An Israeli-American delegation went to Poland to renovate graves, on the occasion of the event commemorating the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising on the 16th of the month.
The project led by Amy and Josh Degan started by chance, when the latter held a roots trip in Bialystok in 2015. A visit to the Jewish cemetery in Genovka revealed that all the tombstones were flattened and that forest trees covered most of the graves. Among the figures found in the cemetery is Rabbi Shmuel Muhliber, a rabbi and public leader, one of the founders of the Zion Lovers movement and the father of religious Zionism.
A year later they returned - but this time equipped with donations, professional equipment, heavy tools and tractors. They succeeded in recovering 2,500 gravestones and an initiative that began as an effort to restore basic respect to the deceased, soon turned into a family reunion, with Josh and Amy's motto: "stone after stone."
Amy told Arutz Sheva - Israel National News: "As far as I'm concerned, we are fulfilling the mitzvah to honor your father and mother, even though my parents are not buried here. Each of the names here is someone's parent, so we are fulfilling the mitzvah in the name of their descendants."
Elhanan Shkolnik recounted how his family joined the project: "One day my uncle who lives in the United States and is the leader of a large community in California, Rabbi Eliot Perelson, contacted them through Facebook and asked if they had seen the tombstones of his grandmother - Pearl Fry. Indeed, in 2017 they found her and her mother's tombstones, and soon joined the project.
The project involves groups from universities who come to volunteer, a professorship for the history of Eastern Europe, and there is also a rabbi in America who accompanies the project and answers halakhic questions that arise during the work." "We give people back their names," adds David Perelson, one of the heads of the family:
Shkolnik summarizes: "We had 20 people for an intensive week, we dug in the ground to find tombstones/parts of tombstones, we cleaned, we painted the letters with a special material so that they would be legible in the years to come, we glued parts of the tombstones, and created a support so that they would not fall. We return with a great sense of mission and excitement that we discovered our ancestors who are buried there."
During the week I received dozens of inquiries from families in Israel and I searched for their lost families in the cemetery, and I even found tombstones corresponding to the name Amdursky. I contacted the singer Assaf Amdursky and now he is trying to find out if they are related to him."
In conclusion, Shkolnik shares a moving story: "We had a very moving story. We found the grave of someone from the family for whom my cousin who was killed in an operation in Jenin (Gedalia Hillel Malik) was named, and I published it. I received a message from one of the followers that it was her great-grandfather! Our lost Judaism is scattered throughout Europe and we are doing the little that we can to restore people's name and dignity, as my uncle David said."
