A landmark draft resolution by the Council of Europe Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media has called for European governments and pan-national inbstitutions to take urgent action to protect Jewish cemeteries and burial grounds.
The Council of Europe began to study information for this report in early 2010 and requested that Lo Tishkach provide full data lists of all the cemeteries and mass grave sites in Europe from our exhaustive lists.
Particular attention was also paid by the Council of Europe to the legislative framework for protecting Jewish burial grounds as found in national legislative reports prepared by Lo Tishkach on ten eastern and central European states in recent years.
The draft resolution, which is slated to go before the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly in the coming weeks, calls for member states “to implement a number of practical recommendations and to promote joint action of different stakeholders” in protecting cemetery sites.
Lo Tishkach Executive Director Philip Carmel praised the work of the committee, stating that “only by working collectively within agreed pan-national frameworks can we preserve this vital area of Jewish heritage which is also an integral part of Europe’s heritage.
“It has long been the view of the Lo Tishkach Foundation that along with key work at the local level and establishing standardised legal instruments, our key goal must be to collect an up-to-date full inventory of the current state of Jewish cemeteries as a prerequisite to their preservation. We have already physically surveyed well over a thousand sites and we call on the Council of Europe to assist us in speeding us this vital work,” Carmel added.
