דעמביץ

דעמביץ — בית החיים

Dembitz — the Jewish cemetery

Jewish cemetery, ulica Cmentarna, Dębica, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, Poland

• The cemetery is on ulica Cmentarna. It was opened around the turn of the seventeen hundreds and served Pilzno and the towns around as well as Dembitz itself; the oldest stone that can still be read is from 1791 and the last burial was in 1945.
• THE STONES DO NOT STAND OVER THE PEOPLE. The Germans took the matzevos to pave the town's streets and pulled down the wall for building material. Survivors from Dembitz recovered several hundred after the war and brought them back, and the broken pieces were built into two lapidariums. What you walk among is a rescued collection, not a burial map.
• Part of the ground was turned into a playground under the communists, and the wall they demolished has never been rebuilt as it was. The site was fenced again in 1983 and re-sanctified in 1996, so it is tended, but expect an open field rather than a kept cemetery.
• Dembitz had its own line of rebbes, beginning with Reb Reuven Horowitz, a grandson of the Ropshitzer. No source found says where any of them lies, and this listing is not going to guess for you.
• SURVEYED COORDINATES. The map point on this listing is the cemetery itself, measured on the ground by the ESJF survey — not a town centre. Where a kever is inside an ohel it will still need finding once you are through the gate, but the gate is now something you can navigate to.