It’s summer time and the season for Jewish cemetery volunteer clean-up operations is under way — in Poland, in Ukraine, in other countries.
There is a regular “clean-up Sunday” program for the vast Okopowa Street Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, a 33-hectare expanse where as many as 200,000 people lie buried. The Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland has documented just over 82,000 of these graves.
BBC has run a special report on this operation — showing in what it takes to document and clean up this cemetery, which, despite much work in recent years is still largely overgrown.
it is a million miles in space and time from the city’s slick glass towers and ticking pedestrian crossings. Birds dart between tall acacias and maple trees. Nature has got the upper hand on once-imposing 19th Century sepulchres. In some places, sandstone headstones look like they’re drowning in waves of pale green creepers. Time, here, is measured by the speed at which ivy grows.
The BBC correspondent. Alex Duval Smith, joined a group of volunteers.
Alicja Mroczkowska, one of the organisers, hands out gardening gloves. We’ve a choice of rakes and shears for implements. Alicja says the less energetic ones among us can do the railings. She decants black rustproof paint into small pots.
The story also reports on the motivations that bring a “little army of plucky volunteers with packed lunches, a wheelie bin and a wheelbarrow” — Jewish, non-Jewish and people who aren’t sure of their heritage — to carry out this work.
Monika, who is blonde and blue-eyed, has been researching her family’s history. She points at her tanned forearm. ”Look at my olive skin. I have found a picture of the sisters of my great, great grandfather. We think they were Jewish. I look so much like them.”
2 comments on “Poland: What’s it like to volunteer to clear up a Jewish cemetery?”
I would like to volunteer. How can I contact the organizers?
They usually announce the event on Facebook. If you are on FB, you can get on the mailing list. https://www.facebook.com/events/279693399041613/
Otherwise, contact the Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, whose link is in the JHE post