April 6, 2011 – During an international conference on Jewish cemeteries, Lo Tishkach presented its work on the documentation, protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and mass graves in Europe to an audience of Jewish heritage experts. The three-day event, which was co-organised by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the Berlin cultural heritage authorities, was attended by researchers and conservationists involved in the documentation and preservation of Jewish cemeteries throughout Europe.
Taking place at the Berlin Weißensee Jewish Cemetery, which was established in the 1880s and is considered Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery, the event combined presentations and discussions with visits of the burial ground where a number of gravestones as well as grave memorials of particular artistic value have been beautifully restored over the past decade. The site, which miraculously survived Nazi rule almost intact, also features on a list of potential future Unesco World Heritage Sites.
In the course of the conference, which saw the presentation of numerous in-depth studies of Jewish cemeteries across Europe, the need to centralise information on the many different initiatives become obvious. Additional links to such in-depth databases will therefore be included on the Lo Tishkach database, which already features information on more than 10,000 Jewish cemeteries and mass graves in Europe.
