The Sacralization and Secularization of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (original) (raw)

Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich/ Jacek Partyka (eds.)

Jews and Non-Jews:

Memories and Interactions from the Perspective of Cultural Studies

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jews and non-Jews : memories and interactions from the perspective of cultural studies / Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pedich, Jacek Partyka (eds.).
pages cm. – (Warsaw Studies in Jewish History and Memory ; v. 6)
ISBN 978-3-631-64612-0

1. Jews–Identity–History–20th century. 2. Jews–Identity–History–21st century. 3. Jewish literature–History and criticism–20th century. 4. Jewish literature–History and criticism–21st century. 5. Collective memory. I. Ale-ksandrowicz-Pedich, Lucyna, editor.

DS143.J488 2015
305.892’4–dc23

2014041133
The publication was supported by the Faculty of Cultural Studies of the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.

ISSN 2191-7493
ISBN 978-3-631-64612-0 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-03924-5 (E-Book)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03924-5
© Peter Lang GmbH

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Table of Contents

Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich and Jacek Partyka
Introduction … 9
Victoria Khiterer
Kiev Jews in the Early Twentieth Century: National Identity and Culture … 13
Klaus Hödl
Viennese Culture in 1900: Bridging the Divide … 29
Natalie Wynn
Ireland’s Jewish Identity Crisis … 43
Mara W. Cohen Ioannides
The Community Memory of Springfield, Missouri Suppresses the City’s Jewish Past … 61
Anna Maria Karczewska
Jewminicanos and the Sosúa Settlement … 75
Hanna Komorowska
Stereotyping Through Silence and Speech.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Conversational Styles of Poles and Jews as Presented in Polish Literature … 85
Annette Aronowicz
No Longer Other? Jews in Czesław Miłosz’s Landscape … 103
Magdalena Szkwarek
Manifestations of Jewishness in Literature of Latin America … 115
Dorota Mihułka
Temptations of Non-Jewish Lifestyle in Allegra Goodman’s and Pearl Abraham’s Novels … 127
Jacek Partyka
“False Veins Under the Skin”: Does Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker Fail as Holocaust Fiction? … 143

Maria Ferenc Piotrowska
The Feelings of Survivors of the First Deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto … 155
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk
The Mother-Daughter Dyad in Bożena Keff’s On Mother and the Fatherland … 167
Justyna Sierakowska
A Quest for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland: Agata Tuszyńska’s Family History … 179
Na’ama Sheffi
Normalization through Literature: Translations from German into Hebrew during the 1970s … 189
Yechiel Weizman
The Sacralization and Secularization of the Jewish Cemeteries in Poland … 205

Yechiel Weizman

The Sacralization and Secularization of the Jewish Cemeteries in Poland

Introduction

These days in many cities, towns and villages in Poland, the Jewish cemetery remains the only material remnant and testimony to the historical presence of a Jewish community. Out of an estimated number of 1,400 Jewish cemeteries in Poland today, only a few are still functioning as burial places for the current Jewish communities in Poland (Gebert and Datner). While many of the cemeteries have been preserved and reconstructed in recent years, others are neglected, abandoned or destroyed. In some towns, only remnants of a wall or a clearing in the forest mark the place where once a Jewish cemetery stood. But in order to thoroughly answer the question of what remains of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland we must understand this question not only in material terms, but also in terms of collective memory and consciousness.

The aim of this essay is to tell the post-Holocaust story of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland from the point of view of Polish society. I intend to do so by using the conceptual framework of the sacred and the profane. More specifically, I would like to analyze the material and symbolic transformation of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland since the Holocaust as an ambivalent and dialectic process of “sacralization” on the one hand, and “secularization” on the other. I would like to offer this sacralization-secularization dichotomy as an explanatory model for understanding how the Jewish cemeteries were perceived by Christian Poles, and how the existence or rather the nonexistence of Jewish cemeteries was and is experienced and articulated.

