Heidi M. Szpek, Ph.D.

Heidi M. Szpek, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies (Central Washington University, WA/USA) and currently, serves as Vice-Chair, translator and historian for the Bialystok Cemetery Restoration Fund. She also served as an educational consultant and epigrapher for Centrum Edukacji Polska-Izrael w Białymstoku (Poland), working with Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Germany) in their efforts to restore the Jewish cemetery of Bagnowka in Bialystok, Poland. After earning her doctorate in Hebrew and Semitic Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Szpek taught a wide range of courses related to Hebrew language and literature, Jewish culture and history as well as religious studies, in general, at universities and educational institutes in Wisconsin, Arizona and Washington.

Her first contact with Eastern European Jewish cemeteries were the famed cemetery in Prague’s Jewish quarter and the equally renowned cemetery adjoining the Remu Synagogue in the Kazimierz district of Krakow. In the tiny shtetl cemetery of Kolbuszowa, east of Krakow, a town highlighted in Norman Salsitz’s book, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa, she first encountered the uniqueness of the shtetl cemetery. In 2007, Professor Szpek conducted a survey of the cemeteries in the Grodno gubernya region of (northeast) Poland, including the largest urban cemetery of Bagnowka (Bialystok), the main focus of her subsequent research. Since 2010, she has been active in restoration of Bagnowka Jewish Cemetery. She has also contributed translations to the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR), examining epitaphs throughout eastern and central Europe and the Netherlands, collaborated through translation in documentation of forgotten cemeteries in northeastern Hungary, and, most recently, explored Jewish cemeteries throughout the Baltics States ( Jewish Heritage in the Baltics. 

For a list and links to her publications and conference paper related to the Jewish epitaph is linked here: Publications. Szpek’s book, Bagnowka: A Modern Jewish Cemetery on the Russian Pale (iUniverse.com, 2017) is ranked in the top 4000s of the million+ titles on Amazon and is in the process of revision to accommodate all the incredible discoveries on Bagnowka since its publication. The most notable updates: 1. Bagnowka was not devastated by the Nazis in WWII, rather in the early post-WWII years under Communism; 2. While Bagnowka had the potential to cradle 35,000 of Bialystok or the surrounding towns Jewish population, this was never realized because of the Holocaust and WWII. Rather about 12-15,000 Jews are buried here. 3. Bagnowka once had three ohalim for distinguished rabbis: Shmuel Mohilewer, (d. 1898); Chaim Hertz Halpern (d. 1919); and a third one, connected to Rabbi Halpern’s ohel, which may be that of Rabbi Halpern’s son-in-law, David Faians (d. 1935), also a rabbi.