The local Leustach civic association has organized a clean-up operation for the abandoned and overgrown 18th century Jewish cemetery in the village of Janikovce, a few kilometers from Nitra, Slovakia. Leustach organized two days of clean-up work, March 31 and April 14. Dozens of volunteers, aged from 9 years old to over 70, took part, clearing brush, cutting down trees and removing waste from the cemetery, which for many years has been used as a dump site. They found discarded refrigerators, construction waste, car parts, tires, construction material, plastic and asbestos tiles on the site. Many of the volunteers were pupils at a local middle school.
On the first day, they uncovered 58 gravestones, bearing inscriptions in Hebrew and German, but many more tombstones were believed to be on the site.
Photo gallery of how the cemetery looked before the clean-up operation
Photo gallery of how the cemetery looked after the first day of clean-up
The idea is to clear and clean up the cemetery and maintain it as a sort of park, but also to restore the memory of the Jewish community that had lived there for centuries until the Holocaust. You can read a long article (in Slovak) about the project HERE.