I will show how, in an ambivalent way, Jewish cemeteries in Poland after the Holocaust were perceived as some sort of sacred and desecrated places at the same time. Through concrete examples I will try to show why analyzing the transformation of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland under this “sacred-profane” discourse is crucial in order to understand the transformation and construction of the memory of the Jews in Poland. I would argue that in many ways, the history of the perception of the Jewish cemeteries by Polish society is an ambivalent story of dialectic movement between the sacred and the profane.

Conceptual clarification

Since some of the terms that I use contain different meanings and tend to be vague and idiosyncratic, a short conceptual clarification is needed here. By using the “sacred-profane” framework I am not trying to make any essentialist argument about the sacredness or profaneness of a certain place, but rather to define these terms phenomenologically - as they are experienced and perceived. Although I understand here the sacred-profane dichotomy mainly as a sociological construction, I will not confine myself to the strict Durkheimian dichotomy. 1{ }^{1} Rather, I will try to use these terms in the very broad sense of the word - as they are understood and perceived both in the religious world and in the social sciences.

According to the Oxford English dictionary, the sacred is “regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular religion, group, or individual”. 2{ }^{2} The philosopher Mircea Eliade defines the sacred as different from normal realities, and as such the sacred is not necessarily a divine entity (Eliade). As Durkheim also claims, the sacredness of an object or place derives from a set of social prohibitions that differentiate it from the profane sphere, and sacralize it. Indeed, what is common to almost all cultures and religions is the prohibited nature of the sacred.

Very often we tend to think of the sacred as something threatening and frightening. A “sacred place” is not only important and different from other places in the public sphere, it is also considered, in popular culture and in certain religions, as a “forbidden place”. Another element that very often characterizes the sacred is its irrational nature, or rather, the irrational sphere in which the sacred sometimes functions. “In the immediate vicinity of the sacred, everything may appear a little irrational” writes the literary theorist Cesareo Bandera (69). According to the theologian and scholar Rudolf Otto, the sacred is not only overwhelming and powerful, but also irrational in its essence. This strong connection between the sacred and irrationality is also psychologically and medically recognized as “Hierophobia” - a fear and anxiety caused by sacred objects or places.

After analyzing briefly the phenomenology of the sacred, we can understand the profane, for the sake of argument, as something which is not sacred; thus, it also lacks the uniqueness or transcendence of the sacred. While a sacred place is different from all other places in its threatening-admired alterity, we may define

[1]

1. 1 For the Sociologist Emile Durkheim, the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane is the essence of religion, see Durkheim.
   2 “Sacred.” New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd 3^{\text {rd }} ed. 2010. Print. ↩︎

a profane place as part of the normal and rational public sphere, but also as a place that was profaned and deprived of its holiness. In the next sections of my paper I will show how this sacred-profane vocabulary that I am suggesting can function as an interpretive framework for understanding the transformation of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland.

Before the destruction

In order to analyze the transformation of the Jewish cemeteries after the Holocaust, we need first to understand the place of the Jewish cemetery in pre-war Polish culture and folklore. How did non-Jewish Poles perceive and treat the Jewish cemetery in their town? Did the Jewish cemetery have a religious or spiritual significance in the eyes of Polish neighbours? And to what extent was the Jewish cemetery perceived as a “sacred place” not only by Jews?

The perception of the Jewish religious sites by the local Polish population, especially in villages and small towns, as ethnographic research has shown, was often a combination of fear and respect, fascination and loathing (Parciak). One of the most exotic and liminal places in the town or village was the Jewish cemetery. In its alterity it was not only, in a way, the ultimate “forbidden place”, but also a place with “supernatural” or even demonic qualities (Cała, “The Image” 236). Stories about ghosts and other threatening entities in the Jewish cemetery were common in Polish folk culture, and so were myths about the healing and positive power of the cemetery and the religious Jewish sites (Cała “The Image” 141-142). Often non-Jews would adopt esoteric Jewish traditions performed in the cemetery - for example, taking a married couple to the Jewish cemetery to perform a dance for good luck and protection (Ibid). 3{ }^{3} The famous Jewish-Hassidic tradition of placing “Kvitelach” (notes with personal prayers or requests) on the grave of the local “Tzadik”, 4{ }^{4} was also adopted by local Poles (Cała “The Cult” 16-19). In some towns and villages the Tzadik was considered, not only by Jews, as a “holy man”. His grave was perceived as a special and holy place with supernatural qualities. 5{ }^{5}

