שאוול

שאוול — פלאץ פון בית החיים

Shavl — the site of the Jewish cemetery

Site of the old Jewish cemetery, Šiauliai, Šiauliai County, Lithuania

• THERE IS NO CEMETERY TO WALK. The ground goes back to the early seventeen hundreds. It was closed when the city cemetery opened in 1959, closed again in 1965, and then cleared with bulldozers — the matzevos were piled up and carted off, the better-cut ones taken elsewhere and the rest broken up for city fencing.
• PART OF IT WENT INTO A PUBLIC STAIRCASE. Some of the stone was built into the flight of steps by the cathedral known as Aušros Takas. People walk up them without knowing.
• What is left on the site is a small memorial stone at the old entrance, covered in graffiti, a few broken graves, and the northern stretch of the wall that once went round the whole ground. That wall is the clearest thing to find.
• The site is not protected in practice. In August 2018 pipe-laying work turned up human remains and bone fragments on it, which was reported and photographed. Nothing about the ground should be assumed to be respected.
• A SURVEYED GROUND EXISTS AND IT MAY NOT BE THIS ONE. ESJF records a Jewish cemetery in Šiauliai at 55.92146, 23.32821, about a kilometre and a half from the town centre. Nothing in that survey says whether it is the destroyed old ground this page describes or a different cemetery in the city, so the coordinate is given here as something to check rather than as this listing's map point.