לעטיטשוב

לעטיטשעוו — פלאץ פון בית החיים

Letychiv — the site of the old Jewish cemetery

Site of the old Jewish cemetery, beside 5/1 Likarska street, Letychiv, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine

• THERE IS NOTHING TO ENTER AND NOTHING TO ASK FOR. The ground goes back to about 1760. It was demolished in the nineteen-seventies and private houses were built across the whole of it. It is somebody's street now.
• ONE FRAGMENT OF ONE MATZEVAH SURVIVES, in a private yard beside 5/1 Likarska street. That is the entire physical remainder of two centuries of burials, and it is on private property — it is not something to go and handle.
• The land is privately owned, so nothing can be restored and nothing is planned. ESJF has made a three-dimensional model of the site, which is as close as anybody will get to seeing the ground as a cemetery.
• There were Jews in Letychiv from 1581. Pogroms came in 1882 and again in 1919; after the German occupation of 1941 a ghetto was made here, and over seven thousand Jews died in the town during it.