3 In the play “The Dybbuk” by Anski there is a famous scene where Hannan and Leah’le are taken to the cemetery in order to perform the marriage ceremony next to the grave of a Jew who was killed by the Cossacks.
4 In Hassidic culture the “Tzadik” is a spiritual and religious leader. He is often considered by his followers to possess a special connection to god.
5 A popular urban legend in the town of Leżajsk that I personally heard while visiting there tells of three SS officers that during the German occupation tried to destroy the

S. Anski, in his ethnographic reports from Eastern Europe, wrote about nonJews who were protecting deserted and inactive Jewish cemeteries as “holy sites”. According to a story he heard in one of the villages, farmers who worked the land in the territory of the Jewish cemetery died in mysterious ways (Parciak 16).

Alongside this “ambivalent respect” that the Jewish cemetery sometimes received as a sacred or special place, we also learn about acts of profaning and desecrating cemeteries and "matzevot"6 by Poles (Cała, “The Image” 226). Nevertheless, those acts of profaning the matzevot show how the boundaries between the sacred and the profane can be blurred - as parts of the matzevot and even corpses from the desecrated cemetery were integrated into the walls of cow-sheds and stables in order to heal animals (Ibid). In many ways this ambivalent religious-mythical approach to the Jewish materiality was an embodiment of the general perception of the Jews in the eyes of their neighbours in Polish folk culture. 7{ }^{7}

According to Cała, the strangeness of the Jews “has always given rise to ambivalent feelings similar to those felt in the presence of holiness: fear, awe, and at the same time fascination and admiration” (“The Image” 220). The Jew in the Polish village was “a liminal figure with a special supernatural unique force” (GoldbergMulkiewicz 381). 8{ }^{8} As a result of the extermination, and with the absence of Jews, this ambivalent-magical perception, as we will see now, was “transformed” into the perception of the material traces, mainly the cemetery.

After the Holocaust

As early as during the war the German occupiers used matzevot to pave roads and sidewalks. Jewish cemeteries were vandalized, and some were completely destroyed and physically erased. Immediately after the war the first attempts were made, mainly by returning Jewish survivors, to reconstruct and save the remnants of the cemeteries (Finder and Cohen). However, as communist rule was consolidated towards the end of the 1940s, and with the mass emigration of Jews, the Jewish cemeteries entered an era of a literal and mental process of
grave of the famous local tzadik, Rabbi Elimelech, because they heard that the rabbi was buried in a golden robe. According to the legend, when they opened the grave they were afraid and ran away. Later they went insane.
6 The plural form for “matzeva” - A Jewish headstone.
7 Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz writes about Jewish objects, such as old books, that were used by Poles for healing. See Goldberg-Mulkiewicz 380.
8 Unless otherwise cited, all of the quotes in Hebrew or Polish were translated by me.

desecration. This process was the result of political, historical and social circumstance, caused by different agents and from different motives. Local authorities and entrepreneurs, sometimes backed by the state, were constantly using areas of destroyed Jewish cemeteries for construction, and matzevot were removed and conserved for other uses by the former neighbours of the Jews. 9{ }^{9}

In Olsztyn during the 1960s the authorities removed the matzevot from the Jewish cemetery in order to prepare the place for public use. The rationale behind this act was articulated in a resolution passed in 1962 by the Municipal National Council: “… Because of the advanced state of damage, these cemeteries cannot be reconstructed but converted into green areas and municipal parks” (qtd. in Bartnik 182). 10{ }^{10}

While some Jewish cemeteries were still in use, mainly in big cities and until the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, in many cities, towns and villages the Jewish cemeteries remained abandoned and deserted. In some places thick grass and vegetation that have grown without disturbance have literally and symbolically covered the matzevot and turned the remnants of the cemeteries into thick forests. After the events of 1968, and with the forced emigration of most of the Polish Jews, the Jewish issue was almost totally silenced and tabooed. As the memory of the Jews and the Holocaust was not only repressed but also expelled, so was the place of the Jewish cemeteries in the Polish consciousness. 11{ }^{11} In certain towns the Jewish cemetery was actually erased from the official maps (Bergman and Jagielski 483). 12{ }^{12}

But how did the Jewish cemeteries function in their absence? To what extent did they exist in the local memory map? In Judaism the sanctity of the cemetery is eternal, even when no single matzeva has remained. In what sense did the ambivalent sacredness of the cemetery, as in the eyes of pre-war Polish society, survive?

