Please excuse our silence these last months but we’ve been incredibly busy in Budapest. Working with a larger team, we are proud to say we have completed 50,000 sq meters (12.4 acres) year-to-date regaining access to 15,920 graves. To give some perspective, last year was our biggest year yet where we completed 80,000 sq. meters for the whole year.   This includes half of Section 38B, a very large section on which we are working at present.

 

2025 YTD summary

 

1. Hit a significant milestone of reopening access to over 100,000 graves across an area of over 310,000 sq meters (77 acres).
    

2. Renovated 6 sections plus part of a very large one that sum to 50,000 sq meters. Includes 4 medium (16, 17, 24A, 24B) and 2 small (1B, U3-U4) plus 65% of 38B

   Thank you to the Weisz family (Maine, USA) for sponsoring Section 17, Rosen family (New York) for 24Aand 24B and Munk family for 1B and U3-U4
    

3. Grave Restorations: this year we have restored a number of beautiful stones partially buried under mud. The story below of Netti Landesmann’s tombstone, as written by her great-granddaughter Ingrid, is worth a read. She was the first visitor in 89 years!
    

4. Maintenance: the 40+ sections that need to be maintained now spans an extraordinary area. We are getting through it using some members of the existing team but have not yet found the best model. A second, smaller group would be ideal so as not to distract our main team but we have found that an unsupervised full time worker is inefficient. In July, we are going to test a new idea in two sections.  

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Having completed 40 sections, below are 15 that we have left and their cost. We urge our readers to please consider sponsoring one or several, especially if they are of relevance to your family.

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We have included the customary photos of our latest sections below. Before that however, here is a story that we think our readers will find interesting. It is written by our new friend, Ingrid Cranfield, of London and we thank her for making the time and effort.

 

Lately, I have been reading and transcribing some 500 letters mostly between my grandmother, who lived in Budapest as a young woman before moving to Vienna, and my mother, dating from 1919 to 1946. I intend to publish an edited collection of the letters.

 

In 1936, my grandmother described a visit to Budapest, where she caught up with friends and relatives and visited the grave of her mother, Netti Landesmann.

Until I read this, Netti had been to me just a name in the family tree. I knew nothing about her except that she had 10 children in the space of 16 years, three of whom died in infancy.

Investigation revealed that Netti (1854-1902) is buried in Kozma Street Jewish cemetery. I paid a small amount to get the grave cleaned and renovated.

 

Michael Perl drafted in Zsolt, their foreman, to find the grave, which is in Section32, one of the uncleared sections of the cemetery. This took a long time. The gravestone had fallen over and the grave was shrouded in a tangle of vines and shrubs, partially buried in mud. Michael called in a mason and had the stone and pedestal repaired. He also organised for Zsolt and his team to clear access to and the surrounds of the site.

 

In addition, Michael entered with gusto into the search for further Landesmanns, identified the sites off our other family member graves, and provided me with lots of information that I did not have.

On 7th May, my daughter and I, having travelled from our homes in London, linked up with Zsolt, who took us to the five graves. Marc Pinter was on hand on the phone facilitating this visit and making sure we saw what we wanted to see. No one had purposely visited these graves for 89 years!

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It is impossible to visit Kozma Street cemetery without being stunned by its size and shocked by the massive task of clearing its many overgrown sections. The Friends of the cemetery are working heroically toward that end. It has to be done: if not by our generation now, then by whom and when?