Are you on Facebook? If so, you can help decide on the restoration of a grave monument in the vast Okopowa st. Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
The Foundation for Cultural Heritage has launched a Facebook campaign to choose the monument it will work on this coming year.
If you go to its Facebook event page, you can find pictures of 10 grave monuments that need restoration work. Between now and November 9, click the “Like” button — 👍 — under the picture of monument you would prefer to see restored, and the Foundation will choose which one to work on, on the basis of the number of “likes.”
(As of this post, the “winner” so far is the monument to the Landau family, pictured above).
Last year, the Foundation restored 24 grave monuments in the cemetery that were designed by the pre-World War II sculptor Abraham Ostrzega, born in 1889, who was noted for his tombstone sculpture. He was deported from the Warsaw ghetto and was killed at the Treblinka death camp during the Holocaust. The restoration work was funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
An “Ostrzega” educational path through the cemetery was traced, and Ostrzega’s works formed the inspiration of an exhibition at Warsaw’s Zacheta art galley, January-March 2016. (See a downloadable map of the tombs by Ostrzega in the cemetery HERE.)
The Okopowa st. Jewish cemetery stretches over around 33 hectares and includes scores of thousands of graves, whose monuments range from simple matzevot, to grand mausolea, to striking sculptural representations. Much of the site is overgrown, but regular volunteer clean-up actions are held to cut back vegetation and carry out other maintenance. The Foundation organized one such action this past summer.