Miskolc, Hungary Jewish Cemetery Records, 1904-2010
By John J. Kovacs
The Jewish Cemetery of Miskolc dates back to about 1759 and in 1767 the Miskolc Chevra Kadisha was formed. Most of the cemetery records were lost during the Holocaust including the records of those buried in the 18th and the 19th century. It is fortunate, however, that the cemetery has a record of those buried there during the 20th century, approximately during 1904 and 2010.
John Kovacs with the support of Vivian Kahn, H-SIG coordinator and the assistance of the Miskolc Jewish community arranged and coordinated to photograph these 600 burial records for the use of current and future generations. JewishGen with Nolan Altman and several H-SIG volunteers performed the data entry and validation to help create a searchable data base for the Miskolc cemetery records that will be added to JewishGen JOWBR (JewishGen's Online Burial Registry) database. Our thanks to Maria Benedek, Ken Bernknopf, Gary Deutsch, Ava Gorkin, Pat Shaw, Jerry Zeisler, and Rabbi Joel Meisels for the help with data entry and validation.
Miskolc is the third largest city of Hungary. In the 1940s prior to the deportations it was reported to have a Jewish population of about 14,000 or about 14% of the total Miskolc populations. Today's Jewish population is about 100. The size of the cemetery is reported to be about 6 ½ hectares or 65,000 m2.
It is our hope to be able to photograph the 18th and 19th century grave headstones in the future, once the area is cleaned up. We need substantial funds to accomplish this part of the project. The best way to support the project is to make contributions to the JewishGen Miskolc project at
http://www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen-erosity/v_projectslist.asp?project_cat