The Jewish cemetery in Tarnów is considered one of the oldest cemeteries in Poland. During the Nazi occupation the Germans destroyed the cemetery and

9 For a thorough summary of the legal aspects of Jewish property, including cemeteries, in post-war Poland, see Krawczyk.
10 This resolution regarded not only Jewish cemeteries but also protestant (German) cemeteries.
11 Michael Steinlauf defines the period between 1948 and 1968 in Poland as “memory repressed”, and 1968-1970 as “memory expelled”. See: Steinlauf.
12 While visiting Miechów in 2012 I was told at the town’s official information centre that there had never been a Jewish cemetery in the town. In fact, the Jewish cemetery there was completely destroyed by the Germans. Today in its area there is an open field.

used matzevot for their own purposes. The large and thriving Jewish community of the city, which had constituted 45%45 \% of the population before the war, ceased to exist. Adam Bartosz, who grew up in Tarnow in the 1960s, writes about a mysterious place in one of the districts of the city: “some sort of a thicket of trees and bushes, surrounded by a crumbling wall” (Bartosz 353). Nobody entered this place, and though located in the centre of the city, it was considered an exterritorial place. Only the language, in a sense, retained the repressed Jewish past. Bartosz remembers that the Tarnów cemetery was referred to by everybody as the “kirchol”, a word that he came to understand later. 13{ }^{13}

In the consciousness of Tarnow’s residents, the presence of Jews in the past seems an empty concept, not one which would arouse reflections or questions. Just as if the area of the Tarnow Jewish cemetery was a sort of hole, an illegible stain on the city map. It was located nearly in the centre of the city, but no one ever went in there … I made my first attempt to enter the Jewish cemetery, which proved an impassable jungle, a thirty- year-old forest … its depths were a campground for groups of tramps, drunks and similar types. (Bartosz 353)

Another description that shows how the absent Jewish cemetery was present in a mysterious way as some sort of “forbidden place” was written by Piotr Kwiatkowski. When he was a child growing up in the 1960s the neglected Jewish cemetery in his hometown was considered anything but normal. Its mysterious and almost metaphysical nature demonstrates the dialectics of the absent-present memory in communist Poland.

The Jewish cemetery remained abandoned, nobody’s- in other words: unneeded. On the outskirts of the town … as children, we rode there several times a year on our bicycles to experience an unusual, slightly thrilling feeling … We stood at the border of the cemetery looking down into that melancholy, rubble-strewn ground. Each of us felt the tension: the antechamber of a mystery stood open before us. From that place everything led to the unknown … we entered it solemnly, with gravity and with something like fear… The Jewish cemetery was like an open door to the abyss. (Kwiatkowski 253-254)

It seems that the presence of the Jewish cemetery, in both descriptions, is acknowledged and denied at once. Real or symbolic boundaries separate the cemetery from the allegedly normal and every-day reality. Similarly to the perception of the sacred, it is unreachable, unknown and unintelligible - but it is

13 “Kirchol” is one of the many ways the Polish language describes an old Jewish cemetery. It is similar to the term “kirkut”, which is more common. Several Jewish cemeteries in Poland are referred to by Polish citizens as “kirchols”, mostly in the area of former Galicia.

