Their voices may have long been silent but the graves in which they lie can still tell a story.
Cemeteries can be a vital resource for teaching about European Jews pre-War as well as their fate in the Holocaust, according to a new report published by the London-based Foundation for Jewish Heritage.
Examining seven countries in Eastern Europe, which include Ukraine, Poland and Hungary, the report’s author Joanna Milchlic says that some of their 1,700 Jewish cemeteries can act as “outdoor classrooms” and “open-air museums” for high school children.
They offer “a rich and effective educational resource for teaching about Jewish history, society, culture and Judaism,” her report says.
Visits can help to introduce “rarely addressed topics such as the Jewish cemetery as a site of escape from persecution, as a place of smuggling goods and as a place of concealment, hiding Jewish fugitives including children”.
Learning from the past: in the cemetery at Radomysl Wielki, Poland (credit: AntySchematy Foundation)
While many cemeteries are in too great disrepair for such educational use, some continue to be vandalised - which illustrates that “antisemitism still exists, even though Jewish communal life has been reduced to near extinction,” Dr Michlic observes.
Michael Mail, the foundation’s chief executive, commented, “The Jewish heritage that remains in Eastern Europe should concern us; a heritage that stands as testament to the once vibrant Jewish life in what were the heartlands of the Jewish people. This legacy is in a highly vulnerable state.”
A parallel report by Paul Darby looks at Jewish cemeteries as destinations for visitors in general, noting that sustaining Jewish heritage is a key element in a strategy to combat antisemitism adopted by the European Union in 2021.
The two reports, Mr Mail said, are “an important contribution to the debate on how we can preserve and promote Jewish cemeteries, honouring those buried there and the communities that were so tragically lost in the Holocaust.”
They are part of a wider project backed by the foundation in association with two other NGOs, the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative and Centropa.
An American professor who leads student visits to a cemetery in Warsaw - who is quoted by Dr Michlic - says this provides “a hands-on, multi-sensorial exploration of the richness of Jewish life in Poland”.
Cemeteries are vey often “the only remaining physical proof” that a Jewish community existed in the area, says Dr Michlic, a historian whose specialises in Holocaust memory.
She recommends that teachers address the subject in the context of local history so that it is “not about abstract and anonymous facts but more about individuals’ moving stories and personal accounts”.
Whether prominent rabbis or resistance fighters against the Nazis, children can learn about some of those buried there.
They can also revisit the world of bygone days, learning for example about practices such as the so-called “black weddings”, in which a poor orphan couple were married in a cemetery in the hope that this would protect the community against plague.
Dr Michlic says that the work of teaching about Jewish heritage depends mainly on “a cohort of enthusiastic individual teachers”.
But she also highlights as an “alarming development” illiberal trends in some countries, which are shifting memorialisation of the Holocaust to focus on national suffering and the non-Jewish rescuers of Jews.
“The governments of Poland and Hungary actively oppose education on the difficult past in relation to the treatment of Jewish communities,” her report states. “As a result, it is is almost completely absent from current textbooks.”
Teachers in Hungary have reported that some Jewish cemeteries are regularly closed because caretakers are “afraid of antisemitic acts by supporters of the radical Jobbik party”. Similar fears of vandalism have also been reported in other countries.
