A remarkable historical research project led by a Christian woman from Poland has enabled a large Chassidic family with more than 5,000 descendants to locate the exact burial place of their ancestors in a Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Nazis. Her painstaking work has also uncovered thousands of forgotten Jewish burial records and inspired a separate effort to preserve the memory of prewar Jewish life through the traces of mezuzos still visible on centuries-old homes.
Janina Naskalska, 42, a Christian resident of Krakow, has spent years researching Jewish history and preserving the memory of communities that were almost entirely wiped out during the Holocaust. She leads an extensive digitization project that has documented more than 9,000 names of Jews buried in the historic Plaszow Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated and destroyed by the Nazis. She is also widely known in Krakow for launching the project, “In the Footsteps of Krakow’s Mezuzos.”
As a licensed tour guide and historian, Naskalska conducts educational tours highlighting the physical remnants left behind by Jewish families who once lived throughout Krakow. Her research focuses on the marks and indentations left on doorposts where mezuzos were once affixed before World War II.
Naskalska said her interest in Jewish history began after she realized how much of Poland’s Jewish past had been omitted from her education.
“It came as a shock to me that there was so much history that no one had ever taught me,” she said, explaining that Jewish history was largely absent from the Polish school curriculum when she was growing up.
Motivated by that discovery, she immersed herself in Jewish studies. She visited the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, traveled to Yad Vashem in Yerushalayim, learned basic Hebrew, and during the COVID-19 pandemic completed a master’s degree in Jewish Studies at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University while caring for her two children at home.
Before pursuing graduate studies, she completed specialized training at the Galicia Jewish Museum. She is now working toward a doctorate focusing on the Jewish history of Podgórze, the Krakow district where many Jews lived before the Holocaust.
Naskalska is also inviting descendants of Jews from Podgórze to contact her if they are searching for information about relatives who lived there before the war. Those seeking assistance can reach her at j.naskalska@gmail.com.
She explained that her fascination with Jewish history began roughly 15 years ago while training to become a city tour guide. During her studies, she learned that before World War II, roughly one-quarter of Krakow’s population was Jewish—and that nearly the entire community was murdered during the Holocaust.
Determined to preserve what remained, she began examining archival materials that had never previously been researched. Her work eventually led to the digitization of more than 9,000 burial records from two destroyed Jewish cemeteries. Of all the original gravestones, only one remains standing today—the matzeivah of Chaim Yaakov Abrahamer, who passed away in 1935.
One of the most emotional chapters of her work unfolded recently when she met members of the Halperin family from New York.
According to Naskalska, the family’s greatest wish was to stand at the precise location where their ancestors had been buried on what is now little more than a barren hill. Today, only one original Jewish gravestone remains at the site, alongside a reconstructed monument honoring Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Bais Yaakov movement.
Using old maps, historical records, and rare photographs, Naskalska successfully identified the exact burial location, enabling the family to stand there and recite Kaddish.
She said the family was deeply moved by the experience.
“Although the gravestones are gone, we found the exact location thanks to the maps and a handful of surviving photographs of the family graves,” she said.
Among the graves identified were those of Chaya Halperin and her husband, Rav Mattisyahu Halperin, who served as the rav of the town of Dobczyce.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Jews of Dobczyce were subjected to increasingly harsh decrees and forced labor. In August 1942, they were deported to the Wieliczka Ghetto and from there sent to the Nazi death camps.
Today, Rav Mattisyahu Halperin’s descendants number approximately 5,000 and are spread throughout the United States, Britain, and Eretz Yisroel.
During the family’s visit, Shaya Halperin told Naskalska, “The family gravestones did not survive, but the families did, and that is a great victory over evil.”
Speaking to B’Chadrei Chareidim, Halperin reflected on the emotional significance of the discovery.
“For years, our family knew where our ancestors were buried, but we never knew exactly where their graves had stood after the cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis.”
He then recounted an extraordinary story from many years earlier.
“I once came across an auction on eBay offering an old photograph of the gravestones of my grandfather and grandmother—Rabbi Mattisyahu Halperin and his wife Chaya Halperin. I immediately began calling cousins I knew were active on eBay and asked them not to bid so I could quietly purchase the photograph without driving up the price.”
