מינסק

מינסק — בתי החיים

Minsk — the Jewish cemeteries

Jewish cemetery, Sukhaya street, Minsk, Belarus

• MOST OF WHAT MINSK BURIED IS UNDER THE CITY. The ground by what is now the central square was closed in 1846 and built over; when the square was rebuilt in 2002 the remains of twenty-one Jews came up and were reburied. A mid-nineteenth-century cemetery went under the Belarusian State University in the nineteen-twenties, and fragments of its matzevos surfaced again during metro works around 2018.
• THE ONE THAT SURVIVES AS A CEMETERY is on Sukhaya street. It has been vandalised — nineteen matzevos were destroyed in one attack in 2002 — but it is a cemetery you can walk rather than a site you stand beside.
• THE YAMA IS THE OTHER PLACE PEOPLE COME TO. The Pit memorial, put up in 1946, marks five thousand Jews murdered on the second of March 1942. It was the first Holocaust memorial in the Soviet Union to carry an inscription in Yiddish, which is why it matters beyond Minsk.
• Minsk's surveys name Reb Yechiel Halperin of the Seder HaDoros, Reb Yerucham Yehuda Leib Perlman and Reb Binyomin Makovsky among the rabbonim buried in the city, but do not say in which of its grounds — and several of those grounds are now a university, a square and a road. This listing will not point at a spot it cannot stand behind.