Polish Researcher Maps Jewish Burial Sites, Reunites Hasidic Family with Ancestral Graves

Yanina Neskalska, a 42-year-old Christian Polish historian and tour guide from Krakow, has led a major digitization project documenting over 9,000 Jewish names from the historic Plaszow Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Nazis. Known locally for her unique "Following Krakow's Mezuzahs" project, Yanina researches Jewish heritage by tracing marks left on doorframes of pre-war Jewish homes. Her interest in Jewish history began about 15 years ago during her tour guide training, when she learned that a quarter of Krakow's pre-WWII population was Jewish and mostly perished in the Holocaust.

Yanina has studied at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and earned a master's degree in Jewish studies from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she is now pursuing a doctorate focused on Jewish history in the Podgórze district. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she completed her master's while caring for her children.

Recently, Yanina helped the Halperin family from New York locate the exact burial site of their ancestors, Rabbi Matityahu and Chaya Halperin, in the former Plaszow cemetery. Although the original tombstones were destroyed, Yanina's maps and archival photos enabled the family to say Kaddish at the precise gravesite. The Halperins, now numbering 5,000 descendants, trace their roots to the town of Dubcza and Podgórze, with family branches in New York, London, Israel, and Brooklyn.

Yanina also uncovered 200 marble fragments from tombstones during excavations and identified their owners through municipal records, including Adela Bergner, who died in 1939. She lamented the loss of burial society records during the war but pieced together names from city archives, revealing that 30% of the buried were infants and children.

Through her guided tours, Yanina teaches visitors to spot subtle physical traces on old doorframes that indicate former Jewish residences, reviving micro-histories of Krakow's Jewish community. She invites descendants of Podgórze Jews to contact her for assistance in tracing family histories. Yanina describes her work as a mission to preserve Jewish heritage and help survivors' descendants reconnect with their past.