This week, the 11,000th Jewish burial site in Europe was added to the Lo Tishkach database. Since 2007, Lo Tishkach has been steadily building up material on the database, researching through archival and historical material, compiling and comparing national records and verifying this information on site.
While the 11,000 figure marks a considerable achievement and is testimony to the many people involved in researching, photographing and surveying sites, much of our work today is in updating records as we seek to visit and physically survey as many sites as possible.
Since 2009, this physical survey work has seen reports on close to 1,500 sites in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. Most remarkably, a major reason for the increase in numbers of sites has been a direct result of the surveys with local survey teams “discovering” an average of some ten percent more sites in each region surveyed than appeared on traditional Jewish community and municipal lists.
The lesson here is simple. True records of the current situation at sites requires up-to-date physical surveys. It is not enough to rely on old records. And the more we survey, the more we find.
So as we stop for breath to celebrate the 11,000 – in close to 9,000 towns and villages across the European continent, the thousands of pictures on the database, the hundreds of surveys and the many people motivated through our education programmes to pursue this work, we’re cognisant that we have so much more to do.
