Shovels and shears and sweat-hardened leather work gloves became signs of good will from one faith to another.

North Lanier Baptist Church in Cumming spent a Sunday afternoon in June — not Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat when work is forbidden — cutting away brush and uprighting Jewish gravestones in an abandoned corner of Roseland Cemetery near East Point.

Courtesy of Kimberly Sizemore (ENLARGE)

Greg Thorpe helps clean up Roseland Cemetery.

Courtesy of Kimberly Sizemore (ENLARGE)

David Grist and Aaron Sizemore right a gravestone in a neglected corner of Roseland Cemetery, near East Point. The men are part of goodwill mission by North Lanier Baptist Church in Cumming.

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In a cemetery where upkeep problems had been reported in the past, the abandoned plots had not been tended for years, as head-high brush attested.

"It was like a jungle," said Ron DeMoss, an associate pastor at the church.

The graves, 15 identified so far, are clearly Jewish as indicated by the names and Stars of David carved into the moss-encrusted granite stones. Some were inscribed with birthdates from the late 1800s.

The work by North Lanier members is a hand extended that grew out of some church members' experiences with another cemetery in Poland, DeMoss said.

Relations between the faiths in metro Atlanta are not antagonistic, but there is a chasm created by misunderstanding, indifference, distrust over issues of evangelization or just by worshipping and living in different circles.

"We want the Jewish community to know that rather than a divide between us, we want to have a joining together. We want to show God's love to people," DeMoss said.

A Jewish woman who is Christian by faith and has a connection to North Lanier discovered the gravestones among the brambles and brought them to the church's attention. No one asked the members to do the work. It just occurred to them it would be a good deed because of some church members' experiences in Poland.

In 2005 and 2007, North Lanier sent teams of mission workers to an orphanage near Warsaw. They visited Auschwitz, the concentration camp whose name has come to stand for the horrors of the Nazi regime, and listened to survivors with death-camp numbers tattooed on their arms tell their stories.

"The people there are still very broken," said Kimberly Sizemore, who helped in Poland. "When we heard about that, there is just something inside you that stirs."

Some of the members used their time there to help clean up a large, abandoned Jewish cemetery in a village called Otwock.

"When we heard there was a cemetery [in Atlanta], we said, 'We can do that for our neighbors,'" Sizemore said.

The Atlanta Jewish Times ran a story with photos in 2005 about the North Lanier teams' work in Poland, which brought responses from around the world to the church, DeMoss said.

People with Polish roots who had dispersed across the globe wrote to thank the church, a few noting that gravestones in the photographs were those of family members.

Regene Rosenfelder, 77, of Atlanta is a survivor of the Holocaust whose family roots are sunk deep in Poland.

She and a North Lanier member worked together before Rosenfelder retired. They talked about the trip, which Rosenfelder followed on the church Web site. Rosenfelder visited the church and told her story afterward.

"That's a wonderful deed these kids did," she said of the church's Atlanta project. "Just the thought that the church is doing something wonderful like that means so much to me."

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