RFE/RL has posted a video mini-documentary about Yvette Merzbacher, a woman now living in Switzerland, who is on a personal crusade to save the Jewish cemeteries of Moldova, where her grandparents came from. Merzbacher founded the Living Stones Association, a volunteer organization aimed at preserving Jewish and Holocaust memory in Moldova and “at reconnecting present descendants and their children to the vanishing and lost Jewish history of former Bessarabia to rescue and save whatever is still there.”
It has been working with the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, which, with support from the Living Stones Association, in August 2017 completed its first fencing of a Jewish cemetery in Moldova — in the town of Briceva.
In April 2016, we posted another mini-documentary about the plight of Jewish cemeteries in Moldova, which has some more context and is worth reposting here.
The film, by Eugenia Pogor, was produced in Russian and Romanian — but has English subtitles. It focuses on three cemeteries: the vast Jewish cemetery at Vadul-Raşcov , a village on the bank of the Dniester River where no Jews live; and the Jewish cemeteries in Ohei — home to few dozen Jews, and Chisinau, the capital — which is where Merzbacher is filmed in the RFE/RL documentary.
There are at least 50 Jewish cemeteries in Moldova.
This is what the Survey of Jewish Heritage sites in Moldova, carried out for the U.S. commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and first published in 2010, says about them:
Most cemeteries were founded in the 19th century, though there are a few older ones, including the important sites of Dubosari, Lipcani, Markuleşti, Nisporeni, Orhei, Otachi, Rashkov, Rezina, Teleneşty, and Zguritsa. The cemeteries of Chişinău and Bălţi are very large – approximately 100 hectares each – and each probably has more than 20,000 graves. …Some Jewish cemeteries, such as Ungheni, are adjacent to, or part of, municipal cemeteries. Some cemeteries, such as Markuleşti, are in very bad condition.Many older cemeteries still preserve scores – and even hundreds – of beautifully carvedgravestones. All have carved epitaphs and many include distinctive decorative reliefs, including favorite motifs of paired rampant lions, the blessing hands of the kohanim, menorahs and rosettes. These carvings are the most typical examples of Eastern European Jewish folk art, and are related in form to other traditional craft representations – particularly those of synagogal wood carving and synagogue and domestic paper cutting.While many stones have been stolen or destroyed in the past half century, the Commission’s survey shows that many survive – unrecorded and also unprotected. Photographs of many lost carved stones survive in the in the work of David Goberman, who recorded Jewish cemeteries in the region during the 1950s and 1960s.The newer cemeteries have many more graves, and the monuments at these sites are often more ornate and include multi-stone constructions which combine horizontal and vertical elements.Cemeteries also contain other elements – metal fences around graves, remains of pathways, and in some cases the remains of pre-burial halls where the body of the deceased was prepared for burial, and where mourners could gather to pray.
1 comment on “Moldova: new mini-doc on preservation of Jewish cemeteries”
Thank you, Jewish heritage Europe, for posting this film. Hopefully many people would like to get involved and help in this honorable and important work.