An anonymous Polish benefactor is financing the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in Zywiec, in southern Poland. Volunteers organized on Facebook cleaned up the devastated Jewish cemetery in Czechowice-Dziedzice. More than 300 gravestones are uprighted, cleaned, and documented during this summer’s volunteer action at the Bagnowka Jewish cemetery in Bialystok….
These are just some of the results of Jewish cemetery restoration and clean-up operations this summer in Poland.
In Zywiec, the local Bielsko-Biala edition of the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper reported that a few months ago Dorota Wiewiora, the head of the tiny Jewish Religious Community in Bielsko-Biala, contacted a private entrepreneur from Żywiec to ask if he could help clean up the cemetery — which is one of about a dozen under the Bielsko-Biala community’s jurisdiction. Seriously damaged in WW2, it had fallen into further disrepair due to neglect, vandalism, and theft of gravestones, despite some renovation carried out in 2002.
“I thought he would mow the grass, take care of the greenery and do other such simple works,” Gazeta quoted Wiewiora as saying.
Instead, the entrepreneur — who prefers to remain anonymous — contacted the local conservator and launched what the paper call a “gigantic” operation to restore the cemetery, which includes about 500 gravestones. The newspaper estimated that costs could run into hundreds of thousands of zlotys (more than €100,000).
From April, ten people worked the the cemetery every day. They clean up the area, repair the fence, and erect matzevot that had collapsed on the ground. The tombstones are renovated and then re-embedded on pedestals.
Work is said to be on track to be completed in September.
We already mentioned the volunteer action at the Bagnowka cemetery in Białystok in a round up of cemetery actions in several countries that we published at the beginning of August.
The weeklong annual summer cemetery work camp there concluded August 18.
Prof. Heidi M. Szpek, an expert on the cemetery, reported on Facebook that for a week, around 40 volunteers with the Białystok Cemetery Restoration Project (BJCP), together with a Berlin-based American Friends Service Committee student group, and with assistance from local volunteers, “labored in this mutual endeavor. This spirit of mutual cooperation sustained our physical efforts as we both mended torn memory and made memories anew.”
The 300 stones that were uprighted, cleaned, painted when necessary, and documented represented a total of nearly 1,000 stone restored from 2016-2018 via the BJCP. “With this restoration, the dignity of this Jewish religious institution has also returned,” she wrote. See more details and photos on the BJCP Facebook page.
Last year Prof. Szpek, the author of a book about the Bagnowka cemetery, wrote a special report for JHE detailing the ongoing restoration work at the cemetery.
Here’s a video of the work this month — click to watch full frame to see the entire video:
In Czechowice-Dziedzice, the volunteer cemetery restoration was spearheaded by Sławek Pastuszka, a teacher and former education project coordinator at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, who launched a clean-up appeal in April on Facebook.
Over the following two months, he wrote, four clean-up sessions by more than a dozen volunteers were held at the devastated 19th century cemetery, which is believed to only have two dozen surviving grave markers. They cleared the site of vegetation, garbage, and rubble and revealed gravestones. The project, Pastuszka wrote on Facebook, was aided by a grant of 2,700 zlotys from the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute, in part to finance erection of information signage at the site.
Here is a before and after comparison, grabbed from Pastuszka’s Facebook page:
See the round-up on cemetery clean-ups we published August 1
Read the Gazeta article on Zywiec