The Israel Genealogical Society is proud to announce the documentation of the Memorials for Vanished Communities (MVC), in preparation for the 24th IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem. The project was initiated by Mathilde Tagger, and carried out by Rose Feldman, Chana Furman, Ellen Stepak and others.

These memorials in Israel are located mainly in cemeteries, in particular the one in Holon, but they can be found in other locations as well. Some are grouped in cemeteries, whereas others are found in isolated locations. Many towns appear on monuments listing several or more communities in a region. One of the most comprehensive and impressive of these is the memorial in Holon for the Jewish community of Wlodawa (and for those killed at Sobibor), Poland, and for other Jewish communities in the vicinity. Among the Jewish communities documented on these monuments are villages otherwise forgotten by history.These memorials are a labor of love, erected to memorialize loved ones lost in the Holocaust, pogroms or as martyrs, for whom there can be no true gravestone. Many monuments are beautiful, and are the product of much thought and creativity. Some of the memorials also list names of people murdered from that locality. All of the gravestones for communities that vanished in the Holocaust have symbolic ashes brought from killing fields and/or death camps of Eastern Europe. Countries particularly represented in the memorials themselves are today’s Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. Some of the memorials represent entire countries, such as the Hungarian memorial, where many communities are listed. Some countries, such as Belgium, Holland, Latvia, Estonia and France, and some communities, have forests planted in their names, instead of or in addition to memorials.

Many landsmanshaften associations hold annual memorial ceremonies at the monuments for their towns, though as the communities of people who remember these towns and their people from before WWII dwindle, the ceremonies have become less prevalent.

In preparation is a CD of this documentation project, which will include photographs of the memorials. The CD will be available at the 2004 IAJGS Conference.

The list of communities and countries may be accessed below. They are PDF files.