Jewish cemetery notes…. recent clean-ups, guided tours, vandalism….
VIENNA:
About 60 volunteers staged a clean-up action at Vienna’s disused and overgrown Währinger Jewish cemetery on Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day, organized by the Green Party. The action was part of a regular series of clean-up days and guided tours at the cemetery.
The Jewish community of Vienna, which owns the cemetery, “cannot be expected to use its limited resources for the dead at the expense of the living,” said Marco Schreuder, who began recruiting volunteers for the cleanup operations a decade ago when he was a city counselor for the Green Party. The community has only 7,500 members; it once was 200,000 strong.
Despite its condition, “this cemetery is the final resting place of some of the founders of Vienna as we know it, people this city owes a lot to,” he added.
See a video about the cemetery
WARSAW:
A fund-raising event took place Nov. 2 at Warsaw’s vast Okopowa street Jewish cemetery, followed by a guided tour led by pioneer Jewish heritage researcher Jan Jagielski of the Jewish Historical Institute.
TRONDHEIM, NORWAY:
Several gravestones and the ceremonial hall in the Jewish cemetery in Trondheim were daubed with graffiti, the Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten reported. The vandalism was discovered Oct. 25.
ATHENS:
The Holocaust memorial in Athens, Greece, which was erected in 2010, was spray painted with graffiti by the far-right by the far-right group “Unaligned Meander Nationalists.” The vandalism was condemned by government and Jewish leaders. The Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki was vandalized in May.