A Jewish gravestone apparently from the 19th century that had been uprooted and converted into a millstone is for sale on an online auction site in Belarus. It was put up for sale from someone from the town of Molodechno.
The circular stone is described on the Ay.by auction site as a “Millstone, gravestone Judaism Torah old Hebrew 19th century” in “good condition;”. made of marble, with a diameter of 47 cm, thickness of 14 cm, and weight about 60 kilos.
Bidding ends June 11, and the starting price is 320 Belarusian Rubles, or around €100. The seller will ship to addresses in Belarus, but not to other countries.
While there are cases when old millstones have been recycled and used as headstones, such as in the Jewish cemetery in Šeduva, Lithuania, this one is clearly to be one of the many cases where a headstone from a destroyed or neglected Jewish cemetery was removed and repurposed this way.
The inscription clearly was cut off when the matzevah was chiseled into the rounded shape of the millstone.
The upper portion bears the lively carving of an lion breaking a branch from a tree, a common death motif, with the elaborately carved Hebrew letters PN — an abbreviation of “po nikbar” or “po nitman,” meaning “here lies” that traditionally appears on Jewish headstones.
The legible part of the epitaph reads (thanks to Sergey Kravtsov for the translation):
“Come here all the destined to [the] grave,
And tell about this grave
Of an honest and innocent man…”
We have posted earlier about matzevot being repurposed as millstones.
The Maceva Litvak Jewish Cemetery Project alerted us in 2015 to a case in Lithuania, for example.
In Poland, the photographer Lukasz Baksik documented a number of examples in his projection repurposed Jewish headstones, Matzevot for Everyday Use.
Click here to see the auction page and a series of pictures of the stone