On the individual level, there are some non-Jews who make huge efforts to restore, fence and maintain the Jewish cemetery in their village or town. One shining example is Antal Kocsis in Backa Topola (Topolya), Serbia who even built a Holocaust memorial and organized an annual remembrance ceremony. There are others and they do this work without support >from any Jewish organizations or individuals.

Some towns, after sustained pressure >from abroad do a clean-up but the issue of maintenance is unclear, perhaps to be solved only if the cemetery is recognized as part of the townâ??s heritage and history. One continuing success story seems to be â??Friends of the Kozma Cemeteryâ?? which has so far cleaned up several sections of the vast cemetery in Budapest.

On the national level, more than five years ago as part of remembering the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust, Hungary did an inventory of Jewish cemeteries in the country and committed to their clean-up but to my knowledge little has been done. On the international level about 5 years ago an organization called ESJF came into being with the goal of fencing abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Eastern and Central European countries formerly part of the Soviet block. Their leadership and decision making (as to where to work) is unclear and seems to change >from year to year. For me they have been a huge disappointment as the cemeteries they surveyed and promised in writing to fence were only surveyed, and as a result left exposed but the promised fencing was never done.

Of course the cemetery clean-ups, in addition to bringing dignity to the dead, are a boon to genealogists if the names are submitted to JOWBR or otherwise made available.

Catherine Adam,

Toronto, Canada

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Subject: Bakonybank
From: michael_perl9@...
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2019 16:05:59 +0000
X-Message-Number: 2

Thanks to a grant >from Mazsok, the small cemetery in Bakonybank was recently restored and a fence erected.
Together with Martin Perl, we paid to have the stones re-erected properly and cleaned so that we now have a photographic database of the 62 extant stones.

We donated these records to Jewishgen a month ago but they are not yet in the database. If anyone has family >from there, I would be happy to send it.

With regards,

Michael Perl