But things did not go as planned.
“However, when the auction closed, the bids kept climbing higher and higher. I couldn’t understand who would even be interested in a photograph of my family’s gravestones. I lost the auction.”
Only later did he learn what had happened.
“The winning bidder was connected to the Plaszow Museum. It turned out the photograph was one of only six known images of the old Jewish cemetery in Podgórze taken before its destruction during the Holocaust. It is considered one of the most historically significant photographs of the cemetery because it captures the magnificent Byzantine-style taharah building with its towering dome behind the graves. More importantly, the photograph clearly preserves the names on several gravestones—including those of my family.”
For years afterward, Halperin tried unsuccessfully to determine the exact location of the graves in hopes that one day they could properly commemorate them.
That breakthrough finally came through Naskalska’s research.
“She succeeded in identifying the exact place where Rabbi Mattisyahu Halperin and Chaya Halperin were buried,” Halperin said. “When we stood there together as a family, on what now appears to be an empty hill, we were finally able to say Kaddish at the actual place where our ancestors were buried before the cemetery was destroyed.”
Halperin also shared the broader history of his family.
“For me, this story goes back even further. For approximately ten generations, the rabbis of the Halperin family were buried in Berezhany, today in western Ukraine. Generation after generation—father after son—was buried there. Rabbi Mattisyahu Halperin was the first to leave that family line. After marrying into the distinguished Frankel-Teomim rabbinic family of Podgórze, whose patriarch, Rabbi Shimon Alter Frankel-Teomim, served as the city’s chief rabbi, he settled in Podgórze. When he passed away in his father-in-law’s home, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery there.”
Although the Nazis destroyed his gravestone, Halperin emphasized that they failed to erase his legacy.
Three of Rav Mattisyahu’s grandsons survived the Holocaust. One branch became the family of the renowned Rav Elchonon Halpern of Golders Green in London, whose descendants today live across Britain, Eretz Yisroel, and New York. Two additional surviving brothers established large families in Brooklyn and Efrat.
With Naskalska’s continued assistance, together with experts in historical mapping and geography, the Halperin family now hopes to reconstruct and rededicate the original matzeivah at the precise spot where it once stood, restoring a small but meaningful piece of Jewish history the Nazis sought to erase.
Reflecting on her years of work, Naskalska said the project has become deeply personal.
“It gave me a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction to do something for people who are so different from you,” she told B’Chadrei Chareidim. “I felt that it really became part of me.”
She explained that while her original goal was simply to preserve Poland’s Jewish history, she now feels privileged to help Holocaust survivors’ descendants rediscover their own family stories.
Her research has also extended to more than 200 fragments of broken marble matzeivos uncovered during excavations conducted under rabbinical supervision. Through painstaking detective work, she has identified many of the individuals to whom those fragments belonged.
One belonged to Adela Bergner, who passed away in 1939. After locating her name in municipal records, Naskalska expressed hope that Bergner’s descendants might one day read about her work and contact her to learn more about their family history.
Naskalska said one of the greatest disappointments she encountered was discovering that the Chevra Kaddisha burial ledgers disappeared during the war. Undeterred, she turned instead to municipal death registries and city archives, where families had officially recorded deaths. Through years of painstaking research, she reconstructed the identities of approximately 9,000 Jews buried in the cemeteries.
She noted one heartbreaking statistic: roughly 30 percent of those buried were infants and young children.
Beyond cemetery research, Naskalska’s unique tours encourage visitors to look closely at the old doorframes throughout Krakow. Small physical traces—a diagonal groove in the wood, rust stains from ancient nails, or faint marks in the plaster—often reveal where a Jewish family once affixed a mezuzah before the Holocaust.
Through those silent remnants, she says, the stories of Krakow’s vanished Jewish residents come alive once again. On her tour’s official website, she describes those tiny marks as “an opening to the micro-history of Krakow’s Jewish residents and the Jews who once lived here.”
{Matzav.com}
