We were saddened to learn of the death last month of Dr. Michael Lozman, who worked for years to preserve Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe and created a project to build a Holocaust memorial in upstate New York.
Lozman, whom President Biden had appointed in 2023 to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, passed away October 11, aged 86.
The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Lozman was an orthodontist in Latham, N.Y., near Albany.
In Saving Jewish Cemeteries: We Owe It to the Murdered, a Have Your Say personal essay he wrote for Jewish Heritage Europe in 2016, he recalled that he became active in Jewish cemetery restoration in 2001, when he traveled to Sopotskin, the village in Belarus his father had come from.
“I was confronted with a call to action,” he wrote.
Visiting the Jewish cemetery there, I was appalled by its horrible condition. There were no fences or markings to designate it as a Jewish cemetery, few standing gravestones, garbage all over, and clear evidence of vandalism. I soon learned that the condition and fate of this cemetery was similar to that of Jewish cemeteries all over Eastern Europe.
Back in the United States, he established a not-for-profit foundation, the Restoration of Eastern Europe Jewish Cemeteries Project, Inc., and developed a cemetery restoration program involving the participation of students from several U.S. universities.
The project restored 10 cemeteries in Belarus and five in Lithuania, with the students taking part in educational programs as well as hands-on cemetery work.
In 2018, he founded of the Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial, with the aim of developing a Holocaust memorial in the Albany area. He worked closely with Roman Catholic Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger on the project; the church donated land for the planned monument.
Lozman is survived by his wife of 64 years, his two daughters and their husbands, four grandchildren and a brother.
May his memory be a blessing!
Read his obituary in the Albany Times Union
Read Lozman’s Have Your Say essay, Saving Jewish Cemeteries: We Owe It to the Murdered