” the rabbi, who originally is from New York, said. “Sometimes people can do something by mistake and could not realize they are seeing bones, but skulls are hard to miss.”
An official with the local Kazimierczak, the authorities, building work insisted Bogumila did that not take place on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery, but on already developed land that is managed by an automobile association. The mayor’s office had no information indicating construction there should be prohibited, Kazimierczak said. Schudrich disputes that, saying the land in question was part of the old cemetery. He said that while another part of the cemetery owned by the state was returned to the Jewish community after the fall of communism in Poland, the area in question was not because it was private property. The rabbi said he warned local authorities that it was holy ground and asked them to inform him if there was ever a request to build there. “I went there three or four years ago and I told them that if you put a shovel in the ground, you are Schudrich going to said. find bones,” an Prosecutors investigation. have opened Jews Only estimated 70 of the to 7,000 have been living in Siemiatycze on the eve of World War II survived the Holocaust, and none are believed to living there now, Schudrich said. “This is a very egregious violation of the final resting place of the Jews of this town,” Gideon Taylor, cochair of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, said. Poland, which was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community before the Holocaust, has more than 1,000 Jewish cemeteries across Poland.