In a previous post, I began to describe the various types of places where Jews are buried in Poland, since, unfortunately, there are millions of Jews in the ground in Poland and very few walking the streets. As a result, much of my trip in Poland centered around the visiting of Jewish burial places of different types.

As I experienced it, these burial places can be divided into the following categories:
1) Largely intact;
2) Somewhat intact;
3) Minimally intact;
4) Slight remnant;
5) Trashed;
6) Barest remnant;
7) Mass murder sites;
8) Death camps.

The Lodz cemetery is largely intact. (See http://zambrow.blogspot.co.il/2015/08/different-kinds-of-jewish-cemeteries.html) In this post, I will attempt to describe the somewhat intact cemetery in Lublin and the minimally intact cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny, both of which we visited on our last day in Poland.

The Lublin cemetery is one of the oldest ones in Poland. It contains the graves of famous rabbis, such as the Seer of Lublin, one of the founders of Chasidism. The tombstone is intact and is now protected by iron grating that, according to a sign, was donated by someone from Brooklyn who is trying to preserve the graves of Jewish notables buried in Poland. Here too lies the Maharshal, one of the leading decisors of Jewish law. (https://kollublin.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/maharshal-rabbi-shelomo-solomon-ben-yechiel-luria-maharshal-morenu-harav-shelomo-luria-neta-avidar/)

As you can see, there is a marker next to it where the faded words on the tombstone have been rewritten so it can be read.

The cemetery is not completely intact. There are graves that are unattended and have either fallen over or are about to do so. The grounds are not well kept:

There was fighting between the Germans and the Soviets in the area, which apparently accounts for what looks like a shell hole in this marker:

There is, however, a fence around and a gate to enter the cemetery to which our guide got the key, so it is protected from further damage.

The cemetery of the town named Kazimierz Dolny is sadder. Kazimierz Dolny is a small resort town along the Vistula River. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Dolny) According to the Wikipedia site, which accords with what our guide told us, Yechezkel Taub, a disciple of the Seer of Lublin, established the Kuzmir Chassidic sect in the town, and half the total of the town’s population consisted of Jews.

Now we come to one of the fundamental facts of the Nazi perpetrated Holocaust: their purpose was not only to rid the world of Jews, but of any trace of the Jewish past as well. Thus, the Nazis not only killed the Jews, but also destroyed many of the traces of Jewish life, synagogues, study houses and cemeteries. After the Nazis took control of the town, they forced the Jews to take the tombstones from the cemetery and to use them to pave the access road to the Gestapo Office.

Some of the tombstones still remain, and they are beautiful examples of Jewish funereal art:

Tombstone of a woman with images of charity and shabbat candles

Tombstone of a woman with image of candlesticks

Tombstone of man with image of lions

You notice that the tombstones have small stones on top of them, because Jewish groups routinely come to this site and leave stones, according to the Jewish custom.

After the war, the hundreds, if not thousands, of tombstones that were used to pave the road were gathered and made into a wall which is supposed to remind one of the Western Wall (the Kotel) in Jerusalem. The wall is, as it were, cracked in the middle to suggest the existential break of Jewish life in the town. On one side are stones from Jewish men and on the other side from Jewish women.

This is better than just putting them on the ground, but still we see that a living Jewish community, of which a cemetery is part, has been turned into a memorial. The markers of Jewish life have been disconnected from their proper place. The bodies that lay under the ground are now nameless and forgotten. The synagogue of Kazimierz Dolny has also been turned into a museum about the Jewish life of the town.

In Kazimierz Dolny, the town has at least preserved evidence of its Jewish past. The Jewish presence has not been completely erased. Jews can go to the cemetery and synagogue to pay tribute to a community that is no more. Non Jews are reminded that Jews once lived in their midst.

These memorials don’t make it any easier to accept what the Nazis did. They only provide a place to mark what happened to the Jewish people of Europe. The roots are still visible, but they have been severed from the living tree.