An agreement signed last month paves the way for work to start on creating a Holocaust memorial incorporating the hundreds of matzevot that were rescued from around Brest and which have been piled up and stored for years. The matzevot will also be digitized and uploaded online.
The Together Plan (TTP), a British NGO dedicated to Jewish community development in Belarus, reports that it signed an accord on June 17 with the Brest mayor.
“In spite of many challenges, our Belarus Country Director, Artur Livshyts, and the Mayor of Brest, Alexandr Rogachuk, signed an exclusive agreement giving us the green light [to go ahead with the project],” it said on its web site.
Every headstone, complete or broken, will be photographed, and where possible, read and translated. A lapidarium will be designed and installed on land that was once part of the cemetery which means that a lasting and timeless memorial will finally mark this place of enormous historic significance.
Around 26,000 Jews lived in Brest before the Holocaust. The Jewish cemetery was demolished by the Nazis in 1941-42 and then in the decades after World War II the Soviet authorities converted the site into the Lokomotiv stadium and playing field.
In recent years, at least 1,500 Jewish gravestones and fragments have surfaced around the city, used for construction or paving — a scenario described in an article in Vice media as “a turn of events that wouldn’t seem out of place in a horror film.”
As they surfaced they were rescued and piled up, awaiting funds to use them to create a Holocaust memorial.
Together Plan CEO Debra Brunner told JHE that, following the agreement, work on the memorial project and digitization should take three years.
“We would welcome approaches from academic institutions interested to be a part of the developments,” she said.
Watch a Together Plan video from 2020 about the matzevot: