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REKINDLING JEWISH SPARKS: Descendants of Polish Jewish families protect memories and embrace future Valley man guides effort to restore Jewish cemetery
Cows no longer graze in the Jewish cemetery in Lomza, Poland.
The dead who occupy the cemetery can rest in peace again, in part through the efforts of Phoenix resident George Puchall.
Since a 1978 trip to his birthplace - his first visit in 43 years - Puchall has wanted to clean up the town's Jewish cemetery. He was shocked at conditions in the graveyard. Cows wandered through it, grazing on overgrown weeds. Tombstones with almost illegible engravings had been knocked over or sunk into the earth.
Before World War II, 11,000 Jews lived in Lomza. The community had a yeshiva, several synagogues and a Yiddish newspaper, Puchall says. Although a few Jewish residents fled the Nazis, most were killed in the town or perished in the death camps.
The cemetery is all that remains of the Jews of Lomza.
For years, Puchall was haunted by what he had seen.
Before a 1991 return trip, he sought help from Jewish organizations in finding contacts in Poland who might be able to help clean up the cemetery. From one of these contacts, he learned that relatives of Chaim Herzog, then president of Israel, were buried in the cemetery. He wrote letters to Herzog, and with Herzog's influence, successfully arranged an initial cleanup in 1992.
Puchall paid unemployed Poles $1,300 to do the work.
In 1994, Puchall's wife, Rose, was stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease. He quit his job as a management consultant to care for her until her death in 1996, and during that time he put the cemetery restoration "on a back burner." He learned, through correspondence from acquaintances who visited Lomza, that the cemetery was slowly becoming neglected again.
Then in February 1998, Puchall received a letter from Gerald Bender, a Jewish judge in Chicago, who had come across Puchall's name while researching the Lomza cemetery. In his letter, Bender explained that his father had been born in Lomza, and that some of his ancestors were buried in the town's Jewish cemetery.
Puchall learned that Bender had formed a friendship with Marek Kaminski, a Polish Catholic physician in Wisconsin he had met...