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22 Av 5760 - August 23, 2000 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family
Broken Tombstones and Grave Robberies in Eastern Europe
by G. Safran

Disconcerting reports have recently come in from Jews who visited Jewish sites which had once been thriving Torah centers in Europe, but are now in ruins. Visitors who recently came from Kelm and Kovna in Lithuania were shocked by the systematic destruction and vandalism in the ancient cemeteries. In some cases, the dead were robbed of their gold teeth.

In light of the these developments, a special delegate of the descendants and family members of those buried in those cemeteries recently went to Kelm and Kovna to try and rectify the situation.

Kelm, the famous city of the Alter and the Talmud Torah of Kelm, the city where the great mussar movement flourished and great Torah luminaries lived, is now without a single resident Jew. The last Jew to have lived in Kelm, Dr. Meir, a person of immense spiritual stature who made great efforts to preserve the cemetery, died of a sudden heart attack two years ago. Since his death, there is no local person to attend to the cemetery and the results are painfully obvious.

In the ancient cemetery, tombstones were desecrated in a disgraceful manner. Great Torah luminaries such as the Alter of Kelm and his family are buried in this cemetery. The menacing signs of vandalism are already evident: broken tombstones and tombstones which have been sprayed with whitewash. The feeling is that if no if steps are taken immediately, the cemetery will be in grave danger.

In Kovna the situation is also serious. The city was known primarily for the Knesses Yisroel yeshiva of Slobodke, the yeshiva which followed the educational approach of the Alter of Slobodke and which later continued the Alter's derech in Hevron and then in Yerushalayim after the massacres of 5689-1929. In days gone by the yeshiva was the pride of Kovna and pictures of the students of the yeshiva and its head were placed in the main synagogue, beside the pictures of Kovna's esteemed rabbonim, HaRav Yitzchok Elchonon Spector and HaRav Dovber Kahane-Shapira, author of Dvar Avrohom.

In Kovna's old cemetery, appalling negligence prevails. There are the common signs of vandalism, such as shattered tombstones with the pieces scattered all over the area. In this cemetery are the graves of the rabbonim of Kovna from the past few hundred years.

The grave of HaRav Yitzchok Elchonon is one of the few that was saved when it was transferred to the new cemetery in Aliscot, which is better maintained. The grave of the Dvar Avrohom, who was niftar in the Kovna ghetto during the Holocaust, was also transferred there, and placed near the grave of HaRav Boruch Horowitz of Aliscot, who was also a ram in the Slobodke yeshiva.

However many marbitzei Torah are still buried in the ancient cemetery, where a very lamentable situation exists. HaRav Yitzchok Elchonon was niftar more than 120 years ago and buried in the old cemetery, but people were buried in that cemetery more than 200 years ago. In this cemetery there were three rows of graves of the rabbonim of Kovna for many generations. Among the gedolim of Kovna buried there were known to be the father of the Bais Halevi, HaRav Yitzchok Zeev, and his father, HaRav Yosef Soloveitchik (who was the son-in-law of Rabbenu Chaim of Volozhin), both of whom served as rav and av beis din of Kovna.

HaRav Chaim Telzer, HaRav Leib Kobner, HaRav Yosef Cohen (the grandfather of HaRav Aharon Cohen, the rosh yeshiva of the Chevron yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel), as well as the brothers, HaRav Yaakov Lifschitz and HaRav Yehuda Lifschitz, and scores of other gedolei Torah, rabbonim and talmidei chachomim are also buried there. The grave of HaRav Chaim Telzer was located and his tombstone was found nearby on the ground. The grave of HaRav Yosef Cohen was famous because he promised that he would intercede in Heaven on behalf of any shomer Torah who visited his grave.

It was found that for some young Lithuanians the destruction of tombstones had become something of a hobby. The cemetery, which was once far from the city, has become closer to homes due to the expansion of the city. At one point, Kovna's residents began to use the cemetery as a shortcut between the neighborhoods that bordered it. The pedestrian traffic made the cemetery familiar and turned it into a sort of park in which dogs roam and children play among the tombstones.

Recently, a local developer was offered the chance to purchase part of the cemetery area, in order to build a parking lot on it. It was claimed that the parking lot would be built on an area that was never used for burials.

The Kovna dead have been horribly violated for very mercenary reasons. Using metal detectors, grave robbers locate precious metals buried in the graves. When they get a sign of some metal they dig up the grave, and extract the gold teeth or other precious metals buried with the deceased. A local paper reported extensively on the trial held for grave robbers caught red-handed while perpetrating their disgraceful work.

This is apparently why the local government felt uncomfortable and is trying to correct, at least in part, the negative impression created by the publicity generated by the affair. The authorities have agreed to comply, to some extent, with the demands made of them. If the Jewish community raises the funds to fence off the area and to clean up the graves, it appears likely that the government will agree to post permanent guards on the site.

A special emissary, R' Gedaliah Olstein, a building engineer who lives in Yerushalayim, was shocked by what he saw when he first arrived. He met with the representatives of the local government and demanded that the cemetery be shown the respect it deserves and that it be guarded. The authorities told him that if a way could be found to renovate the destroyed tombstones and to erect a fence around the cemetery, the local authorities would make a serious effort to guard it properly. The officials claimed they lacked the funds to do anything more than that.

A terrible spiritual neglect also prevails in those cities and towns which once were vibrant Torah centers and where there are still a few survivors. Of the scores of synagogues that once dotted Kovna, only one functions at all and that on a part-time and very unsettled basis. The Jews who remain in those places cry out for spiritual help, siddurim, seforim and a baal korei, so that they can live as Jews. They asked for a rav and guide for the Jewish youth, who will be able deliver shiurim to the older Jews who still recall a few Jewish concepts and are eager to learn more about Yiddishkeit.

R' Gedaliah Olstein managed to obtain a unique map which shows all of cemeteries in the Jewish towns of the area, as well as the mass graves of the kedoshim massacred by the Nazis. This map was laboriously prepared over many years by the aforementioned Dr. Meir of Kelm, who went from city to city gathering testimony and amassing every bit of information about the cemeteries and graves of the kedoshim throughout Lithuania.

According to the rabbonim and activists involved in the issue, the lack of awareness and attention to the future of the cemeteries on the part of the worldwide Jewish community enables the non-Jews and the antisemites to do whatever they please on those sites. It is difficult to understand why there is such a general lack of concern about the sorry situation which grows worse from day to day, and has lately increased even more as the local residents see the indifference of the Jewish community to what is taking place on the scene.

All those who visited the cemeteries in East Europe share the feeling that the last living Jews are disappearing from these areas. Seeing the few vestiges who have remained in the former Torah centers of Europe has caused the activists involved in the rescue of destroyed Lithuanian Jewry to wonder who will remain there in a few more years. Today in every city there are one or two families and they keep the keys of the cemeteries and take visitors to the Torah sites and to the buildings where the where the yeshivos and the apartments of the marbitzei haTorah were. Only a very few Jews remain.

The activists wonder what will happen after they too disappear? They ask: Aren't all of us responsible for the fate of both the living and the dead, especially in light of the shocking trend of the desecration of graves?

 

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