Millions of Ukrainian refugees are still living outside their home country. Some have found work (both volunteer and paid) helping to clean and maintain Jewish cemeteries.
Fred Chvatal, chair of the TAMUS – Tachov Archives & Museum’s Society, which carries out extensive Jewish cemetery work in the Czech Republic, writes that a group of Ukrainian refugees settled in the town of Prostibor has recently been hired to help clean and maintain the large Jewish cemetery in Pilsen.
Established in 1896, the Pilsen cemetery has around 1,600 gravestones. TAMUS had documented all gravestones there seven years ago, but the Jewish community in Pilsen is tiny; there are few living descendants; and maintenance is difficult.
“Many gravestones are covered by ivy, some also by dense shrub vegetation, [some are]
partly also damaged,” Chvatal told JHE.
The refugees are employed to cut back ivy and shrub vegetation and clean the gravestones.
Chvatal said TAMUS organizes the work on a technical basis, the Municipality of Prostibor helps with transportation, and the salary for refugees came from the Jewish Community of Pilsen.
“Our TAMUS Society was looking for how to organize employment for the Ukrainian refugees, and to help the Jewish cemeteries at the same time,” he said.
In other instances, the activist-descendant Jeffrey Cymbler wrote on Facebook that he had personally hired two Ukrainian teenagers to help him clean the Jewish cemetery in Bedzin, Poland.
And in May, a Ukrainian refugee and her two daughters as well as a group of Ukrainian teenagers studying at the high school in Brzesko, Poland joined volunteers of the association Memory and Dialogue: a Common History, to clean up the local Jewish cemetery.
1 comment on “Some Ukrainian refugees have found work — volunteer or paid — helping clean Jewish cemeteries. One example is in Pilsen, Czech Republic”
For our part here in western Ukraine and Rohatyn, we for the first year have been helped (and simultaneously helped out the local economy) by hiring Rohatyners to cut and clear for us at the two cemeteries and two mass graves:
https://rohatynjewishheritage.org/2022/10/clearing-season-ends-2022/