How to commemorate unmarked Jewish graves of Holocaust victims according to Halakha and in collaboration with the local community?

Context

As a result of the events of the 20th century, “contaminated landscapes” – to use Martin Pollack’s phrase – appeared on the map of Central and Eastern Europe. These are places of violence and mass murder, where traces have been deliberately erased.

Uncommemorated and unmarked Jewish burial sites of Holocaust victims are an example of such places. Hundreds of them are located in Polish villages and towns; they may be individual, collective, or mass graves, situated among today’s agricultural fields, forests, or along roads. The Zapomniane Foundation is dedicated to finding, researching, and commemorating these sites.

Since 2017, projects have allowed for the marking of several dozen of them with special wooden matzevot (Jewish gravestones) in a manner consistent with Halakha (Jewish religious law), which prohibits invasive research and the disturbance of the remains of the deceased.

The “MultiMemo” project, in line with the concept of multidirectional memory, focused on burial sites where Jewish and Romani victims rest, as well as women, often individual victims of violence.

Highlights

  • Engaging the local community in the participatory process of creating a symbolic marker of the burial site.
  • Transforming a “non-memory place” into a place of memory without the need for significant interference in the landscape through the use of a wooden matzevah.
  • Combining craftsmanship with modern technology in the commemoration process.

Challenges

  • HOW to address the lack of official commemoration and clear marking of burial sites?
  • HOW to increase the local community’s knowledge about Halakha-accepted forms of commemoration, despite the absence of Jewish communities?
  • HOW to change the perception of places associated with Jewish history as “foreign”?

Solutions

  • A participatory, inclusive, and engaging commemoration process in which local community members become co-creators of a modest monument/marker. The joint creation of commemoration serves as a catalyst for local care for places linked to Jewish history, as well as those where different groups of victims are buried.
  • The temporary and non-invasive nature of commemoration in the form of a marker that does not impose predetermined forms of commemoration but opens the path to further commemorative actions.

Description

In September 2017, the Zapomniane Foundation, in collaboration with The Matzevah Foundation, marked 30 previously researched Jewish burial sites with symbolic wooden markers in the form of matzevot.

The markers referenced the traditional wooden gravestones from Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Poland, and the material used to create them – larch and pine wood – was common in the south and east of the country. Using laser technology, inscriptions in Polish were engraved on the matzevot, along with the word “tancewe” – an abbreviation of five Hebrew letters TNCBN, meaning “May their soul be bound in the bond of life.” The inscriptions were done in a typeface developed within the Warsaw Fonts project, inspired by pre-war signs and Warsaw plaques commemorating World War II.

These actions aimed to minimize interference with the landscape, reminding us of what is invisible yet present in the memory of local communities. It was also an attempt to integrate these places into the local infrastructure of memory.

The temporality of the commemoration was intentional – it opened up the possibility for local communities to take care of these sites, to become familiar with them, and perhaps also to initiate their own commemorative practices (including permanent ones).

In the following years, the initiative was continued and expanded, with more projects marking Jewish burial sites with wooden markers and organizing matzevah-making workshops involving local youth.

Through cooperation with the Creative Coding Lab at SWPS University, the Zapomniane Foundation developed its portable tool for creating inscriptions on the markers in collaboration with local community representatives. This allowed the markers to be created on-site in participatory carpentry workshops, combined with exploring local history and creating inscriptions using modern technologies.

Conclusions

  • The participatory and non-invasive nature of the project inspires the local community to change their perspective and initiate further actions.
  • An interdisciplinary model of commemoration, combining work with the local community, modern technologies, and traditional craftsmanship.
  • A long-term approach to the project, its continuation, and expansion with additional elements (workshops).

More Information

More information about the project “https://zapomniane.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Reference-Points-EN-291121-s.pdf (zapomniane.org)

Full list of projects below.

Funding

 

Photos – Zapomniane Foundation