Fragments from dozens of Jewish tombstones were discovered during renovations in a Polish town near the former Nazi death camp Treblinka. The fragments were found last week in the eastern town of Sokolow Podlaski as work began on a terrace leading to the shops located at a marketplace there. “We are in contact with the mayor and the ‘matzevot’ [headstones] will return to the cemetery,” Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said. One idea for returning them is to embed the fragments in a …More

A Jewish burial plot in the island state of Cape Verde was rededicated with help from the king of Morocco. About 100 people attended the rededication ceremony Thursday. “The support of King Mohammed VI to this project is representative of Morocco’s attachment to the preservation of its patrimony--Arab, Jewish or Berber,” Andre Azoulay, the king’s Jewish advisor, said in a statement read during a ceremony hosted by Abdellah Boutadghart, a Moroccan diplomat. Several hundred Moroccan Jews …More

Every month or so, a highly emotional email lands in the inbox of Martin Kornfeld, CEO of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia. The authors invariably are Western tourists appalled by the neglect they witnessed during visits to one of the hundreds of Jewish cemeteries scattered across the country. Often their emails concern the final resting place of their relatives amid overgrown grasses and overturned tombstones. “They want us to fix it,” Kornfeld told JTA. “But ours is a small …More

An ancient Jewish cemetery in Amsterdam has been reopened after almost 70 years, thanks to help from the Moroccan and Jewish communities who renovated it. The Zeeburg Cemetery will be open to the public on the first Sunday of every month, a spokesperson for the Association for the Restoration of the Zeeburg Cemetery said. The opening was made possible by a group of Jewish and Moroccan youths who have been volunteering with the association since 2011 to clean up the area. The cemetery is where approximately …More

Jewish leaders this week asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take further steps to secure Jerusalem’s ancient Mount of Olives (“Har Hazeitim” in Hebrew) cemetery, whose grounds and visitors have been the target of vandalism and attacks by Arabs. The Jerusalem Development Authority has already installed security cameras and established a permanent police presence at the cemetery, home to 150,000 graves and a number of landmarks for Jews, Christians and Muslims. The cemetery has …More

The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is more than a cemetery; it’s an archive. The cemetery is a 500-year-old testament to steadfast belief in the face of persecution and neglect. To visit the cemetery is to walk through the remains of what was once one of the world’s major centers of Jewish life. The Old Jewish Cemetery is located in what used to be the Jewish ghetto in Prague, an area named Josefov, and the cemetery reflects the old neighborhood. Josefov was a part of town with narrow streets and where …More

Warsaw has agreed to hand over control of an ancient cemetery to Poland's Jewish community. The Brodno Cemetery sits on the eastern banks of the Vistula River, and will be handed over to the Jewish community in the coming weeks. The cemetery will undergo a major restoration operation this year, according to a report last week on the Gazeta website. The 13-acre cemetery, established in 1780, came into the possession of the Polish state after its partial destruction by the Nazi occupying forces in the 1940s. …More

For the second time in a month, vandals desecrated Jewish graves in Tunisia. On Feb. 4, unidentified individuals smashed and overturned ten grave stones in Kef, in western Tunisia, according to the Tunisia News Network. An earlier incident in the coastal Tunisian town of Sousse left more than 68 Jewish graves ransacked and looted on Jan. 23, according to the Tunisian Shems FM radio station. The last Jew left Kef in 1984, according to Dreuz.info, a French news website. It quoted Yves Kamhi, a Jewish lawyer, as …More

French police reportedly are investigating fresh acts of vandalism in two Jewish cemeteries and a municipal building. On Monday in Paris, police arrested two men suspected of digging up two corpses at the Pantin cemetery, according to a statement from the municipality. They were found to be in possession of a number of human teeth and are suspected of being gravediggers, the statement read. In Avignon near Marseille, two plaques on the Jewish cemetery’s wall were bludgeoned on Nov. 22, according to …More

Some 40 gravestones were overturned at a Jewish cemetery in Hartford, Conn. The damage throughout the Congregation Ados Beth Israel Cemetery took place sometime between Oct. 12 and Oct. 19, according to The Associated Press. No arrests have been made. The vandalism was discovered by a man who regularly visits the grave of his son, who was killed while serving in the U.S. military, according to WTNH-TV. WTNH reported that the gravestones were knocked off their bases, including one large stone which would have …More

Dozens of Jewish graves were defaced at a New Zealand cemetery, a crime discovered early this morning. Auckland’s Karangahape Road Cemetery is the resting place of graves dating back to the 1880’s, with this marking the first occurrence of anti-Semitic vandalism. The tombstones were defaced with swastikas and the number 88, a code for HH, or Heil Hitler. Two grave stones were also graffitied with “F*** Israel” and “Don’t f*** with us.” The crime has rocked the small …More

A wall modeled on the Western Wall in Jerusalem will stand at the site of the Jewish cemetery in Bilgoraj, in southeastern Poland. The wall, which is being funded by the Isaac Bashevis Singer Association of Bilgoraj, will display the names of Jews who lived in the town. The cost of the wall is about $15,000. Among the names that will be included is Shmuel Ben-Artzi, father-in-law of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Artzi was born in Bilgoraj in 1914 and later studied in the town's cheder and then …More