Obj. ID: 53337
  Memorials  Memorial to Zduńska Wola and Warsaw victims of the Holocaust in the Trumpledor Cemetery in Tel Aviv, Israel, 1954

To the main object: Trumpledor Cemetery in Tel Aviv, Israel/Eretz Israel

In 1947, Zduńska Wola landsmanschaft in Tel Aviv "received a small bag of ashes from the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland where most of the community's members had been murdered. With a sense of holy mission, the organization's chairman approached the Tel-Aviv burial society to ask for guidance. In response, he received a free plot in the old Tel-Aviv cemetery in which to bury his community's remains. The burial ceremony - among the first of its kind after the Holocaust - was held under the auspices of the Chief Rabbis of Tel-Aviv and other important personages. Financed by the Zdonska-Wolla landsmanschaft, a small marble tombstone was later erected over the grave site." [Baumel, 1995: 155]

According to Baumel, this was the first Holocaust memorial built by a Landsmanschaft organization in Israel that "began a tradition of erecting communal memorial stones in Israel." [Baumel, 1995: 155]

In 1950, a new memorial was unveiled next to the memorial dedicated to Zduńska Wola community. According to Baumel, "the Warsaw martyrs' memorial was erected by an individual whose family had been killed in the Warsaw ghetto. In 1949, during a visit to Poland, he was taken to the Poniatowska forest where the last of the Warsaw ghetto resistance fighters had been killed. There he filled two sacks with ashes and bones which he found in the forest and these were secretly sent to Israel in a diplomatic lift. On 19 April 1950, the seventh anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, these remains were buried in the old Tel-Aviv cemetery in a grave dug near that of the Zdonska-Wolla martyrs. As the sacks had been removed from Poland illegally, it was decided to erect a common gravestone with that of the Zdonska-Wolla martyrs and to shroud the story in secrecy. Only in 1970, when the last person who had been involved in the enterprise left Poland, was the story made public." [Baumel, 1995: 155, 167]

In 1950 two more memorials were unveiled in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery in Tel-Aviv (for the martyrs of Mir and Treblinka). Baumel believes that these early memorials differed "from those built afterwards." They were representative and large in comparison to those that would be built later. The construction process was not complicated by bureaucracy in these years.  "Until 1951 the Tel-Aviv burial society charged no fees to those wishing to bury 'martyrs' ashes and did not require them to fill out forms. Only in the mid-1950s was a bureaucratic process developed to govern the burial of ashes from the Holocaust." The memorial to Warsaw Jews implicitly mentions armed resistance in compliance with the contemporary Israeli understanding of the Holocaust.  "This culture rarely expressed itself in the later memorial stones." [Baumel, 1995: 155]