The Jewish cemetery in the city of Wroclaw in southwest Poland was recently vandalized, with dozens of headstones toppled by a group of 12-year-olds who wanted to build a fort.

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The incident took place last week. Local police arrived at the cemetery and discovered a group of five children using a hammer to knock down headstones and break them apart. Some had already been completely smashed, while others were only partly damaged.

In total, 63 headstones had been destroyed, 20 of which were targeted on the day the children were caught in the act.

The children were taken to the police station and questioned with their parents present. There were no indications that the vandalism was antisemitic in nature.

However, in 2019, the same cemetery was targeted when anonymous vandals spray-painted "Jesus is king" on its walls.

The Jewish community of Wroclaw, also known as Breslav, is one of the oldest in Europe, dating to the 13^th century. One of the headstones in the cemetery is dated 1203, the earliest evidence of Jewish life in Poland.

In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, Wroclaw was home to some 20,000 Jews, but that number plummeted by half after Kristallnacht, when all the city's synagogues were destroyed. Most of the Jews who still lived in Wroclaw when World War II broke out were murdered in the Holocaust.

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According to accounts in the German media, two masked men arrived at the Jewish cemetery at approximately 3 a.m. Monday morning and proceeded to knock over dozens of gravestones and deface some of them with blue paint.

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The two were arrested near the crime scene following a tip from a witness to the act of vandalism who alerted the authorities.

According to Bild, the two men, 21 and 33, both known as far-right extremists, were briefly detained and released. Law enforcement has opened an investigation into the incident.

Just a few days ago, a similar crime was reported in Slovakia, where some 20 gravestones were vandalized in the country's north.

This article was originally published by i24NEWS.

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As the visionary behind the $28 million restoration and documenting of Jewish sepulchral heritage in Poland, Laszczkowski has helped the organization raise funds from Poland's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and Capital Monument Conservation Office. In addition to their biggest project – cleaning up the major Jewish cemetery in Warsaw – other work includes the preservation of other Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, churches and various national heritage sites connected to Polish heritage abroad.

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The Jewish cemetery in Warsaw on Okopowa Street was built in 1806 outside the city ramparts, and is one of the last Jewish cemeteries in Poland that is still being used. From its founding until 1939, some 150,000 Jews were buried there, making it the largest cemetery of its kind in Europe (according to number of people buried there) and representing 10% to 15% of Jewish tombstones in Poland.

So far, under the direction of rabbis who ensure that the restoration work is done according to Jewish law, the organization has renovated more than 100 tombstones and gravestone art, they have also cut down bushes, weeds and about 500 wild trees that pose a danger to those who visit the cemetery. According to Laszczkowski, making the area safer and better preserved will bring more people to the cemetery, Jews and non-Jews alike.

"Right now, teachers are afraid to take responsibility for bringing students here because of an incident where a tree fell on a tourist," he told JNS.

As the material heritage of the Jewish community was almost totally destroyed during World War II, with Nazis stealing Jewish tombstones for building projects and street pavements, Laszczkowski expressed the need for Poles "to have a place to understand Jewish heritage and contributions to Polish society."

The cemetery does just that, with styles of the tombstones and the contents of the epitaphs reflecting the diversity of Warsaw's Jewish community. Although the cemetery archives were burned during the war, and thus the identity of many buried there are unknown, information from the monuments show that among those buried at the cemetery are thousands of victims of the Warsaw ghetto, buried in mass graves; rabbis and tzadikim ("righteous Jews"); leaders of secular movements like the assimilation movement, Zionism and socialism; promoters of Hebrew; Yiddish writers, journalists and actors.

Exhibiting the prominence of Jewish presence in Warsaw, people buried there also include those who were at the forefront of Polish life: leaders of Polish uprisings, industrialists, physicians, scientists, artists, publishers, philanthropists and patrons of culture.

