Case study no. & title:
204. Renovation of the Jewish cemetery by the local self-government and the Jewish Association, 1989-1997, Hrubieszów, Poland

Keywords

2. Author information:
2.1 Author’s Name
Joanna Wawrzyniak

2.2 Institutional Affiliation and Contact Details:
Warsaw University
Institute of Sociology (PhD student)
00-324 Warsaw
ul. Karowa 18
Poland

E-mail: kochanowiczjoanna@wp.poczta.pl

2.3 Date recorded
31/01/2001

3. Good Practice Information Sheet
3.1 Local Level Good Practice:
The practice aims to commemorate the Jews who used to live in Hrubieszów. It involves cleaning and fencing of the Jewish cemetery, which had been neglected for many years, and in building monuments in its grounds. The practice contributes to the improvement of mutual relations between the local population and the representatives of the Jewish Compatriots and has an educational value for the local community.

3.2 Location:
Hrubieszów town, lubelskie voivodship, Eastern Poland, near the Ukrainian border. The town has around 20,000 inhabitants.

3.3 Minority/Target Groups:
Minority: Jews; Target group: Jews born in Hrubieszów, members of the Association of Compatriots of Hrubieszów.

3.4 Major Actors Involved

3.5 Budget allocated by local government authorities and/or by other actors
The total sum is not available; the contribution of the self-government for building the Wall of Memory on the cemetery’s territory was around 10,000 PLN.

3.6 Timeframe
The initiative has developed gradually. In 1989, the parties signed an agreement to clean the cemetery and build the first monument. At the beginning of the 1990s they agreed to build the Wall of Memory, which was officially unveiled in 1997.

3.7 Local level good practice relation to national level ethnic policy
This was an entirely local initiative with no disagreement coming from the national level.

4. Good Practice Description
Background
A brief historical background is necessary to clarify the significance of a local policy whose main target is an ethnic group which does not live in the town any more.

Before World War II around three million Jews lived in the Polish territories. In some villages, especially in Eastern Poland, they constituted the majority of citizens (as it is was the case in Hrubieszów). The exact number of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland is not known, but according to some estimations, there were still around 200,000 Jews in 1946. Since that time, the majority of them have left the country in a few waves of emigration – among them that caused by the state’s anti-Semitic campaign in the 1960s. At the moment, the size of the Jewish minority in Poland is being estimated at around 6000-10,000, depending on the source. In the recent years, the minority has organized communes in big cities, i.e. in Cracov, Wroclaw, and Warsaw.

Those who emigrated during the communist era often left behind not only their property, but also places and buildings of symbolic (Holocaust-related), religious (synagogues), and historical value (cemeteries). Therefore, while various communities of Eastern Poland turned into ethnically homogenous communities, they became the inheritors of Jewish culture. Nevertheless, practically no Jewish-Polish relations existed on these territories. Many of the historical and religious places were either ruined or not restored after the devastation of the war.

At the moment, one can speak of a slow revival of the Polish-Jewish contacts. Regional ("voivodship" level) and some of the local ("gmina", "town" or "powiat" level) authorities have established relations both with the Jewish communes in Poland, and with former emigrants and their descendants (contemporary citizens of Israel or other countries). However, these contacts are being affected by two important controversies. First, there is contention about the religious symbols in the places of memory (the controversy relating to Auschwitz is widely known). Second, there is a question of restitution of pre-War Jewish communes’ property which became nationalised after the War (buildings such as hospitals, schools, etc.). Since the beginning of 1990s, these buildings have become the property of local self-governments. The latter issue is particularly difficult due to a general controversy concerning re-privatisation in Poland and to the disproportionate sizes of the pre-War and the contemporary Jewish communes.

Given this background, the reason for describing the policy in Hrubieszów - whose target group lives now lives elsewhere - is threefold. First, the Jewish emigrants still strongly identify themselves with the town where they, or their ancestors, were born. Second, the place has not only sentimental but also symbolic meaning for them, because there was a ghetto in the town, and two annihilation camps (Sobibór and Majdanek) were situated nearby. Third, the policy is evidence of a positive dimension to Polish-Jewish relations, as the initiative is a result of mutual co-operation, and it contributes to the education of the local population. Therefore it is worth describing also as an example which might counter-balance religious and economic tensions.

Local policy
The recent history of the Polish-Jewish relations in the town of Hrubieszów was not different from that of other villages in Eastern Poland. Before the War Jews constituted around 60% of the local population (i.e. around 7000). After the War they were all gone. Their property was either nationalised or allocated to Poles. The historical buildings of the synagogue, the religious school, and the house of prayer already ruined by Germans, all deteriorated and ceased to exist. In a part of the Jewish cemetery – previously devastated by Nazis who had used tombstones for a hard-core layer in road-construction – a communal dumping ground had been located.

The very beginnings of improvement lie in the informal relations between a local representative and a Jewish emigrant, who came to the town in the 1970s on a quasi-legal basis (at that time, Poland did not have diplomatic relations with the state of Israel due to the conflict in the Middle East) and noted the destroyed cemetery. Just after the transition had begun, the representative started to act for the betterment of mutual relations between the town’s authorities and emigrants.

