The Slovak Jewish activist Jozef Klement, who spearheaded key Jewish heritage and commemorative projects in the towns of Zvolen, Banská Bystrica and elsewhere, passed away on New Year’s Day, aged 70.
Klement, a successful businessman, in 1998 spearheaded the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in Zvolen, which includes mass graves of Jews, Roma, and other Slovaks murdered by the Nazis. (His business was defaced by antisemitic graffiti after this action.)
“We restored 60 tombstones and a memorial to the mass graves,” Klement told the Slovak Spectator in 2021, adding that a memorial is held there every year. A large plaque there lists the names of Holocaust victims.
In 2010, another memorial he spearheaded, the Park of Generous Souls, was opened just next to the cemetery, honouring people who saved Jews from deportation.
It includes a striking glass obelisk and a subterranean walkway.
Klement, with his wife, also established the Unforgotten Neighbours event, during which the names of Holocaust victims and also rescuers are read out. It is held annually in scores of towns all over Slovakia on September 9, marked in Slovakia as the Day of Victims of the Holocaust and Racial Persecution.
“With his energy, care and ability to connect, he was an important pillar of the local community,” Ondrej Lunter, Chairman of the Banská Bystrica self-governing region, said in a statement.
It was important for him to connect people of good will for the sake of cultivating public space and passing on our collective memory to the next generations. Thanks to him, the “Unforgotten Neighbors” project was created, through which people in more than a hundred cities and towns across our country read the names of Holocaust victims and their rescuers every year, so that they will never be forgotten
Read a 2021 profile of Klement in the Slovak Spectator, in English
See information about the Park of Generous Souls