The Associated Press runs a type of story that we often see reported from Poland — but this time it’s taking place in the Czech Republic.
That is, a project to recover headstones that had been uprooted from a Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Nazis and used for construction work.
The cemetery is question is the destroyed old Jewish cemetery in the town of Prostejov, in central Moravia, which was in use from 1801 until 1908. (There was an even older cemetery, which functioned until this cemetery was founded but was totally demolished in the 19th century.)
Before the Nazis took over, the Jewish community rejected proposals from City Hall to sell the site. After the transport to the Terezin concentration camp of nearly all the town’s 1,442 local Jews, as well as 250 others who came as refugees, the graveyard was doomed to destruction, said Marie Dokoupilova, a historian in the local museum. Only some 200 of those sent to Nazi camps survived the Holocaust, and most of them left the country to live in Israel and elsewhere. Today, there are less than a dozen Jews living in Prostejov.
Dokoupilova, who wrote the only Czech study about the site, said all 1,924 tombstones were desecrated, likely in 1943, and no documents are available to clarify their fate. The search for a site that disappeared such a long time ago in the wartime chaos looked like mission impossible at the beginning, said Tomas Jelinek, who is leading the cemetery effort.
After World War II, the site was used as a sports grounds and the site of an amusement park. Today it is a public park — a small commemorative monument marks the area as a historic Jewish cemetery.
After putting an announcement in the local press, AP reports, Jelinek, a former chairman of the Prague Jewish community, and his team received many tips of where to find stones. Since the project kicked off in July, they have recovered about 150 headstones and fragments of smashed stones. One of the finds was an entire backyard paved with about 50 tombstones.
The recovery project was spearheaded by the Brooklyn-based Hasidic businessman and philanthropist Louis Kestenbaum, Chairman of the Fortis Property Group, who has long been associated with Jewish cemetery preservation — his late father, Rabbi Zvi Kestenbaum, a Holocaust survivor, was the driving force behind the foundation of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of American’s Heritage Abroad. Rabbi Kestenbaum died, aged 92, in 2013.
Read the full AP story, with pictures
Photo: Pernak1 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Prostejov has a New Jewish Cemetery, founded in 1908 as part of the municipal cemetery after the closure of the Old Jewish Cemetery. It includes about 500 headstones and is listed as a cultural monument. According to the Prague Jewish community’s heritage site, it includes some stones transferred from the destroyed old cemetery.
The cemetery has an Art Nouveau ceremonial hall and a monument commemoration both Holocaust victims and Jewish soldiers who died in World War One. It recently underwent clean-up and restoration work.