During two weeks in August 2008, a group of twelve international volunteers and three to eleven local volunteers from Chernovtsy cleaned together the Jewish cemetery in ul. Zelena, Chernovtsy.
We worked all in all ten days from nine in the morning till two or three o ‘clock in the afternoon with around one hour lunch break.
The result of our work is a cleaned field section 33 and two rows of field section 34 that follows behind field section 33. The field section 33 is located behind the “ceremony hall” and the grave field of famous Jewish personalities of Chernovtsy.
We assume that we cleaned 2-3 % of the total area of the cemetery, a drop on the hot stone as the director of the Christian- Jewish cemetery said during a television interview.
We are content a lot with the work we have done. We didn’t know beforehand how much of the area we could clean exactly. Everybody of our group worked hard and luckily we didn’t have any serious accident with our tools (sickles, machetes, axes). Without the help of our chainsaw man and the babushka helping him we wouldn’t have cut the trees and worked so fast.
Thanks to the local volunteers we never lost our motivation for work, although we were exhausted when our bus took us home every afternoon and just wanted to have a shower.
Our free time we spent with visits to Chernovtsy museums, meetings with local NGOs, the Yiddish- conference and concert, a trip to the Carpathian mountains and Sadgora, and also last, but not least public actions.
It was very important for us to get local people interested in our project and the Jewish history of Chernovtsy to create a public interest in maintaining the Jewish cemetery to have a sustainable project.
The idea of something as strange as volunteering – “working for free” – was new to most of the people we met, and we hope that we see some of them again next year, what is possible, because their main motivation to work with us was to show that there are also people in Chernovtsy who care.
Our group atmosphere was very good, in spite that we were a bunch of quite different people. They were hard- working, quite awake and patient during all our excursions and funny and philosophical during our evenings.
We would like to thank the City Municipality for free accommodation, the people at our boarding school for their patience, our bus driver, the cemetery administration, our great translator and tour guide Tetyana Tatarchuk, our volunteers and especially Marina, Kostya and Maksim from Chernovtsy.
Barbara Chmielowska, Jasmin Soehner