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Cemeteries in Lublin
The old cemetery on Sienna street
Although this cemetery existed already in the late fifteenth century, no specific information has survived telling us exactly when it was built. In oldest extant gravestone is one of Jaakow Kopelman ben Jehuda ha-Lewi, who died in early 1541. This gravestone is recognized as the oldest Jewish memorial in Poland that has remained in its original location. It stands by the entrance on the cemetery hill and is surrounded by an additional metal fence.
The sixteenth century gravestones of Awraham ben Uszaj and Chana are to be found a bit further down, and behind them on the small hill is the ohel of the "Seer" of Lublin, Jaakow Icchak Horowitz, to which large numbers of Hasidic pilgrims flock from all over the world. Rabbi Azriel Horowitz is buried nearby. He was known as the "Iron Head" and was a great opponent of "the Seer" and of Hasidism. This kirkut also has the grave of Szlom Szachna - the eminent rabbi of Lublin and last general rabbi of Małopolska. Zygmunt II August called him �Doctor Judaeorum Lublinensis". This gravestone is however not an original one, but a copy of the original sixteenth century one that was destroyed in the nineteenth century. Szlomo Baruch Nissenbaum wrote valuable works about the history of this old cemetery in the late nineteenth century. The last burial took place there in 1830. After the new cemetery opened, the old one was neglected, and gradually became derelict.
During the Second World War, the Germans carried out mass executions of Poles and Jews at the cemetery. They had been prisoners at the Lublin castle, made into a Gestapo investigative prison by the Nazis. Alongside hundreds of Polish prisoners there were also Jewish ones, such as Bela Szpiro, a Bund activist and a Lublin city councilwoman who was tortured to death for contact with the Polish underground. Until July 1944, a group of "Jewish specialists" (tailors, furriers, dentists) were at the castle, working for the Lublin Gestapo. They were killed the day that Soviet detachments appeared on the city's outskirts. The first execution took place on 23 December 1939, when members of the Polish intelligentsia from the Lublin region were shot, which is commemorated by a plaque on the cemetery wall along Kalinowszczyzna Street and a memorial. In 1944, the cemetery was used for Germany artillery positions, and destroyed during the fighting in Lublin.
After the war ended, the city's communist authorities completely neglected this wonderful Jewish cemetery. It was only in the 1980�s that the Society for the Care of Jewish Cultural Monuments in Lublin finally tidied the cemetery up and took a thorough inventory. About sixty tombstones have survived at the cemetery. In addition to the gravestones at the kirkut mentioned above, there also the matsevah of the Talmudist Jehuda Lejbel ben Meir Aszkenazy (died 1597), rabbi Cwi-Hirsza ben Zacharia Mendel (died 1690), rabbi Jicchok Ajzyk Segal (died 1735) and director of the yeshiva, Szlomo ben Jechiel Luria, also called Maharshal (died 1573). One of the more interesting gravestones is the unusual one belonging to Abraham ben Chaim (died 1762), the chairman of the Diet of Four Lands, which depicts Artemis with a bow and arrow. Mr. Józef Honig, 4/17 Dembowskiego street, has the key to the cemetery.
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The New Cemetery on Walecznych street
The New Cemetery was founded in 1829 on the area which at that time was known as Garbowszczyzna. In the beginning, people were reluctant to have burials there. People began using it only when a cholera epidemic decimated the population. With time, it became an elegant cemetery. In the early twentieth century, a masonry ohel was erected over the grave of the Lublin tsaddik Jehuda Lejb Eiger, as well as over those of his son and grandson. During the First World War, a separate military section was set aside for Jews who died while serving in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German armies. In 1933, rabbi Meir Szapiro was laid to rest in the cemetery - the founder and first director of the Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin. The ohel erected over his grave still stands, though his remains were taken in 1954 to Israel, where they rest at the Ha-Menuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.
During the Second World War, until November 1942, ritual burials were still conducted. Among others, several hundred Jews from Szczecin who had been deported to Lublin in February 1940 were also buried there. The victims of the "resettlement action" from the ghetto in the Castle district were buried there in mass graves. Because of later damage to the cemetery, however, it is not possible to determine where they lie. After the ghetto in Majdan Tatarski was liquidated, the Germans destroyed the New Cemetery as well. The gravestones were taken to Majdanek, where they were crushed by prisoners and then used to reinforce camp roads. All that remains of the cemetery today is part of a wall, two damaged ohels and an empty plot of land.
After the war ended, municipal authorities allowed a road to be built through the middle of the cemetery. The area was thus divided into two squares of 3.5 hectares each. The small group of Jews remaining in Lublin took it upon itself to preserve the few things that were left in it. In 1958, the Eiger family ohel was renovated. The cemetery, however, nevertheless fell further into ruin, though burials still took place there.
In the late 1980's, the Sara and Manfred Bass-Frenkel Foundation took over custodianship of the cemetery. Sara Frenkel, whose maiden name was Bass, and her sister Lea were hiding in that cemetery when the Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto in the Castle district. They survived the liquidation action there, and then went to Czemiernik, where the local parish priest, Father Poddębniak, provided them with Aryan documents. During the war, Manfred Frenkel was in the Łódź ghetto and then in Auschwitz. At the entrance to the cemetery, there is a Memorial Room housing a permanent exhibition about the Lublin Jewish cemeteries, along with a small synagogue in memory of the Bass and Frenkel families. In 1989, the site was included in the state register of historic sites. Part of the cemetery is still in use by the Lublin Jewish Community. There are about fifty graves in an area of 8.6 hectares. The key is kept by the cemetery's custodians (ground floor of the Mausoleum). The fence around the cemetery grounds is made of cement slabs in the shape of matsevot with metal menorahs, and from the inside is covered with plaques dedicated by the descendants of the Lublin Jews in memory of their families.
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