Laszczkowski views the cemetery as it exists right now, however, as a missed opportunity. While 40,000 tourists visit the cemetery each year, he estimates that only 10% of them are non-Jewish. With only 400 Jews living in Warsaw (less than 1% of the community of nearly 375,000 in 1939) most Poles do not know Jews or about Jewish tradition, maintained Laszczkowski.

"They should know that Jews were in the public of Polish society," he said.

Ola Waszak, project coordinator for the Cultural Heritage Foundation, noted that before she began to volunteer at the cemetery and started her job, she had never been to the site and didn't know its history.

"It's a cool, shared heritage," she told JNS.

Laszczkowski's vision is to drastically increase the number of non-Jews who visit by making it a mandatory part of Polish education. "I want to organize a large program where every Warsaw student comes to this cemetery during high school," he said.

"Poles are afraid to come inside the cemetery, and so they don't open the door. But once they come here during their education, they'll know that all they have to do is open the door," he explained. "I want to make this an exotic, attractive place, not just for students but also for Jews to visit tzadikim and relatives."

'Knowledge of Polish history is insufficient everywhere'

In late 2017, after touring the cemetery with Laszczkowski, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Culture and National Heritage Piotr Gliński agreed in the importance of the vision, allocating PLN 100 million (more than $26 million) to the Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The donation represented some 2% of the ministry's 2018 budget, and nearly half of the budget earmarked for "institutions whose activities include taking care of the memory, culture and heritage of the Jewish nation," which also includes the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Jewish Historical Institute, the State Museum at Majdanek and the Museum of History of Polish Jews POLIN.

"The heritage of Jews is the heritage of Poland," said Gliński in a meeting with Israeli journalists earlier this month. "Knowledge of Polish history, including Jewish history and during the Second World War, is insufficient everywhere," he said.

In the same year that the ministry allocated the budget for the Cultural Heritage Foundation, it also signed an agreement for the co-management of the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa, which according to the ministry is "of great importance to Poland."

"I am responsible for this heritage," said Gliński, noting that ministers from opposing political parties came together on this act. "It's good for us; it's good for everybody," he said.

Laszczkowski estimates that one of the reasons for the large endowment is public diplomacy, "to show that Poland cares about common Polish-Jewish heritage," he said.

One intention, according to Gliński, is to "increase mutual understanding and knowledge of a complicated history."

In the context of some Israeli criticism that Poland's lack of reparations, Holocaust bill and anti-shechita (Jewish ritual slaughter) bills were anti-Semitic, the deputy prime minister maintained that there is no visible rise in anti-Semitism in Poland, and while any anti-Semitism is "stupid," he strongly criticized "anti-Polish sentiment" among some Israelis.

"It is important to eliminate the bad atmosphere and behavior on both sides," he added.

In light of the controversial Holocaust bill (or anti-defamation bill as Poles call it, which forbade the use of the word "Polish" in relation to "concentration camps," preferring the term "Nazi-German concentration camps in occupied Poland"), Laszczkowski maintained that while the intention of the bill was important – namely, to affirm that Poland did not collaborate with Nazis and were in fact "one of the most suffering nations in the Second World War – the bill was "inadequate" and "not the way to [achieve its goals]."

"I understand that some people are upset because Polish history is not well-known – in nearly every family, there was a death," he said. "But because we don't know Jews, we don't feel their perspective."

Gliński, too, noted that while it's "hard to compare [the loss that Polish people experienced in the Second World War] to the Holocaust, material loss and deterioration of humanity in Poland was terrible, and it was all the fault of the German and Soviet occupants."

"That is the opinion of 90 to 95% of Polish people," continued Gliński. "Sometimes, our history doesn't help us, but we have a lot of common interests."

"I hope it doesn't get more political than it already is," said Waszak.

