Project Leader:
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JewishGen Liaison/Advisor:
Project Description
The objective is to secure sufficient funding to photograph 18th and 19th Century headstones and photograph 20th century cemetery books for the Jewish cemetery in Miskolc, Hungary. The 18th and 19th century written records were lost in the Holocaust and such information is currently only available by visiting and searching the overgrown part of the cemetery. A list of names of 20th century deaths were recently made available at the Miskolc synagogue. Another list of 20th century burials is available at the Miskolc cemetery. We estimate that there are approximately 16,000 18th and 19th century headstones, which will be documented by taking 10,000-12,000 photographs in addition to 600 photographs of pages of the 20th century cemetery records.
Miskolc is the third largest city in Hungary. In the 1940s it was reported to have a Jewish population of about 14,000. The city's total population was at that time about 100,000. The cemetery was started about 1792 and its size is reported to be 6 1/2 hectares or 65,000 m2. A picture of the cemetery's surface and geographic location in Miskolc can be accessed at http://binged.it/qZXHa8.
The project involves removing vegetation from the overgrown part of the cemetery, cleaning headstones, and highlighting inscriptions as necessary using a medium that will not contribute to deterioration of the stones. Workers will then photograph each stone and map its location. Volunteers will be recruited from among JewishGen researchers to transcribe the inscriptions and burial locations using the JOWBR template to be integrated into the JOWBR database at httpd://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/
Key Audiences
This project will allow Romania family history researchers to create or fill gaps in their family trees and learn something about their families' Jewish heritage. Where vital records may no longer exist, cemetery records are often the only remaining evidence of a person's life. The material has the potential to be of broader interest to scholars and educators specializing in Jewish history and the Holocaust and specifically in the history of Bucharest, the capital of Romania.
Project Importance
The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) is a searchable database comprised of individual burial records, tombstone photographs, and descriptions of individual cemeteries. At its launch in July 2003, JOWBR featured 643 cemeteries in 25 countries, with more than 300,000 burial records, and 11,000 tombstone photographs. New cemetery records are added to JOWBR on a regular basis. This project will expand the JOWBR database by approximately 40,000 tombstones.
Jewish cemeteries throughout the world are threatened with vandalism and even extinction. The Bucharest cemeteries are no exception. See httpd://www.jewishgen.org/romsig/bucurest%20cemetery.html for information about destruction which took place in 2008.It is vitally important to preserve information about existing Jewish cemeteries so future generations will have the benefit of this aspect of our cultural heritage. In addition, for many Jews, knowledge of their family history perished in the Holocaust. JOWBR is one of several JewishGen activities that will help families fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. JewishGen Inc. is an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage -A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Why Bucharest is important to people without known Bucharest roots:
Bucharest has a very interesting and compelling history that makes the city important not only to those who can trace their ancestral roots to Bucharest, but to other Romanian towns. The city is the capital of Romania, and had the largest Jewish community in the country.
Project Description
The photographer team will spend time in each of the three cemeteries preparing the headstones to obtain the best images, photographing the existing stones and mapping the location of each stone using GPS technology. He will complete one cemetery at a time. After that the inscriptions will be translated and the data integrated into the JOWBR database at httpd://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/
Estimated Cost
$25,000
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Updated 24 Dec 2011 by LA
