The design has been revealed of the monument to be created in Brest (also known as Brest-Litovsk), from the hundreds of matzevot that were rescued from around Brest over the past two decades and which have been piled up and stored for years.
Designed by the American artist Brad J. Goldberg, the monument is an example of landscape art, with a broken circle of wall and walkway surrounding a forest of around 600 re-erected matzevot. It will be built on land that was part of the destroyed cemetery.
“[Goldberg’s] unique perspective sees his art as a fusion of sculpture, landscape, and the built environment,” The Together Plan (TTP), a British NGO dedicated to Jewish community development in Belarus, said in an announcement of the design.
[His] breathtaking memorial design features two gracefully curved walls, symbolizing a warm embrace encircling a mound where the carefully salvaged remnants of the headstones will find their final resting place.
Watch a video about the project. From minute 3.33 there are specifics about the monument, with comments from Goldenberg and more images:
TTP is coordinating the monument project in collaboration with its partner organisation in the USA, Jewish Tapestry Project, the Religious Jewish Union of Belarus, and the international charitable organization Dialog in Belarus.
It signed an agreement with Brest’s mayor in 2021 to green-light work on the monument and also carry out a detailed documentation and digitisation of the rescued matzevot and fragments.
Since then, TTP said, its team “has successfully photographed, meticulously documented, and catalogued every salvaged gravestone fragment, with the complete catalogue and accompanying images now accessible on the Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland’s website.”
Work on the monument is set to being in 2024, TTP said.
Coinciding with the publication of the monument design, TTP launched a fund-raising campaign to help finance its construction. As of the end of September, about one-third of the estimated $325,000 had been secured.
We have posted several times about the rescued matzevot in Brest.
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, more than 1,200 Jewish gravestones and fragments have surfaced around the city, used for construction or paving. As they surfaced they were rescued and piled up, awaiting funds to use them to create a Holocaust memorial.
The memorial project, TTP said, “is the brainchild of Stephen Grynberg, based in Los Angeles, the founder of the Illuminate Foundation, whose father and grandparents are among the few to have survived the Holocaust in Brest. The remaining members of his extensive family were murdered.”
Access the TTP fundraising page
Read about the monument project on the TTP web site