Warsaw Jewish Cemetery

The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery must be preserved. This 200-year-old historic landmark contains 250,000 graves and an estimated 150,000-200,000 tombstones within 83 acres of extremely overgrown and neglected grounds. These gravesites must be made accessible and presentable to the more than 40,000 visitors who go there each year. With the renovation of the cemetery and the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the visitors are expected to increase tenfold.

In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, the Germans purposefully burned the cemetery records and destroyed many of the gravesites, though they destroyed more than that. They also destroyed the rich cultural knowledge that the tombstones contained. These gravesites contain critical information for heritage preservation and can yield important genealogical and historical information. Most of the gravesites do remain, but the information they contain can only be accessed by restoring the decaying tombstones in their overgrown plots.

But documenting information from gravesites alone is not enough. Information also needs to be available on a cemetery website and at kiosks on site for visitors to access. By making information available on the web, it will also serve the needs of off-site scholars, researchers and future visitors in preparing their visit to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery and other Jewish historic sites.

In order to meet these project objectives, two-year funding in the amount of approximately $2.54 million is required.

The project's goals are therefore to create both physical and virtual access, with the following priorities:

1. create an attractive entry area and conduct a major physical overhaul of the site by ridding it of overgrowth, such as trees, brush and debris;
2. document the tombstones and restore their inscriptions;
3. create a computer learning station for visitor access to gravesites and genealogical index, site maps and related visitor and research information;
4. re-tool and update the existing website and link it to the Jewish Historical Institute's computerized Genealogy Learning Center.

The significance of this project is in every way in keeping with present-day efforts to reclaim and preserve the Jewish past of Poland as key to its history as a nation. The project of restoring the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is therefore an important step for living descendants, as well as for world heritage and posterity.

The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery is in dire need of restoration and landscaping to preserve its historic value.