The scene in Lizhansk
A shocking discovery was unearthed In the course of renovation taking place this week in the marketplace of Lizhansk, Poland, not far from the tomb of HaRav Elimelech.
No fewer than 12 Jewish gravestones which had been uprooted from the Jewish cemetery were found to have been appropriated as the foundation for the main road.
The city square, known better by the locals as the market square for its previous use in past years, is one of the central sites of the city, but no one dreamed that under the layer of asphalt were dozens of Jewish gravestones from past generations.
This scenario is actually familiar from many cities throughout Europe. Lizhansk was, indeed, a flourishing Jewish city up until the Holocaust. During the period that Lizhansk was under Communist rule, there was no supervision over the cemetery and local gentiles capriciously pilfered valuable tombstones for construction and road paving.
"This is not the first time that gravestones have been discovered under the roads of Lizhansk," says HaRav Simcha Karkovsky, head of the Lizhansk Hachnosas Orchim hostel. A similar discovery was made several years ago during road repairs.
"At the time, we turned to the Shevet Levi, asking what to do with the broken stones. He told us to gather all the fragments and return them to the Jewish cemetery. He told us to stand them up alongside the edge of the cemetery rather than erect them in the middle, since there is no way of knowing where they originally stood. And that is what we did."
