Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as the largest cities in Palestine at the time, were the places where the largest number of Polish civilian refugees who arrived in 1939-1941 as part of the evacuation from Hungary, Romania and the Balkans, and then in 1942, settled. - from the USSR via Iran. Not only civilians, but also soldiers, from among whom the 2nd Polish Corps was formed, arrived in these areas.

In the southern part of the Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, under the care of the Franciscan Fathers of the Custody of the Holy Land, there is a Polish section. Eighty-six people who died between 1942 and 1946 are buried there - both soldiers (18 graves) and civilians. Three Czechs are also buried here: Jindra Blažek (1914-1943), Leo Perutz (1890-1944) and Jiři Linhart (1920-1944). Later, about 20 more Polish refugees were laid to rest in other parts of the necropolis.

Information above the entrance to the cemetery directs you to the grave of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved the Jewish employees of his factory in Krakow from extermination. He is buried right next to the section of Polish graves.

The graves were cared for after World War II by Polish priests, Elizabethan nuns and the few Poles living in Jerusalem. The cemetery was guarded by a watchman hired by the parish.

In 1998, with funds from the Polish Embassy in Israel, an inventory was made of all the Polish graves in the cemetery. Unfortunately, some of the grave inscriptions were already obliterated. In 2006, a renovation was carried out with funds from the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, as part of which some of the tombstones were restored. A monument in the shape of a milepost was erected at the edge of the cemetery, with a characteristic rectangular shape, uniform for cemeteries of refugees from the USSR, and topped with an eagle bas-relief. The monument bears the inscription in Polish and English: "IN TRIBUTE / TO THE POLES / RESTING IN THIS CEMETERY / CIVILIANS AND SOLDIERS / OF THE 2ND POLISH CORPS / GEN. WŁADYSŁAW ANDERS / FORMER PRISONERS OF WAR AND PRISONERS / OF THE SOVIET GULAGS / WHO DIED ON THEIR WAY TO THEIR HOMELAND / IN THE YEARS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR / AND AFTER ITS END // POLAND REMEMBERS ABOUT YOU! / RZECZPOSPOLITA POLSKA / Warsaw Jerusalem / 2007".

In 2018. The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage funded further repair work carried out by the Armenian Foundation to improve the embedding of the crosses. Within the framework of the task subsidised by the Minister's Programme "Sites of National Remembrance Abroad", the Foundation takes care of the Polish graves in the Jerusalem cemetery, which consists of caretaking and constant maintenance of order.

For more detailed information on this cemetery, see the monograph by Prof. Dr. Artur Patek: Polish Cemetery in Jerusalem. Poles buried in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion, Krakow 2009.