Lecture #2 – Garden of the Living: Jewish Cemetery Restoration in Eastern Europe

Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati (JCGC) and Rockdale Temple hosted the second lecture in our series. Rabbi Abie Ingber, recently retired professor at Xavier University, presented on Jewish cemetery rehabilitation in Lithuania. He led students from Xavier University on two of these trips, one in 2016 and one in 2018, to restore two abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania as the culmination of a course on the Holocaust.

For over 30 years, Rabbi Abie Ingber served as the executive director of the Hillel Jewish Student Center at the University of Cincinnati. In 2008, he founded the Center for Interfaith Community Engagement at Xavier University and served as its executive director until his retirement in the summer of 2018. Throughout this career, Rabbi Abie has advocated for the rights of immigrants and refugees as an act of social justice and led the way for mutual understanding among those of different faith traditions and cultures. In 2006 he dedicated a monument at a killing field in Belorussia. In 2005 Rabbi Ingber and two Xavier colleagues created the award winning exhibit, “A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People.” The exhibit traveled to 17 American cities, was visited by more than one million people, and closed in 2015 at the Vatican.