News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) A 158-year-old Polish cemetery was restored this week in a ceremony attended by the mayor of the town of Kanczuga, who paved a new road to the cemetery at the town's expense. Part of the restoration included re-building a stone wall around the cemetery to prevent local farmers from encroaching on the land, according to Michael Freund director of Shavei Israel, which helped finance the work. 

"It was sad for me to see that a number of the gravestones collapsed or were broken and that the cemetery was overgrown by trees and bushes and essentially looked like a forest," Freund said at the ceremony. "It was also evident that many gravestones were taken from the cemetery over the years to pave local streets, or were looted by local persons."

Approximately 500 graves remain, and the last known burial took place in 1940. Two years later, Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 Jews from Kanczuga, marched them to the grounds of the cemetery and murdered them before tossing their bodies into a mass grave on the site.