At the moment, there are two main official agents concerned with these relations. The first is the Polish self-government at the town level. The other is Związek Ziomkowstwa Hrubieszowskiego [Association of Hrubieszów Compatriots]. The Association’s representatives live in Israel, but there are also members from other countries. They are involved in various activities, such as: organising each year Dni Pamięci [Days of Memory], funding scholarships for high school students from the Israeli city Holon to visit Hrubieszów (in return, the students organise commemorative meetings devoted to the Holocaust and Hrubieszów), or editing a periodical entitled "Nasze Korzenie" ["Our Roots"].

In 1989 the first official trip of the Association’s representatives was made to the town. At that time, the cemetery’s grounds were cleaned up, ploughed and fenced. An agreement was signed with the town’s authorities - who are formally the owners of the grounds - to take care of the cemetery. The Association contributes a sum of money annually, but it is mainly the town who is in charge of the place (cleaning, keeping order, etc.).

In 1990, a private sponsor, a Jewish compatriot from Munich, funded a marble obelisk to be placed at the cemetery. The inscription in three languages (Hebrew, English, and Polish) on the monument reads In the Memory of the Holocaust Victims 1939-1945. The unveiling of the monument became the occasion of a meeting of Hrubieszów Jews from the whole world, accompanied by a Jewish prayer and psalmodies performed by an Israeli cantor. On the Polish side, there were the town and "voivodship" authorities, priests, local citizens (among them two persons recognised by the Yad-Vashem Institute), and the media. In 1991, a Polish local representative paid a visit to Israel.

In the following years, an agreement was made to build another monument - Ściana Pamięci [The Wall of Memory] - in the cemetery’s grounds. The monument was planned to commemorate 500 hundred years of Jewish existence in Hrubieszów, and its tragic end in 1942, when the Jewish ghetto was liquidated by the Nazis. Among the sponsors there were the town’s self-government, the "voivodship" authorities, and the Association. The resources of the Association came from its members’ voluntary contributions.

The design was done by an Israeli architect born in Hrubieszów, while the details were worked out by a Polish artist also born in the town. The monument was built by a private enterprise (Przedsiębiorstwo Budownictwa Rolniczego).

The Wall is made from fragments of 110 Jewish tombstones recovered in Hrubieszów and its neighbourhood (some of them were found in the streets, some in people’s houses). The oldest stones have high historical value as they come from the 17^th century. Those recovered tombstones that were not used to build the monument, were buried at the cemetery.

In July 1997, the monument was solemnly unveiled. From the Jewish side there was a representation of three generations of Jews from Israel, Canada, Germany, and the USA (the compatriots and their descendants). The representation of the Polish side was similar to that at the 1990 ceremony. Among other official orations, the letter from the president of World Federation of Polish Jews was read in which the president considered the policy of the town’s self-government to be a model to other communal governments in Poland. After the event, the Association edited a special publication in Israel in the Polish language, devoted to the monument’s unveiling.

The restoration of the cemetery and the building of the Wall became the reason behind intensifying of the Polish-Jewish relations (as the Wall is an important place for many Jewish organisations to visit), and - at the same time - a lesson in tolerance for the local community,

Among others there are the Israeli teenagers from the school Kiriat Sharet in Holon who have already been to the town four times. Usually, during their one-day stay in Hrubieszów, the teenagers meet the Polish students from the local high school. The students exchange e-mail addresses and correspond with each other. Also, the Polish students were invited to pay a visit to Holon (they would have free accommodation sponsored by the Association), but due to the lack of funding for a flight to Israel the initiative has not yet taken place.

There are also other signs of the development of the mutual relations. For instance, the Association members were asked to participate in the organising committee of the town’s anniversary; the local monthly has published several articles on the Jewish minority in the town; a university student, who was born in Hrubieszów, wrote a thesis on the Jews from the town.

Two significant gestures made by the Association’s members toward the local community are also worth mentioning. First, the Association officially asked the Pope – while he was in Israel - for a blessing for Hrubieszów. For the mainly Catholic town’s inhabitants it was an extremely important event. The Association has also contributed a symbolic sum of money to the local Catholic Church, and the church contributed to the cemetery. Second, the Association’s representative has publicly announced in the local monthly paper that his organisation does not support any restitution claims in relation to the post-Jewish property.

The very fact of improving the once indifferent (or sometimes even hostile) attitude of the local Polish population toward Jews is an extremely important result of the local policy. Therefore, the restoration does not only have a compensatory dimension for the Jewish minority but it also has educational dimension for those who remained.

Concluding remarks
The restoration of the Jewish cemetery and building of the monument is a good sign of the development of the Polish-Jewish relations. Contrary to conflicts, which sometimes occur in other Polish towns, the main sources of disagreement (religion and the question of property) did not occur. The Wall of Memory was built thanks to the mutual co-operation of the local authorities and the Jewish organisation, and contributed to an improvement of the attitude of the local community toward Jews.

Main sources of information
Information obtained directly from local authorities; local monthly paper; Uroczystość Odsłonięcia Pomnika “Ściany Pamieci” w Hrubieszowie. 1997. Israel (a special publication devoted to the unveiling of Wall of Memory); Jadczak, S. 2000. Hrubieszów i Powiat Hrubieszowski 1400-2000 [Hrubieszów and the Neighbourhood]. Lublin: Express Press.