Kiryas Joel, Monroe, NY - Village Officials Asking For Control of Romanian Jewish Cemeteries

Kiryas Joel, Monroe, NY - All across Eastern Europe, in every city and country hamlet where Jewish communities thrived before the Holocaust, are burial grounds sacred to the children and grandchildren of those who survived Hitler's mass murdering.
But time has taken its toll on these hallowed grounds. With few Jews left to maintain the cemeteries, headstones have toppled, and trees and brush have taken over. Little by little, sacred land is sold off or used to plant vegetables.

Nati Meir a Romanian Parliament deputy, came to meet Village of Kiryas Joel officials, elders and activists, and he offered hope that at least his European country will help their preservation efforts, and the deputy got an earful.
"They killed the living once, and now they're going after the dead," said Ari Felberman, Kiryas Joel's government relations coordinator. "Please beseech your members of Parliament to at least respect the dead."

Tension between American activists and the leaders of Romania's tiny Jewish population have complicated the preservation effort.
A 2002 law gave Romanian Jewish leaders ownership of the burial sites. But activists claim these leaders are less interested in protecting the cemeteries than in selling them off.
Meir offered this glimmer of hope: a bill, pending in the Romanian Parliament, would allow the government and outside preservationists to share control of the cemeteries with the local Jewish leaders.