there. While the cemetery in these memories is allegedly desacralized, it seems that below the surface the sacredness of the cemetery not only did not vanish, but in many ways became even more mysterious and demonic. The cemetery is experienced as “nobody’s” and as “sort of a hole”, according to Bartosz and Kwiatkowski, but it exists in a haunting way. This esoteric “presence of absence” was also manifested after the Holocaust in local legends about ghosts in abandoned Jewish cemeteries. 14{ }^{14} While ghosts in Jewish cemeteries had already “appeared” in pre-war Polish folk culture, it seems that after the war these ghost stories became more threatening and haunting (Cała “The Image” 133). In 1998, the Polish-born Israeli writer and journalist Benjamin Yaari visited the Jewish cemetery in Częstochowa, and noted:

From a distance I saw two young boys approaching and moving away from me on and off. After a while they came closer to me and one of them asked in excitement: “Sir, aren’t you afraid to be here?” “Why should I be afraid,” I asked, and he answered: “Why, there are demons here!” (Yaari 16)

While stories of the destruction and instrumentalization of Jewish cemeteries in Poland became a matter of routine during communism, we can see a certain sense of uneasiness and discomfort regarding the use of cemeteries and matzevot for profane uses. An awareness of the problematical nature of using cemeteries is expressed in a document from the Olsztyn District National Council’s Presidium in 1972, concerning the fate of the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Olsztyn:

Special caution is needed when dealing with decisions about the conversion of Jewish cemeteries for other purposes. We have to remember that cases of using Jewish cemeteries for other purposes are used by hostile circles as deliberate malice of the state toward believers of the Mosaic faith. Unused Jewish cemeteries belong to the state and may be closed, but, until the time when these sites are converted for other purposes, they should be kept by local national council presidiums according to the general principles for the maintenance of unused cemeteries. (qtd. in Bartnik 183)

The text above shows how political and utilitarian considerations were significant in the formation of official policy towards Jewish cemeteries during communist rule, but it may also reveal an acknowledgment of a sort that there is something

14 Stories about ghosts in Jewish cemeteries are not uncommon today, either. On some Internet forums it is possible to read “reports” about encounters with Jewish ghosts. See for example: „Cmentarz żydowski w Częstochowie" Katalogi.pl. n.p. web. 18 January 2007; Paranormalna: „Duch na Cmentarzu Żydowskim? (Nowy Sącz)." Paranormalne.pl. n.p. web. 18 January 2011.

problematic in the “conversion of Jewish cemeteries for other purposes”. 15{ }^{15} The view that building on areas of former Jewish cemeteries is wrong was not uncommon. In Starachowice, at the beginning of the 1980s, the local authorities gave to a local citizen a piece of land for building a house. When he started digging in order to lay the foundations, he discovered human bones and realized that this area was a Jewish cemetery. The man decided to stop the construction and abandoned his plans (Parciak 52). In Przeworsk, where on the ruins of the Jewish cemetery a bus station was built, a local woman told Alina Cała: “That was wrong, a lot of good people were buried there. People have talked about this; they say that the memory of the Jews should be respected” (“The Image” 213).

The uneasiness regarding the desecration of the Jewish cemetery was caused not only by a rational recognition of the moral injustice or political sensitivity, but also by much less rational factors. Fear of “revenge” by the disturbed dead, or some sort of collective repressed guilt, led to the development of popular beliefs about a causal connection between the desecration of Jewish religious sites and divine punishment (Parciak 51). 16{ }^{16} Mysterious death cases or car accidents in certain Polish towns were sometimes explained as a “curse” resulting from the desecration of the local Jewish cemetery (Cała “The Image” 133-134). 17{ }^{17}

Political, cultural, historical and social factors contributed to the ambivalent perception of the Jewish cemeteries after the Holocaust. The aftermath of the extermination, and the communist policy of the repression and manipulation of the Jewish issue created a “pathological silence” regarding the memory of

