New Polish cemetery resources


Recently I added links to Lo Tishkach, the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, for all the Polish towns in the B&F Encyclopedia of Jewish Genealogy. Lo Tishkach is an initiative to collect information on all Jewish cemeteries, as well as mass graves, within Europe. There is a lot of overlap between the information in Lo Tishkach and the IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project, although the IAJGS efforts covers a lot more than just Europe. Lo Tishkach, on the other hand, is not just interested in cataloging the cemeteries, but wants to help push for the restoration and renovation of the cemeteries it is cataloging. To that end, they look to catalog cemeteries across Europe and lobby for standardized legislation in different European countries (or within the European Union) to manage the preservation of Jewish cemeteries, particularly in places where Jews no longer live.

Started by the Conference of European Rabbis in 2006, Lo Tishkach is now run out of offices in the United Kingdom and Belgium, and operates as a non-profit foundation. The foundation runs education activities with European students, as well as utilizing the same students to help catalog the cemeteries. There are well over a thousand cemeteries and mass graves documented by Lo Tishkach in Poland.

In addition to the Lo Tishkach pages, which give general information about all known Jewish cemeteries, I’ve also added links to the pages of the Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland, which photographs and transcribes the tombstones within the cemeteries for which it has information. Starting with the Okopowa cemetery in Warsaw (for which it has information and photographs for over 80,000 tombstones), the foundation now has information on over 90 cemeteries in Poland, which are now linked to their respective town pages in the encyclopedia. When you go to the page for a specific town, you can browse through the listings, or search for a specific name.

While adding large collections like Lo Tishkach (over 1000 cemeteries) and FDJCP (over 85,000 tombstones in over 90 cemeteries) is helpful, I also like to find smaller sites that are focused on single communities. Sometimes these sites are the work of individuals, but still contain an impressive amount of information. A few focused sites added as well include An Inventory of Przemyśl’s Jewish Cemetery, Lomza Virtual Jewish Cemeteries, and The Jewish Cemetery in Lubaczow, Poland.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to change how some of the resources show up in the encyclopedia. Adding the Lo Tishkach resources presented a problem, which was that as many as half if not more of all the towns had more than one cemetery or mass grave with its own resource link. If I added it as I had before, it would have wasted a lot of space on town pages. Therefore, like the fact that a Web Site with associated Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social media accounts show up in the same entry on a town page, multiple pages from the same collection of information now also will show up in the same listing. In this case, when you see a town page with Lo Tishkach resources, they will all show up together. I’ve updated the listings of the Kirkuty cemetery resources as well, to follow this pattern.

Speaking of which, it’s worth pointing out that these new cemetery resources join over 600 links to Kirkuty (a Polish site with current photos of cemeteries in Poland), over 700 links to the IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project, and over 150 links to the recently mentioned Złe miejsca dla ślimaków.

I hope people find these new resources helpful. In addition to these there are also new resources at the Country level for countries like Spain and Portugal, as well as others spread around the site. If you visit a country, province or city page and know of resources not listed, please submit them so they can be added.

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