בריסק

בריסק — בית החיים החרב

Brisk — the destroyed Jewish cemetery

Site of the old Jewish cemetery, Brest, Brest Region, Belarus

• THERE IS NO CEMETERY TO VISIT. This was one of the oldest and largest Jewish burial grounds in Belarus. The Germans demolished it in 1941–42, and in 1959 the Soviet authorities cleared the site and built the Lokomotiv stadium and its playing fields on top of it. The sports ground is still there and still in use.
• The matzevos went into the city itself. Jewish gravestones have been found in Brest's road surfaces, its pavements, its gardens and the foundations of its houses — fifteen hundred recovered by 2014, four hundred and fifty of them dug up during the building of a supermarket.
• A memorial is being made from the rescued stones: a broken circle of wall and walkway around some six hundred re-erected matzevos, on land that was part of the cemetery. Ask what stands before you travel — this is a site whose state changes.
• One name people search for here: the Beis HaLevi, Reb Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, was niftar in Brisk in 1892. Sources disagree about where he was buried — some say here, some say the Warsaw cemetery on Okopowa — and this site is not going to choose for you. If Brisk, there is nothing left to stand at.