ראסיין

ראסיין — פלאץ פון בית החיים

Raseiniai — the site of the Jewish cemetery

Site of the Jewish cemetery, in the yard of an apartment block, Raseiniai, Kaunas County, Lithuania

• IT IS THE YARD OF A BLOCK OF FLATS. The cemetery was destroyed during or after the war and a modern apartment building was put up over it. There are no stones and there is no gate.
• WHAT MARKS IT IS A TABLET ON A WALL, saying in Yiddish and in Lithuanian that a Jewish cemetery was on this spot. That is the whole of it, and it is what you go to stand in front of.
• Raseiniai was one of the large Litvishe kehillos, so the ground under that yard holds hundreds and probably thousands of kevorim. Nobody knows who or where.
• Lithuania has something like two hundred abandoned Jewish cemeteries. Maceva has been photographing what stones survive across the country, transcribing the Hebrew and translating it — worth a look before travelling to any Lithuanian town on this site, since some grounds have been fully catalogued and some, like this one, have nothing left to catalogue.
• SURVEYED GROUNDS EXIST AND THEY MAY NOT BE THIS ONE. ESJF records three Jewish cemeteries at Raseiniai — 55.38665, 23.12468, 55.384736, 23.131999 and 55.38461, 23.13242 — all within a few hundred metres of each other and about a kilometre and a half north of the yard this page describes. Whether any of them is the ground built over by the apartment block is not something the surveys say, so they are given as leads rather than as this listing's map point.