ESJF-led consortium wins new €1.2 million European Commission grant for educational, outreach, and awareness-raising activities pegged to Jewish cemeteries

(JHE) — The European Commission has extended further funding to the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF), awarding a new grant of €1.2 million to a ESJF-led consortium for continued educational, outreach, and awareness-raising activities pegged to Jewish cemeteries.

With the ESJF as main partner, the consortium also includes the Jewish education NGO Centropa and the London-based Foundation for Jewish Heritage (FJH).

The grant funds an 18-month program called “Preparatory action Protecting the Jewish cemeteries of Europe: fostering stakeholders’ involvement and awareness raising” and builds on two previous major EC grants. According to the call for proposals, hands-on documentation work such as that carried out under the previous grants is excluded. 

 “Types of activities eligible […] include study visits, workshops, training activities as well as communication actions,” the EC call said. “Mapping/surveying Jewish cemeteries is not eligible within the framework of this action.”

Instead, actions supported by the grant are to include

• carrying out innovative pilot actions connecting various stakeholders (policy-makers, NGOs, local communities, educational institutions, cultural and creative sectors, tech and start-ups) around the topic of the preservation of Jewish cemeteries;
• identifying specific opportunities for stronger interactions between various stakeholders interested in the preservation of Jewish burial sites;
• raising awareness of the importance of Jewish cultural heritage and cultural diversity of Europe throughout history.

According to the ESJF, the project will include “larger scale educational initiatives trialling the incorporation of Jewish cemeteries into school curricula, new arts and photography competitions, legal guidance for activists seeking to preserve Jewish cemeteries, and an exciting array of publications and cultural programs.”

This third EC grant marks a shift in the focus of the EC grants, moving away from onsite cemetery work by the ESJF itself into education, awareness-building, and community involvement.

“The EC Pilot Projects gave the ESJF, our partners in Centropa and the Foundation for Jewish Heritage, and all organisations concerned with the protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries a hands-on and up-to-date picture of how perilous this heritage is,” ESJF CEO Philip Carmel told JHE.

Armed with this critical information, we can now enhance the mobilization of all actors working in his field from the national political echelon through to vital work performed by local activists. This project brings together all those partners, experts in the fields of education and the preservation of Jewish heritage. Most of all, I’m delighted by the long-term commitment to the protection of Jewish cemeteries from the European Union. This grant is the natural progression of that commitment. Information, education and mobilization are the three critical elements to the preservation of this heritage, most particularly in areas where there are no longer Jewish communities because of the Shoah.”

The first EC grant, announced in January 2019, was to the ESJF alone and allocated €800,000 to a pilot project  to map and survey 1,500 Jewish cemeteries in Greece, Moldova, Slovakia, Lithuania and Ukraine.

The second grant, announced in December 2019, allocated  €1 million to the ESJF-led consortium (with Centropa and the FJH) for the project “Protecting the Jewish cemeteries of Europe: Continuation of the mapping process, stakeholders’ involvement and awareness raising.”

Its brief was to map and survey a further 1,500 cemeteries in seven countries: Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine, but also to create and implement educational programs and projects that incorporated Jewish cemeteries in both school curricula and informal education — the new grant builds specifically on this aspect.

The ESJF was set up as a German-based non-profit in early 2015, with “the core objective of protecting and preserving Jewish cemetery sites across Europe through the accurate delineation of cemetery boundaries and the construction of walls and locking gates.”

Carmel said the ESJF remained committed to finishing surveying “the totality of Jewish cemeteries in Central and Eastern Europe” and will continue the mapping process. He said it will also continue its efforts to fence and physically protect Jewish cemeteries thanks to continuing support from the German government and other donors. So far, it has fenced some 230 cemeteries.