Incorporating thousands of rescued gravestones and fragments, the new Memorial Monument on the site of the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Brest (Brest-Litovsk) has been inaugurated with a ceremony attended by civic and religious leaders as well as descendants and local people.
Click here to watch a Facebook video of the inauguration ceremony
Called Memory Embrace, the monument was designed by the American artist Brad J. Goldberg as an example of landscape art: It entails a walkway and broken circle of wall laid with fragments of gravestones that embraces a forest of re-erected matzevot.
It also includes a wall bearing memorial plaques recalling the Jewish history of Brest in Belarusian, Russian, Hebrew, and English.
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 most of the site into the Lokomotiv stadium and playing field.
The matzevot were uprooted and dispersed. Over the years, both intact stones and fragments surfaced around the city, used for construction or paving. As they surfaced, they were rescued, brought back, and piled up in heaps.
The British NGO the Together Plan (TTP), dedicated to Jewish community development in Belarus, spearheaded the memorial 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.
The monument “transforms a long-erased cemetery into a sacred site of dignity, reflection, and education,” said TTP CEO and co-founder Debra Brunner.
“Growing up in Soviet Belarus, Jewish history was a shadow—present but unspoken, a silent grief buried beneath the weight of enforced silence,” said Artur Livshyts, Chairman of the Jewish Religious Union of Belarus and TTP co-founder.
Today, as we consecrate this memorial in Brest-Litovsk, we break that silence. We reclaim the names, the stories, and the dignity of those who came before us. This is more than stone and memory; it is an act of defiance against forgetting, a declaration that our past will no longer be erased.’
July 28 marks the liberation of Brest from Nazi occupation in 1944 an event celebrated each year in the city, and it also marks the date 60 years ago that the decision was taken under Soviet rule to build the sports center over most of the cemetery grounds.
In addition to the Memory Embrace memorial TTP also helped organize the documentation and digitization of all of the rescued matzevot and fragments.
Watch Debra Brunner’s speech at the inauguration ceremony:
We have followed the progress of the Memorial project for years and posted regular updates.
Read our May 26 post about the project
Click here to see our October 2023 post about the memorial project
Click here to access the Together Plan web site and find out more
Read our 2021 post about the project
Access the digitised catalogue of the rescued headstones