News comes from Kovel, western Ukraine, of another instance of the discovery of numerous fragments of Jewish gravestones that were used for construction work in Ukraine in the Soviet period.
The news site Newsru.co.il reports that the fragments were discovered during housing construction on the site of a former military compound, across the street from the site of the Jewish cemetery, where they had been used to build a road. The cemetery was destroyed in the 1970s.
(We posted last week about a similar discovery of gravestone fragments near Husiatyn.)
The head of the Progressive Volyn Jewish Community, Ilya Miretskyi, took charge of the Kovel fragments and moved them for storage onto the premises of his own factory. In a Facebook post, local Jewish leader Eduard Dolinsky wrote that this entailed 13 truckloads of stones. Newsru.co.il wrote that Miretskyi wants to use some of the stones as part of a planned Holocaust memorial for the Jews of Kovel.
In other Ukraine news, we can’t resist posting the latest (March 25) drone video from Ostroh made available by activist Grigory Arshinov, showing the new roof on the Great Maharsha synagogue. We posted about the completion of the new roof earlier this month.
We have been following the progress of the restoration of this synagogue with great interest, ever since Sergey R. Kravtsov of the Center for Jewish Art pointed out its precarious state in a “Have Your Say” essay in December 2015.