Ryszard Bielawski, a Polish zoologist who had a passion for creating YouTube videos of Jewish cemeteries and other Jewish heritage sites, has died at the age of 92.
Bielawski, who has been described as “probably the first and oldest YouTuber to popularize knowledge about Jewish monuments in Poland,” joined YouTube in 2009, four years after the online video service was launched.
He described his YouTube channel as “mostly my films from Jewish cemeteries and the life of the Jewish community in Poland.” There are scores of brief videos on his channel featuring Jewish cemeteries and synagogues (as well as other videos). He was aided by his son Piotr, who shot film and photos.
Some of the Jewish heritage videos include grainy footage shot more than 20 years ago.
The most recent, a video of the devastated Jewish cemetery in Solec n. Wisłą shot by Piotr Bielawski, was posted on March 7, 2023.
Here’s the video about the Jewish cemetery of Solec:
Some of the videos contrast footage and photos from many years ago with more recent images — creating a valuable record of changing conditions, some for the better, some for worse.
Each also includes spoken narration or text captions (in Polish) about the site and local Jewish history.
Bielawski was born in September 1930 in the town of Szczuczyń, in what is now Belarus. He had a distinguished career as a zoologist, specialising in entomology — the study of insects — and herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. Before his retirement in 1995 he worked for 20 years as director of the herpetology section at the Zoo in the southwestern city of Wroclaw.
In the interview he said he had begun making short films after being given a movie camera as a gift, and then got interested in recording Jewish sites almost by chance.
This interest grew, however, after he began seeing the poor condition of Jewish cemeteries and other sites. “I understood that these cemeteries are collapsing,” he said. “I decided to make videos of them.”
See Bielawski’s YouTube channel
The Jewish cemetery videos have “Cmentarz Żydowski” in their title.