קעידאן

קעידאן — בתי החיים

Keidan — the Jewish cemeteries

Jewish cemeteries, Lakštingalų and Kanapinskio streets, just outside Kėdainiai, Kaunas County, Lithuania

• TWO GROUNDS, JUST OUTSIDE THE TOWN, on Lakštingalų and Kanapinskio. They were one cemetery until they were divided — a map from 1933 still shows the single ground — and each now has its own boundary and its own protection.
• The newer one is where the stones are: getting on for six hundred matzevos, the oldest inscription from the eighteen-sixties and probably older ground than that.
• THE OLD GROUND IS ON A BLUFF ABOVE THE SMILGA, and the river is what destroyed it. More than half of it went to flooding and to vandalism. Sources disagree about what is left — one says nothing stands and there is only a monument in a fenced field, another says about a hundred stones are still up, in every condition from good to unreadable. Go expecting the monument and treat anything standing as a bonus.
• SURVEYED COORDINATES, AND THE DIVISION IS ON PAPER MORE THAN ON THE GROUND. ESJF surveyed Keidan's cemetery as three separate parts — old, oldest and new — and measured all three within about thirty metres of each other. One map point serves for the lot, which is what this listing carries.