Czech man creating online memorial to Jews

For the past five years, Jaroslav Haidler has spent most of his free time creating a database of Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic to ensure tens of thousands of Jews are not forgotten. In 1999, the 46-year-old Jewish director of a professional theatre company took on a new role, traveling round the country's cemeteries equipped with a camera and a dictaphone. Haidler knew nothing of his own Jewish roots until the age of 26 when his mother decided to reveal the family's roots to him, after seeing him play a Jew on stage. Around the end of the 1990s, he tried to find out if there was a central register of Jewish cemeteries. "When I discovered that none existed, I was happy that I had found my vocation. This is my way of serving God," Haidler, now an Orthodox Jew, told the news agency AFP.