Hungary: students clean up part of Budapest’s vast Kozma utca Jewish cemetery

This past Sunday morning, October 27, 15 students from a Jewish highschool in Budapest gathered at the Kozma street Jewish cemetery in Budapest for the first clean-up and documentation day organized by the Friends of the Budapest Jewish cemetery, a nonprofit organization established in 2016 to clean and maintain Budapest’s — and Europe’s — largest Jewish cemetery.

JHE Contributor Michele Migliori took part — here’s his report.

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Established in 1891, the Budapest Jewish cemetery located on Kozma street is the largest Jewish cemetery in  Europe, with a total area of around 71 hectares and more than 300.000 burials. However, as we wrote last spring, more than two-thirds of the cemetery’s area “is overgrown with bushes, trees, vines and forest,” as it has been neglected since World War II.

The Friends of  the Budapest Jewish Cemetery aims not only to clean and restore the cemetery, but also to raise awareness within the local Jewish community, especially by involving its youngest members. For this reason the organization coordinated and planned the October 27 clean-up session along with the Scheiber Jewish school. The school, founded in 1919, is run by the Jewish community and is one of several Jewish schools in Budapest.

The students who participated at Sunday’s event, aged between 15 and 18 years old, signed up for a 3-hour long session at the cemetery. The event started at 10am with a brief introductory talk by Michael Perl, co-founder of the Friends of the Budapest Jewish Cemetery, who highlighted the importance of the clean-up for the cemetery and explained the different tasks to be fulfilled over the morning.

After the introduction, we then moved to section number 22, which before the completion of works by the nonprofit earlier this year had been totally overgrown by bushes, with the gravestones  barely recognizable.

This section has 49 rows, with around 40 tombstones each. The gravestones date from the 1930s to the early 1990s, and some of them are still in good condition; family members take care of them, and we were able to meet and chat with some of them during the clean-up. However, some gravestones are scarcely readable, and in a few cases, the names have been completely eroded.

The students were divided into three groups: the first was in charge of  documentation, consisting of taking pictures of the gravestones that will be uploaded on the cemetery’s digital database. The second group was in charge of cleaning the rows, picking up what the Friends of the Budapest Jewish Cemetery described as “vast amounts” of garbage from the area. Finally, the last group was in charge of re-painting the stones that mark the row numbers.

Each group was led by a volunteer: I was one of them – the others were Michael Perl himself; a local activist, David Feiner; and Istvan Balogh, a former teacher at the Scheiber school who is now a professor at the Jewish University/Rabbinical seminary in Budapest. The tools used for the clean-up and painting, such as gloves, garbage bags, brushes, and paint were provided by the nonprofit.

In three hours of work, the students photographed around 1,000 gravestones  (25 rows) and repainted some 147 stone markers. They demonstrated great interest and motivation in fulfilling their assigned tasks and sharing their ideas. They really got into it!

During the cleanup, several people who had come to the cemetery to visit their relatives’ graves stopped by to ask about what we were doing, as they had never seen anyone — especially youngsters — cleaning and painting the markers on a Sunday morning. After explaining to them  what we were doing, they were clearly touched and expressed their gratitude.

Indeed, giving something to someone who cannot give anything in return was the essence of the clean-up. But it was also a time to reflect,  look back on, and reconcile with history. A time to pay respect to those murdered between 1944-1945 in the Ghetto of Budapest, some of whose gravestones are also found in section 22.

Unfortunately, due to the weather conditions forecast for the upcoming weeks, this was probably the first and last clean-up session of the year – it had already been postponed once because of weather. However, since this was the very first clean-up event run by the nonprofit, the initiative gave the organizers the opportunity to understand how to develop such events in the future.

They want to involve other schools and academic institutions in the clean-up sessions, and also to expand the scope of the activities.

The day after the event with the Scheiber school students,  U.S. ambassador to Hungary David B. Cornstein and his wife visited the cemetery at the invitation of Pinter and Perl, who described to them the clean-up project and other plans.

Click here to see more pictures