ROL: All across Eastern Europe, in every city and country hamlet where Jewish communities thrived before the Holocaust, are burial grounds sacred to the children and grandchildren of those who survived Hitler’s mass murdering. But time has taken its toll on these hallowed grounds. With few Jews left to maintain the cemeteries, headstones have toppled, and trees and brush have taken over. Little by little, sacred land is sold off or used to plant vegetables.For the Hasidim of Kiryas Joel, and other Jews around the world, the threat is real. They could lose vital links to their past.

Enter Nati Meir.

On Wednesday, Meir, a Romanian Parliament deputy, sat at the head of a table in Kiryas Joel, surrounded by village officials and elders, where he offered hope that at least one European country will help their preservation efforts.

Dispatched by his prime minister to meet with American Jews about their cemetery concerns, the Israeli-born deputy got an earful.

“They killed the living once, and now they’re going after the dead,” said Ari Felberman, Kiryas Joel’s government relations coordinator. “Please beseech your members of Parliament to at least respect the dead.”

In Romania alone, hundreds of cemeteries are at stake. The government and Jewish leaders there put the total at around 800, although David Kahan, an activist fighting to save the burial grounds, estimates there are “at least a couple of thousand.” Kahan is president of the Brooklyn-based Association of Jewish Romanian Americans and a director of the Heritage Foundation for Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries.

Kiryas Joel was a fitting place to stoke the Romanian campaign. The Satmar Hasidic movement that populates the village of 18,000 originated in Satu Mare, a once-Hungarian city that became part of Romania in 1920. Many in Kiryas Joel trace their roots to Romania.

Tension between American activists like Kahan and the leaders of Romania’s tiny Jewish population have complicated the preservation effort.

A 2002 law gave Romanian Jewish leaders ownership of the burial sites. But Kahan claims these leaders are less interested in protecting the cemeteries than in selling them off, especially the bare ones where the headstones were stolen or destroyed.

“This wholesale renting and selling of cemeteries will have to stop,” he told Meir in Kiryas Joel.

Meir offered Kahan and the others this glimmer of hope: a bill, pending in the Romanian Parliament, would allow the government and outside preservationists to share control of the cemeteries with the local Jewish leaders.