After being used for decades as a park, the site of the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Ostroh, Ukraine has once again been officially recognized as a Jewish cemetery, thanks to the efforts of activist Grigori Arshinov, who has spearheaded efforts to recover removed matzevot and also, over the past year, to restore the ruined Ostroh synagogue.
According to the Ukrainian Jewish news site Hadashot, the decision was taken in July by the Rivne Regional Council.
The cemetery dates back to the 15th or 16th century and once is believed to have included as many as 14,000 graves.
After the destruction of the Jewish community in the Holocaust, it became a neglected site. In 1968, according to the article, following claims that it was a dangerous area conducive to criminal activity, the executive committee of the Ostroh City Council of Deputies ordered it closed, and its territory was turned into the “Jubilee park” commemorating the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. With the fall of communism, the site was “given the status of a monument of landscape art.”
(Cemeteries in other towns suffered similar fates, and the Polish cemetery in Ostroh was also demolished and a stadium built on the site.)
With closure of the site, gravestones from the Jewish cemetery were removed and used for construction:
a shed in a psychiatric hospital, a pigsty, a transformer substation. In two neighboring military garrisons, these matzevas were … used to pave the basement.
Over the past few years, Arshinov has located some 400 matzevot from various places in the city and returned more than 200 of them to the cemetery site — he plans to use them to create a Holocaust memorial.
While doing so, he negotiated with officials to return the area to its original use. Public hearings were also held.
“Legal and scientific support was provided by scholars from the National University of Ostroh Academy and the National University of Water Resources from Rivne,” Arshinov told JHE. He said the costs for the work of the scholars and legal support were covered by the Brooklyn-based Hasidic businessman and philanthropist Louis Kestenbaum, Chairman of the Fortis Property Group, who has long been associated with Jewish cemetery preservation — his late father, Rabbi Zvi Kestenbaum, a Holocaust survivor, was the driving force behind the foundation of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of American’s Heritage Abroad.
The article states that what convinced officials to take the decision on the cemetery was the success Arshinov has had in the restoration of the synagogue. As we have reported in the past, it was a ruin little more than a year ago: thanks to his efforts, it now has a new roof and progress is moving forward in further restoration of the building.
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