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WARSAW: (in 1780) also used the cemetery at Sochaczew Falenica is a part of Wawer,a forested Warsaw district in the far SE corner of the city. Located on the right bank of the Vistula, until 1951 it was a separate village. Before WWII, Falenica was a favorite location for summer cottages and houses. During World War II the Germans opened a Jewish ghetto. All inhabitants were transported to Treblinka in August 1942. Yizkor, [January 2013]
JRI-Poland and JGS NY project to reconstruct the burial records. Warsaw Cemetery Records and Photographs. "Warsaw Cemetery Manager, Mr. Bolek Szenicer, like his father Pinkus before him, has been working diligently to reconstruct the Warsaw Cemetery records destroyed by the Nazis. After 20 years of work, more than 50,000 gravestones have been fully or partially indexed but another 200,000 remain to be done. If you have visited the immense Warsaw cemetery and have seen the jumble of stones and overgrowth, you can begin to appreciate the scale of the project. At present there are more than 30,000 indices in the JRI-Poland database and more are added each month." May 2012] The foundation of the Jewish Cemetery "Gesia" was established. Restoration of the preburial house and paving the courtyard by the gate was done. Source: US Commission [date?] UPDATE: photo. town photos and link to 1910 map. synagogue sketch. [August 2005] history, map, sections, and photo The Jewish Historical Institute Archives have about 4000 names; Warsaw cemetery director Boleslaw Szenicer (Cmentarz Zydowski, ul. Okopowa 49/51, Warszawa, Poland) has over 40,000 names in his database so far. He welcomes inquiries. The 4000 we have and the 40,000 he has do NOT overlap; they are different sections of the cemetery. Source: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (Also see Poland ) [date?] JEWISH CEMETERY : Cmentarz Zydowski W Warszawie by Henryk Kroszczor and Henryk Zimler DS135.P62 W2778 1983. The cemetery at 49 Okopowa Street was the only Jewish burial ground in Warsaw. It was established at the beginning of the 19th century, being then the second Jewish cemetery beside the one at Praga (the suburb of Warsaw on the other side of the Vistula) existing for some thirty years. This listing was drawn from the Chapter Short Life Sketches, wherein there is more information. As annotated in listing, there is Date of Birth-Date of Death, a word on occupation/life's work and S=Section R=Row. The cemetery at Okopowa Street, about 30 ha, is designed to contain alleys, sections, and rows. There are over 100 sections. Before the outbreak of the war in 1939, about 150 thousand were buried. At the main alley in the distant part of the cemetery, one finds barrows that were heaped up on the old sections from which old tombstones and monuments were removed. This was necessary for lack of space and impossibility of increasing the area (such a situation occurred about 1915). A few names are listed under Warsaw. Also: A partial cemetery list is available; contact Joel Reisner. It is miraculous that among the ruins of bombed out Warsaw, where hundred's of thousands of Jewish lives were destroyed and 85% of Jewish records were burned in buildings razed to the ground, that the big Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, "The Gesia", was spared. It still survives, though overgrown with trees and brush and still preserves the gravestones of approximately 250,000 people. There are famous people buried there too like famous Yiddish writers I.L. Peretz, the actress Ida Kaminska and Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto.We arrived at the cemetery having walked down Mordechai Anielewicz Street and entered the grounds at around 10:00 a.m. on a Friday morning. I was surprised to see that Boleg (Berl) Szenicer, the person in charge of the cemetery, sitting behind a rough wooden desk in a small house is so young, maybe 40. With him was an elderly gentleman who comes to keep him company. Berl is slender, dark, with delicate features and brown eyes. One wants to feed him, strengthen him for the tremendous responsibility that he carries to care for all these graves in hostile surroundings. Last spring, 66 graves were desecrated and even as he sits across from me I see behind him a great big plastered over odd gray shape adjoining the door behind him. He tells us that damaged wall is where the robbers blowtorched the locks of the door and broke into the next small room which contained a safe with some money and precious old silver ritual objects in it which they stole. They also stole the computer on which he had begun to make a dent in the huge job of recording all the graves and their locations. Fortunately, he had a back up disk at home so all of that was not lost. However he is now without a computer and it needs to be a lap top that he can take with him on his bicycle as he goes around to the gravestones to directly record their information. It needs to be a lap-top also for him to be able to take it home with him with him and keep it safe from the next break in that is sure to come at this cemetery. I learned that the favorite break-in times for the anti-Jewish hooligans are Friday night late and Saturday so this devoted young man, Berl Szenicer spends his Fridays sitting in his little office late into the night listening for trouble and stays there on Shabat. And the old man sitting with him that morning told me he fears for Berl even though they have now hired a guard for the most dangerous times to be with him. Berl had grown up around the cemetery and came to work there when his father was ill since there was no one else to take care after his father died. Berl felt that he could not abandon the place he had grown up in and inherited his father's work. The Jewish community of Warsaw was so destroyed by WW2, and demoralized by pogroms and subsequent communist control that most who were able to emigrated. Consequently, now there may be only 1000 Jews remaining in Warsaw, 90% of them elderly. No one knows for sure about the numbers because Poland is not a place where Jews feel safe to be open and counted. In any case, Berl Szenicer is one of few young vibrant people able to do the work of maintaining Jewish heritage there. Source: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it FAX: 310-454-4492 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . photos and history and a link to the cemetery plan. "...situated in Okopowa Street (former Gesia Street), founded in 1799..." [May 2002]
UPDATE: history [May 200?] Photos courtesy of This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , July 2011
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 January 2013 10:43 |