The personal mission of one citizen of Israel to save the Jewish cemeteries in his father’s hometown in central eastern Poland may prove to be a crucial step in enhancing relations between the two countries.

His tenacity, coupled with the intervention of the World Jewish Congress, has helped transform the pre-war shtetl of Szczekociny from a site of violation and contention to a potential model of reconciliation and hope.

During a visit to his father’s hometown of Szczekociny this past August, together with his 81-year-old Auschwitz survivor father, Izyk Mendel, and other family members, Yossi Bornstein was stunned to discover that the Jewish history of the village -- whose pre-war population of 5,600 was half-Jewish -- had been virtually eradicated.

The synagogue, once one of the most magnificent in Poland, is now in the process of being converted into a shopping center; the official history of the town, a 100-page book, makes no mention of its Jewish residents. Four siblings, whose late father had converted to Christianity, are the only remains of the town’s once-flourishing Jewish life.

Most shocking was to discover the fate of the town’s two Jewish cemeteries. A meat processing plant was built on the site of the first graveyard the Bornsteins visited. Although it was still partially enclosed by the original cemetery wall, no monument or marker indicated that the site was the final resting place of generations of Polish Jews. The second cemetery houses part of the town’s central bus station, a private home, and -- most egregiously -- public toilets.

“It's like bringing a pig into the Holy of Holies," said Bornstein, a resident of Rosh Ha’ayin and CEO of Shizim, Ltd, a healthcare and biotechnology company.

His remonstrations to the town’s mayor, Wieslaw Greyner, proved fruitless. The latter told Bornstein that the land had been sold and was privately owned, and he was powerless to do anything. Nonetheless, he promised a plot of land on which to construct a memorial to the village’s Jewish residents.

The Bornsteins were determined to find the vanished gravestones. With the help of a local resident -- and thanks to the zlotys (Polish currency) held out by the family, many of the monuments, some of them intact, were located in townspeople’s backyards. While standing on a stone path in one of the yards, Yossi noticed that the stones were oddly shaped. He requested a shovel and began to dig -- and discovered Hebrew writing, perfectly preserved, on the underside.

In a surrealistic scenario, he began loading the gravestones onto the family’s rented minivan, shoving suitcases aside to make room for the only surviving relics of hundreds of years of Jewish life in the town. Suddenly he was approached by a young woman, who told him to come to her house, located adjacent to the cemetery. There they found a huge pile, maybe five meters long and two meters high, of gravestones, broken into building blocks. Shortly thereafter, they were told that there were pieces of monuments in houses all over the town and that many of the pathways, sidewalks, walls, and buildings were constructed with sections of gravestones.

“When we saw the heap of stones, we thought of making a memorial out of reconstructed monuments,” says Yossi. “But once we realized the magnitude of this desecration, we realized we needed to do something much more encompassing.”

Before leaving Szczekociny, the Bornsteins appointed two families as their agents to try to locate and collect gravestone and fragments. Caches are continually being discovered throughout the village.

Upon returning to Israel, Yossi -- whose father’s parents and six siblings were slaughtered in the Holocaust -- turned to various organizations asking for their assistance in having the toilets removed and the graveyards restored. The World Jewish Congress immediately picked up the gauntlet.

In a letter to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski in August, Bobby Brown, director of International Affairs at the WJC, protested: "These horrifying acts of vandalism represent an intolerable state of affairs that must be corrected. The toilets must be removed at once. Families who are holding the remains of the tombstones should be compelled to return them to the cemetery and a dignified monument should be erected to the memory of the Jews of this community. We believe that righting this wrong would set an example of reconciliation and righteousness that would have a loud resonance beyond Polish-Jewish circles alone. Let Szczekociny become a place that symbolizes hope for the future and remembrance of the past -- and not feelings of bitterness and estrangement that have too often dominated relations between our peoples."

In mid-November, the WJC received a letter from the Polish ambassador to Israel, Jan Wojciech Piekarski. Noting that the decision to build the toiletss had been made by the Communist regime 20 years ago, he nonetheless conceded, “You are absolutely right that this situation in Szczekociny must be corrected,” adding that the “municipality decided to move the public latrines to another place.”

The desecration of the memory of Szczekociny Jews has triggered a multi-layered program in Israel and around the world to preserve the town’s Jewish heritage. A top-level mission to Szczekociny under WJC auspices and coordinated with Polish officials is planned for this July, when a monument in memory of the town’s Jews will be consecrated. Participants are expected to include representatives of the organization, together with scores of survivors, members of the Szczekociny landsmanshaft, and their children, as well as Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Szewach Weiss.

Meetings have already been held among the former residents to share information and plan the trip, which will also include visits to Lublin, Lodz, and other destroyed Jewish communities in Poland. Yossi’s brother, Zvi, who lives in Far Rockaway, NY, is promoting the mission in the U.S.

One of the purposes of the mission is to restore the cemeteries by gathering broken pieces of the gravestones from yards, public buildings, sidewalks, and walls, reconstructing the monuments when possible, demarcating the cemeteries, and enclosing them. Another objective is to gather information about members of the Jewish community and their fate, as well to recover tangible testimony of their lives -- religious artifacts, personal property, documents, and photographs.

One of the top items on the agenda is to arrest the construction of the shopping center and to preserve the building as a synagogue.

“The importance of this initiative transcends the local community,” says Brown. "Thousands of other cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe are in a severe state of decay or have been similarly profaned and every sign of Jewish presence -- synagogues, mikvehs, etc. -- in what were once flourishing communities has been obliterated. The righting of this terrible wrong sets a very important precedent. It is essential to demonstrate that the tangible evidence of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish residents can't be thrown into rubbish bin. We look at this as very important test case of doing the right thing.”

Both sides agree that it is a very important step in enhancing bilateral relations between Israel and Poland, a country with a rich Jewish history of more than 800 years. Recent years have witnessed growing ties between the two countries as well as newfound interest among gentiles about Jewish culture. Poland is considered one of Israel’s staunchest friends in Europe and its media is noted for its balanced coverage of the Middle East. Trade relations are flourishing to the tune of some $800 million annually.

Taking the moral highroad may prove to have practical benefits for Szczekociny as well. As a result of the new turn of events, several Israeli high schools have decided to visit Szczekociny, an area previously ignored by Jewish tourists, during trips to Poland and it is expected that many Jewish tourist groups will now put Szczekociny on the map.