By Ellen Cassedy

The Jewish cemetery in Rokiskis, where Ellen Cassedy found the gravestone
belonging to her great-grandfather, Dovid-Mikhl Levin.
Photo courtesy of Ellen Cassedy.

When I traveled to Rokiskis (Rakishok), the town where I trace my Jewish roots, I was seeking to imagine a way of life long gone. I filled my eyes with the fields and the sky, the brightly painted wooden houses and the muddy vegetable patches, the market square and the gracious expanse of the count’s estate.

And I visited the old Jewish cemetery on the edge of town. The grassy paths were clogged with nettles and blackberry vines. Some headstones had fallen face down into the earth, and many were too deteriorated to be readable. But it was not long before I found the gravestone inscribed with the name of my great-grandfather, Dovid-Mikhl Levin.

As I knelt down and traced the moss-covered Hebrew letters, I felt the satisfaction of offering respect to my forebears. In return, I felt a kind of blessing coming from them to me.

Now, a fellow descendant of Rokiskis Jews has launched a project to restore Jewish cemeteries throughout Lithuania.

Sign identifying the Jewish cemetery at Varena, in the Druskininkai municipality, where restoration will be carried out by the Lithuanian Heritage Project, in partnership with Mayor Ricardas Malinauskas. The cemetery includes 300 monuments.

At an April 1 ceremony at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Harley Felstein of the Lithuanian Heritage Project said he and his partners hope to begin restoration work at a cemetery in Druskininkai, the popular spa town south of Vilnius, in June.

Druskininkai’s mayor, Ricardas Malinauskas, and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture have pledged support. The project will involve local students, as well as students from outside Lithuania, in the restoration work.

Zygimantas Pavilionis, Lithuanian ambassador to the U.S. (left), and Harley Felstein of the Lithuanian Heritage Project, at the April 1, 2011, announcement of project to restore Jewish cemeteries.
Credit: Fred Shapiro.

Zygimantas Pavilionis, Lithuanian ambassador to the United States, and Emanuelis Zingeris of the Lithuanian Parliament attended the ceremony. Pavilionis praised the project as a means by which Lithuania’s younger generation will learn about the nation’s Jewish heritage. “We are discovering this history,” Paviolionis said. “It is a sad one. We are also learning of the beauty of the harmony that we had together. It is not only your heritage. It is our heritage.”

In addition to Felstein, of Rockville, Maryland, other participants in the project include Michael Lozman and Franklin Swartz of the Eastern European Heritage Project, who have led similar restoration projects in Belarus. (For more information, visit www.restorejcem.org.)

“The cemetery is holy ground,” Felstein said. “It is our moral and ethical duty to restore the resting places of our forefathers.” He was inspired to launch the project, he said, after his teenage son visited Rokiskis and brought back pictures.

Felstein would like to hear from people whose family members are buried in Lithuania’s Jewish cemeteries. Contact him at: harleyfelstein@yahoo.com.