Visiting a Jewish cemetery: Experiences, emotions

Ruth Ellen Gruber's posting at JewishHeritageTravel covers emotional and mystical experiences at Jewish cemeteries, both her own and of others.

Visiting a Jewish cemetery in Europe, and particularly in East-Central Europe, can be an emotional experience.

This holds true whether you go there as a volunteer helping clean up an abandoned cemetery overgrown by weeds and trees, or as someone on a roots trip looking for a long-lost, or long-forgotten, family grave, or as a "straight" tourist interested in history or the powerful imagery of tombstone art.

In the introductory chapter of Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe I addressed these emotions, describing how I myself felt when I began exploring these sites.

I became absolutely mesmerized, even a little obsessed with what I was seeing. I wanted to visit, touch, see, feel as many places as I could. I almost felt it a duty. As I entered broken gates or climbed over broken walls into cemeteries where a Jew may not have set foot in years, I wanted to spread my arms and embrace them all, embrace all the tombstones, all the people buried there, all the memories.

In the first editions of the book, I added a further sentence, describing how I projected my thoughts toward these all so often forgotten places: I'm here, I told them mentally; SOMEONE is here.

Back then, my trips were voyages of discovery. Everything was new; there was little literature on the subject, few visitors had made their way to such sites, and there were few efforts to preserve, maintain or restore them. But even today, after scholars and genealogists and tour guides have studied and mapped and documented almost everything -- I still feel the pull.

Ruth continues on to detail a Jerusalem Post story by Jonathan Gillis who took part in a restoration project of the Czestochowa (Poland) Jewish cemetery and his experiences. She includes photos (1991, 2006) of the old Jewish cemetery cemetery in Nazna, Romania - near Targu Mures - and describes her almost mystical experience there.

Read Ruth's complete post at the link above.

Romania: Jewish cemeteries

Alex Reed Westhoff is on a travelling fellowship researching the world's delta areas. Along the way, he visits some places of interest to the Jewish Graveyard Rabbit.

In spring 2008, he submitted a master's thesis for UCBerkeley concurrent degrees in Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of City Planning.

In this posting on November 7 he describes his visit to Romania's delta and also his Romanian roots quest. Find the relevant section of the long post by scrolling down to the paragraph above the seventh photo (the synagogue), followed by photos of the two Jewish cemeteries.

Romania: Bucharest Jewish cemetery vandalized

Ruth Ellen Gruber posted on her Jewish Heritage Travel blog (October 24) concerning the desecration of the Bucharest Jewish Cemetery.

Read the post here.

Jewish cemetery in Bucharest vandalized

Unknown vandals toppled or otherwise damaged as many as 200 grave markers in the largest Jewish cemetery in Bucharest. There is a slideshow of the damage on yahoo news.

From what I can tell from news reports, the cemetery is the vast 20th century cemetery, still in use by the Jewish community, in the far south of the city at Soseau Giurgiului 162. This is where my own great-uncle, Pinkas Gruber, who died in 1980 at the age of 98, is buried.

Ukraine: The Czernowitz Cemetery

The old Jewish cemetery - Czernowitz (today Cernivtsi)
The town is located at 48°17'N; 25°56'E.
Originally in Austro-Hungary, Bukovina, then Romania, it is today in Ukraine.
Researchers interested in the Czernowitz-Sadagora area will find in the Czernowitz-L Discussion Group website a diverse and extensive collection of material concerning the Jewish community, as well as a wealth of information on the cemetery, including historic and contemporary photographs along with images of burial register pages.

In fact, researchers considering a collaborative project for their shtetl will also find excellent ideas that may be adapted.

Recently, the group participated in a Cemetery Clean-up Project.

Here are links to some of the material on this project:

- A PowerPoint presentation of the 2008 Work Camp Cemetery Clean-up Project. Photos by Joanna Liss; PowerPoint by Hardy Breier.

- Report and photos from Christian Herrmann and Mimi Taylor on the 2008 International Work Camp Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- Photographs from the sucessful 2008 Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- The 2008 Czernowitz Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- The Burial Register Transcription project: A chronological description of activities by Bruce Reisch, along with images of the various burial registers connected with the first project.

- Photographs of the Czernowitz cemetery by Cornel Fleming (2004)

- Czernowitz cemetery restoration project

- The Mortuary (Leichenhalle or Zeremonienhalle) Restoration Project of Helmut Kusdat

- The Czernowitz cemetery map from Mimi Taylor Bruce Reisch's cross referenced map of the new areas compared to the old parcels at the cemetery.

- May 2006 Reunion photos of the memorial service at the Czernowitz cemetery, from Rita and Gidi Shilo.

There is much more to explore on the Czernowitz site http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/.