Warsaw’s 211-Year-Old Jewish Cemetery Devastated By Storm
The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, which occupies 83 acres of land with over 250,000 marked graves. Image by Wikimedia
By Ari Feldman July 21, 2017
A recent violent summer storm toppled countless of graves and split thousands of trees in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery, founded in 1806, is largely abandoned and has only a few volunteers to maintain its 83 acres and 250,000 marked headstones.
“This scene is terrible,” a visitor told the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamevasser. “Thousands of Jewish graves, including those of rabbis and dignitaries, are buried under hundreds of trees which collapsed on them. And nobody is doing anything about it.”
The cemetery also contains the mass graves of Jews murdered after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
