Abandoned Jewish Cemeteries

Question: According to family records, some of my mother's ancestors were buried in Uckermark, Germany. They came from Metz, France with Napoleon's army, around 1812. I just learned that the Nazis used the gravestones from Jewish cemeteries to build prisons for a concentration camp in the district of Uckermark, Germany. I suppose their stones were used. Has the German government made any attempts to restore the old Jewish cemeteries desecrated by the Nazis? What is the Jewish obligation, religiously? Neither of my parents WHO ESCAPED FROM GERMANY IN 1938 wanted to go back after the war.

Answer: It is a religious commandment, a mitzvah to care for the graves of the deceased. Events of the last 70 years make this very complicated. Today may communities in which large numbers of Jews once lived are empty or nearly empty of Jews. The largest number are those communities decimated by the Holocaust, but also a large number of communities, especially in the Arab world, have been abandoned by Jews who fled persecution in the 1940 & 50s. The cemetery of the Jewish community of Shanghai, relatively small except for a brief period during the Holocaust when it was a place of refuge for 40,000 Jews who abandoned it after the war, is also in need of attention. In Toledo Spain, work to expand a local school on to the Jewish cemetery (abandoned by the Jews who fled in 1492) stopped and the government agreed to talk with interested parties.

The Jewish community has focused on helping the survivors and supporting the tiny remnants of European Jewry. The problem of who will care for Jewish cemeteries is a complicated one. In Germany alone, there are an estimated 2,000 cemeteries and 600,000 individual graves. More work seems to be done by some local communities or even private individuals than by national governments. The Lo Tishkach Foundation (Do Not Forget) has created a website to help collect information about European cemeteries, and to advocate for laws that protect the sites.

Specifically, Uckermark is a district region in northeastern Germany and is the largest district in Germany. It was the site of a satellite of the Ravensbrook Concentration camp, which was near the city of Furstenberg. Originally, Uckermark was established for housing girls. Towards the end of the war, it was turned into a killing center and was liberated by the Soviets in April 1945. Substantial efforts have been made to preserve Ravensbrook itself, but not for Uckermark or the two-dozen or so sub-camps. Without knowing where your family was buried it is hard to know if their gravestones were used or not, and even more difficult, are any of the gravestones used still intact.