15 Another example showing how the Polish authorities were sensitive to the world’s opinion concerning the treatment of Jewish cemeteries is an internal letter written by the office of public utilities. In the letter there are specific instructions on how to respond to inquiries from abroad about the situation of the cemeteries. See Urban 783−785783-785.
16 Urban legends about cursed buildings that were built on Jewish ruins are common in Muranów, a district in Warsaw that was built on the ruins of the Ghetto. According to another famous legend, when, on the ruins of the Great Synagogue in Tłomackie street in Warsaw attempts were made to build a skyscraper, the constructors faced many setbacks and difficulties. The explanation was that the ghost of the last Rabbi of the Synagogue was responsible for the setbacks. For interviews with Muranów residents that speak of Jewish ghosts there, see Mallet 78-81.
17 As I mentioned earlier, in pre-war Polish folk culture Jews were often considered as possessing special supernatural powers - both healing and demonic. Such perceptions, as we see, continued to function after the extermination of Jews, and in many ways became more connected to the material remnants of Jewish culture - mainly cemeteries.

the Jews (Hoffman 31). 18{ }^{18} In this atmosphere the perception of the cemeteries was a paradoxical mixture of fear, respect, silence, repression, desecration and enchantment.

Regaining sacredness?

In the mid 1980s the communist regime in Poland was weakening, and new possibilities for dealing with the silenced parts of Polish history and culture emerged. More and more voluntary and state-sponsored projects on discovering and preserving abandoned Jewish cemeteries were taking place. A certain change in the official policy towards the material Jewish heritage resulted in agreements with Jewish organizations regarding the protection and preservation of cemeteries (Bergman and Jagielski 480).

How did the weakening and, eventually, the collapse of communist rule in Poland affect the status and social function of the Jewish cemeteries? How did the ambivalent and pathological perception of the cemeteries change in light of the political transformation? And to what extent should we perceive the transformation of the Jewish cemeteries since the fall of communism as a process of sacralization?

One of the first large scale projects aimed at dealing with desecrated Jewish material traces took place in Kazimierz Dolny, a resort town that had a Jewish majority before the Holocaust. During the war the Nazis completely destroyed the Jewish cemetery in the town. Some of the broken matzevot remained scattered on the site, and others were taken by the Nazis, who used the stones for construction. During the next 40 years the site of the cemetery on the outskirts of the town stood neglected, and parts of matzevot continued to function as pavements or as parts of stone walls (Young 199-203). In 1984 the local authorities decided to commemorate the Jews, and a Polish artist was selected to build a monument in the area of the Jewish cemetery. With the help of Polish and Jewish activists attempts were made to locate parts of matzevot from different places in the town and to bring them to the site of the cemetery. Some of the stones were symbolically placed back at the site, and from the remaining broken ones the artist created a “lapidarium” - an impressive memorial wall.

18 For an analysis of the political and social circumstances that prevented a rational discussion regarding the memory of the Jews and the Holocaust in Poland, see Steinlauf; Irwin-Zarecka.

(The Memorial Wall in Kazimierz Dolny. Photos taken by the author.)

In August 2011, when asking the locals in Kazimierz Dolny for directions, I discovered that many of them referred to the monument as “Ściana Płaczu” (the Wailing Wall) 19{ }^{19}. According to Jewish tradition, as is well-known, it is customary to place slips of paper containing prayers or requests into the cracks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. 20{ }^{20} In the photograph on the right we can clearly see slips of paper placed between the broken matzevot in a way that bears immediate association with the Wailing Wall. Is this a sort of a syncretic adoption of the Jewish practice? Apparently, this new local “tradition” of placing slips of paper between the stones of “Ściana Płaczu” developed spontaneously. Many of the papers, I was told by the locals, were placed by school children from the surrounding areas, who came there as part of school activities.

Another possible explanation for this practice might be associated with another Jewish tradition - placing slips of papers (“kvitlach”) with personal requests on the grave of the “Tzadik”. As I mentioned earlier, in some pre-war Polish towns and villages this practice was also adopted by Poles who believed in the sanctity of the Tzadik and in his super-natural powers. In a way, the story of the “Wailing Wall” in Kazimierz Dolny might be a good example of the process of symbolic sacralization of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland. A place that for 40 years was deserted and practically nonexistent functions today as one of

19 “Ściana Płaczu” is also the name of this monument according to official tourist brochures and web pages of the town.
20 The Wailing Wall (also known as the western wall) in Jerusalem is generally considered the most sacred place for Jews. The wall, which is one of the four parts of the external wall that surrounded the second temple in Jerusalem, is the only remnant of the second temple.

