About the Project
"Lost Jewish Gardens" is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to reconstruct an almost entirely erased cultural landscape — the gardens created, cultivated, and inhabited by Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Gardens are rarely included in historical narratives of Jewish life, which tend to focus on religion, urban culture, or intellectual traditions. Yet gardens — whether private courtyards, small kitchen plots, orchard spaces, or community gardens — were sites where everyday life unfolded. They carried ecological knowledge, culinary traditions, seasonal rhythms, and forms of cultural identity embedded in plant selection, cultivation practices, and spatial organization.
The Holocaust did not only destroy human lives — it also erased landscapes, practices, and relationships with the natural world. The absence of these gardens today represents a form of invisible loss: a disappearance not only of people, but of ways of inhabiting and cultivating the environment.
"This project makes that absence visible."
Research Approach
Archival Research
Reconstructing historical traces of Jewish gardens through archives, literature, and oral histories — recovering what was erased.
Plants as Memory
Examining plants as carriers of cultural memory and continuity — how specific species, cultivation practices, and seasonal rhythms encoded identity.
Landscape & Violence
Exploring how landscapes can both preserve and obscure histories of violence and erasure — the garden as a site of invisible loss.
Narrative Writing
Combining environmental humanities, cultural history, and narrative writing to make absence visible and to restore these gardens to historical memory.
By bringing together environmental humanities, cultural history, and narrative writing, the project contributes to a broader understanding of how ecological and cultural systems are intertwined — and how their loss reshapes both memory and place.
Interested in Collaboration?
This project welcomes partnerships with historians, archivists, cultural institutions, and communities interested in recovering these lost landscapes.
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