The inimitable Meylakh Sheykhet is interviewed and profiled in the Canadian Jewish News in an article by Sheldon Kirshner highlighting his work preserving Jewish cemeteries and mass grave sites in Ukraine.
“We are obliged to do this,” he said in an interview last week while on a visit to Toronto to raise awareness about his work. “We’re one people, with one destiny, and if we don’t do this we will not be forgiven.”
For the past 25 years, Sheykhet, a 58-year-old resident of Lviv, has scoured Ukraine in an attempt to save its Jewish heritage from neglect and abandonment.
“Thanks to financial assistance from foundations and private sources, he has preserved about 180 cemeteries and grave sites in Ukraine, whose registered Jewish population stands at around 120,000.
Yet he has only scratched the surface.
In his estimation, there are 2,000 Jewish cemeteries and from 5,000 to 6,000 grave sites in this vast country, which attained independence in 1991 and suffered through a Soviet and a Nazi occupation.