Although the cemetery repairs and upgrades are unlikely to bring back new Jewish life to Warsaw, Laszczkowski hopes that the restoration may initiate dialogue between peoples – both between Poland and Israel, as well as between Poland and its Jewish cultural heritage.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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But slowly, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Cuba is beginning to be rehabilitated, along with the memory of many of the island's early Jewish forebears.

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The restoration is the result of an initiative by the government-run city historian's office to spruce up Havana ahead of the 500th anniversary of its founding in November. Across the city, streets are being paved, monuments are being polished and historic sites are being restored.

There is also an effort to recover long-forgotten sites – among them the almost completely neglected Jewish cemetery in the Guanabacoa neighborhood on Havana's east side.

"I feel very great peace and calmness when I visit the cemetery. … For me it's like being with my mother, my only sister and my nephew," Adela Dworin, president of the Hebrew Board of Cuba, said standing beside a grave adorned with small rocks that are used by Jews to pay homage to the dead.

The rocks, which are believed to symbolize eternity, lie near inscriptions bearing names of the buried. Many have words of consolation written in Yiddish or Spanish and are adorned with the Star of David.

"The people buried here escaped fascism during the war. They're the founders of the community who bought these lands to make it a cemetery," said David Prinstein, vice president of the Hebrew board. "It has historical and sentimental value."

For many years, he said, the Jewish community was unable to raise the $200,000 needed to completely overhaul the grounds. Jews in the US contributed to the upkeep of some burial plots, but the cemetery as a whole was largely left to deteriorate.

Pilar Vega, an engineer in the historian's office, told local TV there are about 1,100 grave sites in the cemetery. About 50 have been repaired and 150 more are expected to be cleaned up before the end of this year, she said. She didn't say whether the entire cemetery would be refurbished, though she added that a special room where bodies are ritually washed and dressed according to Jewish burial rites has also been fixed up.

Vega didn't say how much the state has spent on the project.

The restoration effort in Havana comes as Cuba finds itself struggling with a severe economic crisis, which experts have blamed on a combination of a Trump administration trade embargo and the halt of Venezuelan shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used to generate electricity and earn hard currency on the open market. The country's lack of liquidity has now made it difficult to pay creditors and suppliers, resulting in a shortage of basic products like chicken and flour.

Over the years, the Jewish community has not been immune to the island's political ups-and-downs.

Many Jewish families left the country after the 1959 revolution, leaving behind their dead in accordance with Jewish custom that prohibits bodies from being exhumed unless they are taken to Israel. Others abandoned their religious traditions amid the deep secularism that took hold during the first few years of the Castro government. Some Jews moved to Israel amid the periodic economic crunches in the ensuing decades.

"Families leave and many even forget those left here," lamented Prinstein, who said the cemetery had also been looted throughout the decades of neglect.

It was not until the 1990s that Judaism on the island regained strength, partly due to the efforts of a noted surgeon, José Miller. He helped Jews scattered throughout Cuba reconnect with their roots at a time that the communist government discouraged religious denominations. Miller, who died in 2006, is buried in a prominent place in the cemetery.

Some 1,500 Jews live in Cuba now, most of them elderly.

Land for the cemetery in Guanabacoa was bought in 1906 by members of the island's first Hebrew society. It was inaugurated in 1910 by Jews and their descendants from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom fled persecution in the period between World Wars I and II.

The cemetery also has a 3-meter (10-foot) monument paying tribute to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. A half dozen bars of soap that the Nazis made with human fat from the concentration camps are buried nearby.

Dworin, who lost nearly her entire family during World War II, said she was a schoolgirl in Cuba when the memorial was inaugurated in 1947. Her parents had left a small town in modern-day Poland before war erupted in 1939, but her grandmother and uncles stayed behind, she said.

On a recent day, a group of workers' scrubbed tombstones and reconstructed various installations at the cemetery. Other repairs have also become more visible such as a paved street nearby.

"We are not the country's only problem. There are many places that require the attention of the historian's office, so we are eternally grateful for their interest and friendship to the Jewish people," Dworin said.

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