A small group of Dartmouth students demarcated and restored a destroyed Jewish cemetery this Summer with help from local villagers of Sopotskin, Belarus.
The 16 travelers put up a large and distinctive fence around a cemetery destroyed during the Nazi occupation.
"This is not the usual kind of service project," said Rabbi Edward Boraz, who helped organize the trip to Eastern Europe.
The joint goals of the project were to engage students cross-culturally in the Holocaust, to immerse them in the culture of Belarus and "to emphasize the importance of sacred memory by restoring a Jewish cemetery that had been completely neglected since 1942."
Beyond its symbolic value, the fence was significant because an unmarked cemetery could by built over by the Belarusian government.
"This is probably happening all over Eastern Europe," said Boraz. "So there will be no remnant of Jewish life there."
He said the project was first proposed to him by Dr. Michael Lozman of Albany, New York, whose family had come from Sopotskin, Belarus, the village where the cemetery is located.
Lozman alerted Boraz to a history of the Jews in the area of the village that had been written in 1960 and later translated from Hebrew to English and posted on the Internet.
Hillel immediately took interest in the area, and, with the help of the Tucker foundation, established a service project there.
The group put up 140 nine-foot long sections of fence around the limits of the cemetery over a four-day period.
The trip also included visits to former Second World War-era Jewish ghettos in Krakow and Minsk, and a visit to Auschwitz.
The group had to cease work for a half a day when a government official claimed they did not have proper authorization to do the work and seized their passports.
Boraz went with the official to a ministry station, where the official asked him to sign a form indicating that the group had violated Belarusian law. Boraz refused, and the group had their passports returned.
However, the situation was only resolved when the group was able, through the businessman responsible for making the fence, to get the general for the military in that area of Belarus to sign a letter saying the group's work was legal.
The villagers "could not have been more apologetic," said Boraz. The students had been invited to the village's high school graduation ceremony, but when they didn't show up the villagers delayed the ceremony for an hour until the group and gave them a standing ovation when they arrived.
"The single phenomenon that had the greatest impact on me was the warmth and hospitality of the Belarusian people," said Jeff Murphy '02, Project Manager of the trip. The group represented the first Americans the Belarusians had ever met, and most displayed a keen interest in getting to know its members.
Most of the participants said staying in the villagers' homes was a highlight of their trips, according to Murphy. The students had planned on staying two to a house, but there was such a demand among the villagers to house the participants that they had to be split up.
The night of the home stay, the students were given amplifiers and equipment to carry in to a nearby field, and were treated to a huge, improvised dance party.
Village children and students also helped to erect the fence, a job which had to be completed in a very short time.
The group also left behind some maintenance equipment for the cemetery.
