Tag Archives: Siedleczka-Kanczuga Cemetery

Graves after

Restoring the cemetery

Restoration,

I would like to point out the amazing work that Patryk Czerwony has been doing recently to restore the cemetery in Siedleczka, and his other efforts to remember the Jewish community that was a major part of the town of Kańczuga before the war. Here are some photos Patryk sent me, so you can see how it looked before and after they cleaned the cemetery. There is more information in this article (in Polish): Polak z Nowego Jorku zainicjował uporządkowanie cmentarza żydowskiego na Podkarpaciu and there is a page to donate to this effort here.

Before After
Gate before cleaning Gate after cleaning
Close up of gate before Close up of gate after
Graves before Graves after
Memorial before Memorial after

It’s worth pointing out of course that this is not the first time the cemetery has been restored. The grounds were cleaned and the wall and gate built in 2008 with the first effort to restore the cemetery (see the Siedleczka Cemetery Restoration Project web site, and this contemporaneous article in the Jerusalem Post: Galician Jewish Cemetery Restored).

Books about Kańczuga

Books, ,

Thanks to Marla Raucher Osborn, who shared a photo of a book about Kańczuga with me on Facebook. That book, Kańczuga. Miasto i gmina. Dziedzictwo kulturowe, is about the cultural history of the town, and includes a section on the Jewish cemetery in Siedleczka. When trying to track down this book, I found that the publisher, Podkarpacki Instytut Książki i Marketingu, has actually published four books about Kańczuga, although all are out of print. Those books are:

Kańczuga. Miasto i gmina. Dziedzictwo kulturowe
(Kańczuga. Town and Municipality. Cultural Heritage.)		 l-kanczuga._miasto_i_gmina._dziedzictwo_ku
Kańczuga. Miasto i Gmina
(Kańczuga. Town and Municipality.)		 l-kanczuga._miasto_i_gmina
Kańczuga i okolice. Przewodnik
(Kańczuga and its surroundings. A Guide.)		 l-kanczuga_i_okolice._przewodnik
Historia Miasteczka Kańczugi pisana 1889 r.
(History of the town of Kańczuga. Written 1889.)		 l-historia_miasteczka_kanczugi_pisana_1889

The first three seem to essentially be guidebooks. The last one is perhaps more interesting, as it is a re-print of a book written in 1889 about the history of Kańczuga. It was written by a priest, and apparently was based on many documents he found in the church there, so I have no idea how much, if any, deals with the Jewish community, but being as it was written when the Jewish community was still a major portion of the town, it would be interesting to read.

Of course, all of these books are written in Polish, and hard to find on top of that since they’re all out of print. If I knew we had someone willing to translate the important parts of these books, I would try getting copies of them. If you can read and translate Polish, and want to help out, let me know.

Videos from 2008 of the Kańczuga cemetery in Siedleczka

Holocaust, Videos,

The cemetery used by the Jewish community of Kańczuga was located in nearby Siedleczka. In 1942, the Nazis rounded up some 1000 plus Jews left in Kańczuga, took them to this cemetery and murdered them, dropping their bodies into a mass grave there. Since that time the cemetery was largely neglected, until 2008 when a group of Kańczuga descendants, including Michael Freund and Howard Nightingale, organized a renovation of the cemetery. The renovation included cleaning up the grounds and re-building a wall around the cemetery.

While the cemetery restoration was completed in May 2008, it seems that in March 2008 videos were posted to Youtube that show the cemetery prior to the restoration work. The second video shows the nearby memorial over the mass grave of those Jews murdered in 1942.

Video walkthrough of the Siedleczka-Kańczuga cemetery:

Video of the memorial to the 1000+ Jews murdered in 1942:

If you visit the cemetery in Siedleczka, consider videotaping your visit and posting an updated video of the current appearance of the cemetery and let us know (we’ll be happy to post it for you if you’d like).