A clean-up operation in the old Jewish cemetery in Narew, southeast of Bialystok in eastern Poland near the border with Belarus, will take place Sept. 20, from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Virtual Shtetl reports that the meeting place for volunteers will be at the Narew Cultural Center, at 105 Mickiewicza Street.
The organizers cordially invite everyone interested to join the initiative, including citizens of Narew and the neighborhood of all ages who want the place to regain its respectability again. You are more than welcome to bring your own gardening equipment: trimmers, rakes, pruning shears, spades and protective gloves. A pair of helping hands is the most important though!
Virtual Shtetl and the International Jewish Cemetery Project note that there may only be about two dozen gravestones (a dozen standing upright) in the cemetery, which is very overgrown and at the edge of a forest about one kilometer from the village.
The graveyard was set up towards the end of the 19th century. Its borders are marked with concrete posts. After the end of the war, a part of Narew market square was paved with matzevos. In 1983, some headstones were unearthed during road works and then taken to the cemetery.
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The Kirkuty web site about Polish Jewish cemeteries notes that a clean-up operation in the Narew cemetery already took place in April 2006, with work carried out by inmates incarcerated in a nearby prison.
Meanwhile, a local news site in the town of Myslowice, in Silesia, ran an article and photos Sept. 6 about a clean-up operation in the abandoned, 18th century Jewish cemetery there by volunteers “armed with only bags, shears and rakes” that has been going on over the past month. Work is to continue in September, with prisoners and highschool pupils taking part. Once the grounds are cleaned up, plans will be drawn up about restoring gravestones.
Jewish Heritage Europe reported earlier this summer that the operation began August. 1, after alarm was raised in January over the condition of the cemetery by, among others, Małgorzata Płoszaj, a Śląsk Judaica researcher who collaborates with Virtual Shtetl. She wrote, in an open letter to authorities:
“I have seen many ruined cemeteries but I was shocked by what I have just seen in the Mysłowice graveyard. The cemetery is used by the locals as a dump fill, a place for drinking sprees and a place where you can dispose of all kinds of objects which the locals do not need anymore. I cannot find any explanation for such behavior of the local population, nor can I justify institutions which neighbor the cemetery, on which they regularly dumped leaves over the past years. There are also piles of leaves discarded by an adjacent senior high school. Heaps made of leaves cover tombstones of former Myslowice residents near the cemetery fence. Is this situation not a shame for the town? How can the locals explain themselves?.”
1 comment on “Jewish cemetery clean-ups in Poland”
I am looking for the gravestones of my great grandparents, Shepsel and Neche Slobodsky who lived in Narew from the 1880s to shortly before World War II. Any help would be appreciated.