the main “attractions” of the town, and as a kind of a contemporary pilgrimage destination for Jews and Poles alike. 21{ }^{21}

Since the political transformation in 1989, projects on the reconstruction and preservation of Jewish cemeteries have become the most common practice of commemoration and dealing with Jewish memory in Poland. These projects are initiated and funded by numerous different official and unofficial organizations and associations, from Poland and abroad, at governmental and grassroots levels. 22{ }^{22} Local schools, churches, and even prisons are involved in many of these initiatives. 23{ }^{23} As the fate of the desecrated Jewish cemeteries was the most tangible evidence of the erasure of Jewish memory and culture in Poland during communist rule, the post-communist projects of preserving and protecting the cemeteries are, in many ways, the most tangible expression of the attempts of part of Polish society to reconstruct the memory of the Jews in Poland.

During the first years of post-communist Poland, as interest in Jewish issues was growing, the Jewish cemeteries became more and more visible in the public sphere. Attempts to deal with the aftermath of communism and to build a democratic and Western country led to an increasing awareness of minority rights, and in a way compelled the new authorities to deal with the problematic status of the Jewish religious sites:

The Jewish religion sees places of burial as uniquely sacred. Cemeteries are treated with great respect, regardless of their condition and of what remains of them. They do not cease to be holy, even when they have neither fences nor headstones. In this sense, the word “cemetery” has a much broader meaning than its visible and statutory meaning. Judaism does not know the concept of cemetery liquidation; the laws of this religion do not permit any other use of the land - once it has been designated for burial - apart from burials. The Polish state, on the grounds of showing regard for the convictions and traditions of all religious communities, also wishes to respect the uniqueness of cemeteries in the Jewish religion. (qtd in Bergman and Jagielski 480)

This letter, which was written by representatives of the new Polish Government in 1990, is maybe the first official post-communist recognition of the Jewish

21 At the town’s information centre for tourists, the cemetery is on the list of the most recommended places to visit.
22 Many of these projects are funded and organized by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODŻ). On the website of the foundation there are reports and information about ongoing preservation projects. See: fodz.pl.
23 “Tikkun - Naprawa” is a project, organized by FODŻ and the Polish prison service, in which prisoners from Polish penitentiaries are reconstructing cemeteries as their way of performing community service. See Easton.

cemetery as sacred. It embraces Jewish definitions for determining the ontological status of the cemetery as a holy place. While using the particular arguments of Jewish law, it seems that the writer of the letter is also appealing to Catholic sensibilities, and trying to strengthen the perception of the Jewish cemetery as equal to Catholic cemeteries.

Of course, this process of the gradual “sacralization” of Jewish religious sites was, and is, far from being simple and easy. Alongside the growing interest in Jewish cemeteries after the political transformation, Poland witnessed a wave of anti-Semitic manifestation in the public sphere during 1989-1990, which also included acts of vandalism and desecration of Jewish cemeteries (Michlic 262). While cases of vandalizing Jewish cemeteries still occur, the growing interest in the material traces of the lost Jewish culture has led to many projects of protecting, rebuilding, documenting and mapping Jewish cemeteries all over Poland. 24{ }^{24} In many of these projects, taking care of the Jewish cemetery functions as a first step in dealing with local Jewish history, a history which is often still repressed and forgotten.

One of these projects was “Instrukcja powrotu macewy” (“Instructions for returning matzevot”). The project, which was organized by the Warsaw-based NGO “Towarzystwie Inicjatyw Twórczych ‘e’”, took place during 2007-2010 in 10 Polish peripheral villages and towns. 25{ }^{25} The aim of the project was to encourage people to take care of the Jewish memory in their communities by tracing and bringing back remnants of matzevot to the local Jewish cemeteries. 26{ }^{26} The locations for the project were chosen according to the prior knowledge of the places in the towns where parts of matzevot from the local Jewish cemeteries were used as roads, pavements or walls. As the project’s activists discovered, the matzevot were also used by individual households. Some people used matzevot as furniture, construction material or as decorative objects. According to Dorota Borodaj, the project organizer, the activists were very careful not to act as “intruders”, which might arouse antagonism and seclusion among the locals (Borodaj). In order to avoid pointing the finger at the locals, the organizers made sure not

