(JHE) — Maceva, the Litvak Cemetery Catalogue, has made available photos and translations of gravestones from more than half of Lithuania’s largest surviving Jewish cemetery, the Žaliakalnis Jewish cemetery in Kaunas.
The documentation of seven out of of the 12 sections of the cemetery, which has nearly 6,000 graves, was uploaded to Maceva’s web site at the end of 2021. Maceva says it hopes to post the translations of the matzevot in the remaining five sections in 2022.
The Žaliakalnis cemetery was established in 1861 and closed in 1952. Though registered as a protected heritage site, it languished in very neglected condition until inventory and documentation work began in 2015 thanks to an agreement between Maceva and the Municipality of Kaunas, which allocated €8,000 for the project.
The ongoing translation of the Yiddish and Hebrew epitaphs is been carried out by Avishai Lubitch, in Israel, and partly financed by the Good Will Foundation as part of a project called “Documenting old Jewish cemeteries: learn, preserve and remember.”
Along with the genealogy and other information gleaned from the epitaphs, the documentation has revealed other findings.
For example, several of the matzevot were signed by the stone mason who carved them — a certain A. Beniakonski, who also provided his phone number — 19 88.
He was listed at that phone number in the 1935 Kaunas phone book as Abraomas Beniakonskis, proprietor of a “granite and marble monument workshop” at Luksio gatve 19.
During implementation of the Documenting Jewish Cemeteries project between 2019 and 2021, Maceva made a photo documentation of thousands of gravestones and translated a total of 3,125 epitaphs from the Jewish cemeteries in Telšiai, Seirijai, Subačius, and Valkininkai, as well as the Žaliakalnis Jewish cemetery. In addition, material from the Jewish cemeteries in Punia and Vištytis was digitized.
Maceva said the work was carried out by volunteers from Lithuania, Germany, Israel, Poland, Canada and Belarus. Aside from Lubitch’s work in the Kaunas cemetery, the translations have been made by Lara Lempert and Ralph Salinger.
More than 200 Jewish communities were established in Lithuania as early as the 17th and 18th centuries. They continued to exist till World War II. Around 40 Jewish cemeteries were completely destroyed during or after the Shoah, but nearly 200 Jewish cemeteries survive.
Since it was founded just over a decade ago, Maceva has documented, mapped and digitized 43 Jewish cemeteries.
It has uploaded much of its material to databases on its web site. Most of this digital material is available for a fee to help defray costs, as Maceva founder Sergey Kanovich explained in a JHE Have Your Say article in 2016.
But the database for the Žaliakalnis Jewish cemetery in Kaunas can be freely accessed.
The Good Will Foundation was established by law in 2011, following an agreement between the government and Jewish institution, to receive the compensation totalling around €37,071,362 from the Lithuanian state budget to be used for funding projects that deal with “religious, cultural, health care, sports, educational and scientific goals pursued by Lithuanian Jews in Lithuania.” This amount will be paid out in installments up until 2023. Every year, the Good Will Foundation receives around €3.6 million from the Government of the Republic of Lithuania for the implementation of the goals.