The non-profit Friends of Budapest Jewish Cemetery organization carried out extensive clean-up work at the city’s vast Kozma street Jewish cemetery this past year, cleaning an area of 6.85 hectares (17 acres) encompassing 21,873 graves.
It was “our best year ever,” it said in its 2022 “Year in Review” report, published at the end of January. It said the work in 2022 represented 80 percent of all the work completed since the non-profit began operation in 2016.
Established in 1891, the Kozma street Jewish cemetery is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, with a total area of around 71 hectares (175.5 acres) and more than 300,000 burials, organized in around 100 demarcated sections. It suffered neglect in the decades since World War II, however, and until recently more than two-thirds of its area has been overgrown with bushes, trees, vines, and forest. It is in these overgrown sections (with around 150,000 graves) that the non-profit is working.
Watch a brief drone video that shows the before and after the cleaning work on the cemetery’s Section 27:
To date, the non-profit has cleared 20 sections of dense forest and ivy – completion of the 20th section was is the first for 2023. “We have now recovered access to over 51,000 burials,” the report states. “With the great progress we have made this year we have now achieved about one-third of our goal. We have 33 more sections left, containing about 100,000 burials in total”.
This year, the Friends of Budapest Jewish Cemetery organization was able to hire two teams of workers instead of just one, allowing them to clean more territory.
It said the goal for 2023 is to tackle another 6.5 to 7 hectares (about 16 acres) and recover access to another 21,000 to 23,000 graves.
The organization’s updated scale map of the cemetery makes it possible to see how grave numbering works in each section, how many graves are in each section, the square meter dimension of each section the non-profit has cleared, and which areas have been cleaned and which still need to be tackled.
In 2022, Budapest’s Jewish community, which owns the cemetery, repaved some of the cemetery’s roads. It and others have also carried out other work, including the restoration of some tombs.
Click here to read the full 2022 progress report
Click to read PART 1 and PART 2 of our 2019 report on efforts to clean up and restore Budapest’s Kozma street Jewish cemetery
4 comments on “Hungary: The Friends of Budapest Jewish Cemetery organization reports its “best year ever” cleaning up the vast Kozma street Jewish cemetery”
I am sure they have written records of everyone buried there. It might be computerized by now. Call the cemetery and they will tell you. You may need someone who speaks Hungarian
I know that the orthodox cemetery is nearby. Have you also make any efforts to clean it ?!
I wonder if any of my ancestors are there. Weisz or Fischer?
Do you have the names and dates? I have Weisz and Fischer in my ancestors.