JTA reports that the City of Warsaw “has agreed to return and preserve 1,000 Jewish headstones that were used to construct a recreational facility inside one of the city’s parks.” They were used to build a pergola and stairs in a park in the city’s Praga district.
It quotes Jonny Daniels, the U.K.-born director of an Israel-based commemoration nonprofit called From the Depths, as saying that the city had “allocated a budget of $180,000 for the project.”
According to a statement from From the Depths quoted by JTA, the gravestones will be returned in the coming months to the historic but devastated Bródno Jewish Cemetery in Praga, the oldest preserved Jewish burial place in Warsaw. It was announced in April 2014 that the Bródno Jewish cemetery would undergo a $1 million restoration to be overseen by the Warsaw Jewish Community.
One of the aims of From the Depths’ Matzeva Project is to seek out the many Jewish gravestones around Poland that were uprooted by the Nazis or under post-WW2 communism and used for building construction and other purposes, and to return them to Jewish cemeteries. Among the project’s partners are the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) and the Rabbinic Commission of Cemeteries in Poland.
The Polish photographer Łukasz Baksik has photographed many of these stones — including the pergola in the Praga park — and his photos formed the basis of an exhibition (and book) called “Matzevot in Everyday Use.” Some of the pictures can be viewed online.
It’s not the first time that Jewish headstones have been found and returned to the Bródno cemetery.
In April, 2011, Krzysztof Bielawski of Virtual Shtetl noticed that the wall of the Soviet army section of the main Bródno cemetery had been made of Jewish gravestones. After the situation was made public in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, the wall was dismantled and the matzevot were transported to the Jewish cemetery.