from the Chronicle, 8/12/05
The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 12, 2005, Friday
Raising Markers of Memory
BYLINE: SARA LIPKA
With toppled gravestones overgrown by more than 60 years of shrubs and weeds, a meadow outside the small village of Lunna, Belarus, was barely recognizable as a historic Jewish cemetery. This summer 19 students from Dartmouth College hauled away brush and righted headstones to restore the sacred landmark.
The cemetery was abandoned during the Holocaust when Jews were deported from Lunna to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Most of them were killed, and none who survived returned to Lunna.
The Dartmouth students -- half of whom are Jewish -- prepared for Project Preservation, which is in its fourth year, by studying genocide. They also searched historical archives for any record of Lunna, and two students flew to Chicago to meet with Alan Welbel, an Auschwitz survivor who was born in the village.
In June the group traveled to Belarus, where, working with Rabbi Edward S. Boraz of Dartmouth and with Belarus's State Committee on Religions and Nationalities, the project has restored three other villages' cemeteries. In Lunna the students and their host families cleared undergrowth, erected a wrought-iron fence, and righted and cleaned more than 100 headstones dating from 1825 to 1938.
"We kept discovering more and more underneath the grass in the dirt," says Lydia J. Gensheimer, a history major who served as the project leader. Among the discoveries were gravestones bearing the name Welbel.
As their week of work wore on, rows of headstones began to form, making the meadow look like a cemetery again, says Ms. Gensheimer. Each stone righted was "kind of like bringing a person back to life," she says.
