Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > June > 04 > Entry
Pulling weeds from Schindler’s grave.
When Yaakov Broder, 52, was a boy in Haifa, the man who saved his father, Mordechai, 87, came to visit every year.
The man’s name was Oskar Schindler, made famous, posthumously, by the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie, Schindler’s List. The German industrialist is credited with saving 1,200 Polish and Czech Jews by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories during World War II.
Broder came to view Schindler as a grandfather he never had. His grandparents were all killed in the Holocaust before he was born.
The other day, Broder visited the grave and was surprised at the weeds that had grown up around it. “I was shocked by the way it was kept,” he said by phone today.
Broder contacted Israeli media, which widely reported two days ago that the gravesite was unkempt.
Today, a cemetery caretaker was pulling weeds from adjacent graves, having already tidied the Schindler grave, careful to keep the stones visitors had placed on top — a Jewish tradition that is extended to Schindler even though he was Christian.
“We cleaned it,” the man said in Arabic, “because of all of the visitors coming to see it.”
I was the lone visitor to the cemetery for 20 minutes on Wednesday morning.
Tourists and ultra-orthodox Jewish men hurried past the cemetery entrance on their way through Zion Gate, into the Old City.
Comments
By Rivkah Rochel Krasnoff
June 26, 2008 6:59 PM | Link to this
Last year in July, my husband and I were in Jerusalem. As Jews, we wanted to pay a tribute to Oskar Schindler for his heroic act of saving 1,200 Jews. We could not find his grave. My husband and I went through most of the graves searching and searching. No luck. Perhaps it was the weeds and the stones that prevented us from spotting his grave. We expected signs to point us to his grave, thinking countless tourists would like to pay their respects. I hope that Mr. Schindler will have more visitors. This week we heard a presentation from the youngest survivor who was on Schindler’s list, a man by the name of Leon Leyson. Thanks to Mr. Schinder, he, his parents and 2 siblings survived the holocaust; two other siblings who were not on Schindler’s list, unfortunately were murdered by the vicious Nazis.