Can you get to west-central Romania? Volunteers are welcome to take part in a Conservation and Restoration Camp held July 26-30 at the Jewish Cemetery in Alba Iulia and August 2-6 at the Jewish cemetery in nearby Zlatna.
This will be the seventh edition of the camp, a hands-on restoration, research and study workshop for students and volunteers established in 2014 and organized by the December 1 1918 University of Alba Iulia in collaboration with the National Museum of the Unificării in Alba Iulia.
It is led by Prof. Daniel Dumitran, a researcher who has worked for years on the documentation and preservation of the Alba Iulia cemetery and other Jewish heritage sites, and restoration expert Sidonia Petronela Olea, in collaboration with the restorer Valentin Ștefan.
Established in the 18th century and still used by the town’s tiny Jewish community, the cemetery is believed to be the oldest Jewish cemetery in Transylvania and one of the oldest in Romania. Extending over about 21,500 square meters, it includes 2,038 graves and 1,960 stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian, German and Romanian. Erosion and neglect have take a toll.
Watch a video about the cemetery:
“The purpose of the Conservation and Restoration Camp is to save the funerary monuments in an advanced state of degradation,” organizers told JHE.
The camp focus includes restoration and preservation of individual gravestones as well as general cleaning of the sites, plus lectures and study sessions.
“It is a research camp, [with] Daniel Dumitran being responsible for the historical part of the project,” the organizers said. “There are always lectures on the Jewish community. Conservation works in particular (cleaning and treatment of monuments) are the responsibility of the restorer Sidonia P. Olea.”
So far more than 100 monuments have been saved and since last year we started to have travel days to other cemeteries (especially for [cleaning]), and last year we started working with the student Adrian Puiulet from Zlatna at the Jewish cemetery in Zlatna, where we intend to clean the monuments still standing.