24 The project “Pamięć w Kamieniu” (Memory in Stone) is an Internet documentation and mapping project of Jewish cemeteries. It is part of the website “virtual sztetl”, which belongs to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
25 The website of the project: instrukcjapowrotu.blogspot.co.il.
26 The project was in cooperation with the photographer Łukasz Baksik, who took pictures all over Poland in places where matzevot from Jewish cemeteries are being used as sidewalks, pavements, sandboxes, grindstones, etc. The photographs were part of his exhibition “Macewy codziennego użytku” (“Matzevot for everyday use”).

to rebuke or judge people that kept matzevot in their houses. They published instructive posters in central places in towns. The posters contained phone numbers and e-mail addresses for reporting places where matzevot could be found, and also a list of places where it was possible to bring matzevot and to leave them there anonymously. A short explanation was included in the posters about the importance of the project:
… Judaism forbids removing the matzevot from the ground. It is very important not to desecrate the grave and disturb the eternal rest of the dead … the Matzeva is part of the grave, and it should not have any use other than as a memorial to the people who died … We know of places where matzevot are in the possession of private individuals or part of public property; thus, we have to do something about this issue. 27{ }^{27}

The message of the posters is very carefully worded, and in many ways appeals to the universal and religious sensibilities of the readers. The religious explanation that using matzevot is a disturbance of the serenity of the dead can be interpreted as another attempt to compare the Jewish cemetery to a Catholic cemetery and to endow it with universal sanctity. Bringing back the matzevot, in other words, is not only a moral obligation but also a religious one.

In some of the towns and villages the activists were able to collect a substantial amount of matzevot material. Together with local volunteers, matzevot were found and brought to the site of the Jewish cemetery, where they were symbolically placed back. In certain places the return of the matzevot to the former site of the cemetery resulted in additional initiatives by the locals (Borodaj). Digging and searching for parts of matzevot around the town, the activists tried to help, or even to force, the local citizens to perform a metaphorical excavation of what was tabooed and buried under layers of silence and repression (Borodaj). In this sense the project was an attempt to create the possibility of learning and talking about the Jewish local history of the given town.

A similar project for tracing matzevot has taken place recently in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. Some of the matzevot in this town were found buried in the backyard of a private house and taken to the Jewish cemetery. According to Joanna Sarnecka, the curator of the project: “It is not good that so many years after the war, people walk on matzevot and it is normal. It is not normal … Matzevot are part of the cemetery and they are sacred” (Sarnecka). Again, we see how an attempt to retrieve the sacredness of matzevot and to put an end to the desecration of memory functions as an act of the normalization of the abnormal perception of the Jewish cemeteries.

27 The posters can be viewed at the project’s website: instrukcjapowrotu.blogspot.co.il.

This abnormal and pathologized perception, which has amounted to silence, repressions, fear, stereotypes and irrationality, is in many ways the result of the Holocaust and communist rule. As we saw earlier, the Jewish cemetery in pre-war Polish folk culture was perceived as a sacred place in a very ambivalent way. The aftermath of the Holocaust, and the cultural, social and psychological implications of communist rule have only pathologized and complicated this perception. As Jewish cemeteries were profaned and desacralized, literally and symbolically, a sense of haunting presence and repressed religious charge constructed the perception of the cemeteries during communist rule as an ambivalent and haunting mixture of a sacred-profane relationship.

In this sense, the act of reconstructing a cemetery functions not only as an attempt to sacralize a desecrated space and to regain its status as sacred, but also as an attempt to secularize a highly charged religious-pathological atmosphere. Thus, returning the matzevot to the cemetery is a necessary first step in normalizing the misperception of the Jewish cemetery. This material “memory work” not only sacralizes a desecrated space, but perhaps also desacralizes an environment overloaded with repressed and irrational religious presence that prevents a normalization and rationalization of the Jewish memory in Poland.

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