Days after a vandal attack that toppled dozens of headstones in the Jewish cemetery in Namestovo, Slovakia, the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF) announced that the European Commission has awarded €1 million to a consortium it leads to continue the drone-assisted mapping and surveying of Jewish cemeteries in Europe.
The consortium also includes the Vienna-based NGO Centropa, and the UK-based Foundation for Jewish Heritage (FJH). According to the ESJF, they are to “work towards the goals of the project throughout the next 18 months.”
Called “Protecting the Jewish cemeteries of Europe: Continuation of the mapping process, stakeholders’ involvement and awareness raising” (EAC/S10/2019),” the project expands the geographical scope and ambition of the pilot project currently undertaken by the ESJF, which has entailed mapping and surveying 1,500 Jewish cemeteries in Greece, Moldova, Slovakia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
Under the new project, a further 1,500 cemeteries will be mapped, in 7 countries: Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine.
The announcement states:
The surveys will be conducted by UVAs (commonly known as drones), and the resulting data will be used to develop 3D models to facilitate the creation of ready-made and fully-costed construction models in the coming years. Survey results will be displayed in an open access, publicly available database developed in the previous pilot project. Historical overviews will be written for each site by academic historians. A key addition to the previous pilot is a stronger focus on stakeholder engagement: bringing together local and national public institutions, NGOs and private bodies to jointly protect Jewish cemeteries, identifying best practices in the process. Educational work will expand as well, training educators and engaging students to become guardians of their own local, multi-cultural heritage.
The vandal attack on the Jewish cemetery in Namestovo, Slovakia, discovered early this week, was the latest in a spate of recent high-profile incidents targeting Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and memorial sites.
Sporadic attacks on Jewish cemeteries have, of course, been carried out for many years.
It is important to respond to them — but it is also important to remember that far more Jewish cemeteries are being cleaned-up, restored, preserved, and documented (carried out or financed by individuals, civic groups, Jewish communities, state, EU and local authorities) than suffer headline-grabbing attacks.
There are 10,000 or more Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Isolated and often neglected, Jewish cemeteries located in places where there is no longer a Jewish community to use or care for them make particularly easy targets.
Some attacks — such as in Westhoffen, France earlier this month, where dozens of headstones were daubed with swastikas — are clearly the work of antisemites. Others have been carried out by drunks or vagrants, or by teenagers or hooligans whose idea of fun is destruction, without any other specific agenda .
The question is how, if possible, to prevent such attacks? And also, importantly, what is the response by authorities, by law enforcement, by civic groups, and by the local citizenry.
Another factor is the intangible damage such attacks cause at a time of widespread concern about rising antisemitism, xenophobia and extremism: fear, concern, anxiety, anger, dismay.
In a lengthy blog post about these issues from several years ago, Sam Gruber wrote:
… violence against Jewish sites, especially cemeteries and Holocaust memorials, has been a ongoing problem for a long time. State sanctioned destruction of Jewish heritage sites ended with the fall of Communism but individual acts of violence that cannot by attributed to youthful high spirits regularly occur. These are deliberate – though cowardly – political acts of anti-Semitic defiance. No amount of security will stop these attacks altogether and given the number in Europe of Jewish cemetery repairs and restoration and of new Holocaust memorials, the actual number of acts of vandalism is small, but still terribly painful. […].
Still, such acts cannot be ignored. […] these acts of violence become opportunities for governments and law enforcement to step forward to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and also to quickly repair the damage; but also opportunities for Jews and local communities to work together collaboratively through action and education to ensure that these acts are not supported and will not be representative of most people.
The vandal attack on the Jewish cemetery in Gyöngyös, Hungary in 2015 led directly to a community-wide clean-up of the overgrown cemetery — and also prompted the Hungarian government to pledge 1 billion forints ($3.5 million) to care for abandoned Jewish cemeteries around the country.
There are many cemetery clean-up and restoration projects, funded by a variety of stakeholders — we have written on this web site about many of them. Besides the mapping project, the ESJF carries out fencing of Jewish cemeteries — to date, a total of 162 sites in the past five years.
Police are investigating the Namestovo desecration, which saw around 60 headstones toppled. A police spokesman on Wednesday said “criminal prosecution for the defamation of the final resting place” had begun — but said that no further details could be provided given the ongoing investigation.
It’s important to note that the Namestovo cemetery was, in fact, well maintained and signposted, with information panels telling its story. It is located on the shore of an artificial lake formed in 1941-1954 by damming the Orava river in northern Slovakia near the border with Poland, and part of the cemetery is believe to be be under water. (Several villages were inundated when the lake was formed.)
The cemetery has been under the care and maintenance of a local civic group called Pamätaj (Remember), founded in 2013 to restore the cemetery — . Click here to see a video of the cemetery, posted on its FB page, which the group filmed shortly before the vandal attack.
Pamätaj activists “invested their time and money in the absence of a Jewish community in the town of Namestovo,” a statement from the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia said. “Activists who have been striving for years to restore this monument, as well as the city’s leadership, are horrified by such inhuman conduct.”
Richard Duda, President of the Union of Slovak Jewish Communities, said in a statement that the vandals had targeted this spirit of cooperation and remembrance, and he blamed the attack, in part, on proliferating extremist politics.
They not only destroyed the tombstones, but destroyed the efforts of all decent citizens to peacefully coexist in the region. Politicians, disseminators of conspiration theories, in general – all the extremists must realize that their words full of animosity will sooner all later degenerate into the outbreak of physical violence they instigate by their hate which has been recently proliferating in Slovakia.
Damage to the cemetery is estimated at €50,000. Pamätaj has set up a bank account for donations — see details HERE.
Pamätaj Chairman Karol Kurtulík said on the group’s Facebook page that he will be meeting with the Namestovo mayor, Jewish leaders, and other officials to discuss plans to protect the site.
I believe that we will find a way to fix it as quickly as possible and set up cemetery control so that a similar situation does not happen again.