As part of its sixth-annual Project Preservation, the Dartmouth University Hillel will be sending 14 students of various religious denominations to Lithuania to help restore a Jewish cemetary in the town of Yurburg. Returning trip attendee Zoe Dmitrovsky will be co-leading this year’s trip and will be joined by her roommate, Juliet Coffey, who is Irish-Catholic.

“My experience last year was incredible, and I really fell in love with the project,” Dmitrovsky said. “It was so powerful to me to look around at the different faces and know that not everyone was Jewish but we were all there for the same reason. Everyone was there to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.”

This is the first year that Project Preservation travels to Lithuania. The first four groups worked on cemeteries in Belarus, while last year’s group traveled to Druzhkapol, Ukraine. Before spending five days in Yurburg, the group will visit Krakow, Poland to tour the site of Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania.

Once in Yurburg, students will clean, document and create a map of headstones in the cemetery. They also plan to erect a fence around the site and hold a dedication ceremony with local and regional authorities after the project’s completion. Rabbi Edward Boraz, executive director of Dartmouth Hillel, will accompany the students on the trip.

The annual trip began after an Albany, New York, dentist visited a rundown cemetary in his family’s native Belarus. Returning to America, he presented a proposal to the Tucker Foundation to return and clean up the site. The foundation then developed the program so students could be included.