(JHE) — Mazel tov! Researchers have completed the gargantuan task of making an inventory of the c. 40,000 headstones in Warsaw’s Bródno Jewish cemetery — most of which were uprooted during and after WW2 and have been lying piled up in heaps for decades. So far, though, the inscriptions on fewer than 3,000 of them could be read, transcribed, and uploaded online as most are hidden by the way the stones are piled up.
The Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries made the announcement this week in a Facebook post:
We have completed indexing matzevot at the Bródno Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw (Praga). Among ca. 40 thousand tombstones that were left in heaps throughout the cemetery after the destruction of WW2, we found 2184 legible inscriptions with genealogical data
All these inscriptions, with photos of the gravestones, are now accessible on the Foundation web site and digital database.
It is understood that many more inscriptions will come to light — but this will have to wait until the stones lying facedown or blocked in heaps can be raised so that their inscriptions can become visible.
The Bródno cemetery posted on its own Facebook page:
The remaining 38,000 [stones] are waiting for the project to raise them and create a lapidary [memorial] from them; without this, [reading] the inscriptions and the data contained in them will not be possible.
It said that the oldest matzevah found so far was one dating from 22 Tevet 5555 (January 13, 1795). This stone is thus the oldest Jewish gravestone to have been identified in Warsaw — the main surviving Jewish cemetery, the vast Jewish cemetery on Okopowa street, did not open until 1806.
An excellent visitor’s center and permanent exhibition on Jewish funeral traditions and cemetery history at the Bródno Jewish cemetery in Warsaw’s Praga district opened at the cemetery in 2018. Called Bejt Almin – House of Eternity, provides a powerful introduction to the cemetery.
As we wrote after visiting in 2018, the cemetery was founded in 1780 and is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and the largest in terms of the number of burials — more than 250,000 are believed to be interred there. It occupies more than 12 hectares.
Many of the gravestones were removed and used for construction, and most of the vast area is now bare fields or covered by new wooded areas, though a few stones have been re-erected in random positions.
But many thousands of uprooted gravestones still lie piled up in huge heaps at the far end of the cemetery grounds — an eerie, desolate, and powerfully moving sight. A mausoleum memorial begun in the 1980s but never finished, made of gravestones and fragments, stands in their midst.
Find visitor information HERE.
Access the digital database of the gravestones from the cemetery
Read our August 2018 article about the cemetery
Here are some more images of the cemetery:
1 comment on “Poland: the inventory of Warsaw’s Bródno Jewish cemetery has been completed. So far, the inscriptions on only 2,184 out of c. 40,000 stones could be read — the others have to wait til the stones are lifted”
So sad.