Funeral Home Plans Crematory Near Majdanek

By JTA August 29, 2012

A Polish funeral company has announced plans to build a crematory near the Majdanek concentration camp.

The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement Wednesday that it had sent a letter to the mayor of Lublin in eastern Poland asking him to block the company, Styks, from going ahead with the plan.

Some 360,000 people perished at Majdanek during the Holocaust, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The Nazi death camp covered 667 acres of land on the highway connecting Lublin, Zamosc and Chelm. It had seven gas chambers where inmates were killed and two crematoria where their bodies were cremated.

Majdanek is now a state Holocaust memorial and museum that hosts thousands of visitors annually.

Kuba Wyszynski, a journalist and member of the Jewish community of Warsaw, told JTA that Syks has made several bids at building the crematorium there over the past few years.

“It is difficult to adequately express the pain and insult which will result if this project goes forward,” said Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Foxman said the idea of building a modern crematorium near the former death camp was “reprehensible.”

In a letter to Lublin Major Krzysztof Zuk, the ADL called the proposal to build the crematory “outrageously insensitive” and urged the city to adopt new planning rules around the museum.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO