“It rained to the right of us, it rained to the left of us. But it didn’t rain on the cemetery”
Early last week, leaders of the Society for Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Heritage in Lithuania, Rabbi Elchanan Baron and Rabbi Eli Meir Cohen, led a group to Europe as part of an ongoing initiative to preserve and restore old Jewish cemeteries.
The plan was that they would meet up with a team of volunteers from the Christian Society for Penitence and Reconciliation (a group who wish to make amends for the hundreds of instances where Jewish cemeteries were destroyed by Christians over the course of centuries) to erect new tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in Vilkija, Lithuania.
But a torrential rainstorm pounded Lithuania, so strong it felled trees. As the cemetery is located in a forest, doing any work there was dangerous, and Rabbi Baron and Rabbi Cohen were resigned to wait until the storm subsided.
It rained throughout Sunday and Monday. On Tuesday, it stopped, and Rabbi Baron and Rabbi Cohen, together with their group, turned up at the cemetery for a prescheduled ceremony with government officials — and stopped short. They saw no fewer than 28 newly reerected tombstones.
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