AMSTERDAM - On a chilly Sunday morning, a group of Dutch teenagers gather in an overgrown patch of land in east Amsterdam to work on a unique project: cleaning up a 300-year-old graveyard.

But the volunteers involved in restoring the Zeeburg Jewish cemetery are more than just beautifying: drawn from the city's Jewish and Moroccan Muslim residents, they are building bridges between two divided communities.

"Come on guys, lets get going!" volunteer Alfie de Vries, 13, urges his friends Jonas Poolman and Max Zegerius as they grab garden rakes and a spade to join some 30 other teenagers hacking away in a nearby clearing.

With help from Ahmed Bularoez, 21, they pull down branches and clean up strands of dead grass to reveal a grey stone slab with an inscription in Hebrew and the Star of David on it.

"Another tombstone", one teenager excitedly points out as dirt and leaves are wiped away before being carted off in a wheelbarrow. De Vries, Poolman, Zegerius and Bularoez lean on their garden tools, grinning broadly.

De Vries, Poolman and Zegerius are Jewish. Bularoez, the son of Moroccan migrant laborers who came to the Netherlands in the 1970s, is Muslim.

"The idea to get Jewish and Muslim teenagers working side-by-side to clean the old cemetery was sparked last year after we filmed incidents of anti-Semitism on a hidden camera and broadcast it," one of the project's organizers, Rabbi Lody van de Kamp, said.

Shown on Dutch television, Moroccan youngsters are seen baiting two Jewish teenagers wearing skullcaps, as they walk around a Moroccan neighborhood in Amsterdam, while in another clip, the boys flashed a Hitler salute.

The broadcast sent out shockwaves which reverberated all the way to the lower house of the Dutch parliament.

It was mooted as a sign of growing anti-Semitism in the Netherlands and an MP, himself of Moroccan parentage, even suggested police don kippas and walk the streets as "decoy Jews" to catch offenders in the act.

But the images also touched a raw nerve within the Moroccan community, whose members also complain of being singled out.

"You know, when you do something good, you're called a Dutchman of Moroccan descent, when you do something bad, you're just a Moroccan," said Bularoez.

Said Bensellam, a key figure among Amsterdam's Moroccans, says he decided to contact Van de Kamp shortly after the program aired - and so the idea of a combined project to clean up the Zeeburg cemetery was born.

"We want to show solidarity with the Jewish community," he says.

Jewish teenager Jonas Poolman says "together we can achieve a lot. Besides, we really like these guys".

Around him, teenagers mix and laugh together, all wearing the same blue overalls. The only real difference, some of the youngsters are wearing kippas.

Bularoez said: "This is a fantastic project with a lot of history here."

Opened in 1714, the Zeeburg Jewish cemetery is spread over 0.8 hectares and with thousands of graves, it's one of Amsterdam's oldest Jewish graveyards.

It's also one of the largest in western Europe, according to Van de Kamp.

Agence France-Presse