Jewish Memorial Park (Minsk)

In May 2007, while laying a pipeline along Ierusalimskaya Street, workers began to find tombstones covered with inscriptions in Hebrew. The news about the old Jewish cemetery attracted public attention. Journalists from newspapers and Belarusian TV channels came to the scene. The place where a park now stands, and where local boys play football on a sandy field, was a Jewish ghetto during the war; now it is commemorated by a memorial on the hill in the square. This is also the site of a mass shooting of Jews during the war. At one time, burials were also moved here from the cemetery that was located where the current Dynamo stadium stands. The cemetery itself, which existed from 1868 to 1946, was closed in the early 1970s and completely eliminated in 1990; it was simply leveled to the ground. Representatives of the Soviet city authorities did not even bother to care about the memory of the deceased. There is still no mention or memorial plaque indicating that there was an old cemetery here. Several monuments have been erected for Jews deported to the Minsk ghetto for further extermination from Germany (Hamburg, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and so on).

In December 2019, this place was named the Jewish Memorial Park. The acquisition of a name is an important step in memorializing the site. This is one of the places of remembrance; otherwise, the entire city would have to be filled with monuments, since shootings took place everywhere.

The Minsk ghetto is a terrible chapter in the city's history. Out of 100,000 people, only two percent survived. People hid here, starved; up to 70 people could live in one apartment, sleeping in shifts, and they could be killed at any moment. Part of the ghetto was the old Jewish cemetery, which could not expand beyond the land allocated to it. Therefore, when the entire territory was used, graves were covered with sand and another layer of graves was placed on top. Now there is a park on the site of the cemetery, where people walk their dogs and mothers play with their children.

But at least there is a memorial here — the place is marked, and there is a good museum that has become the center of Jewish history in Minsk. By the way, in a house resembling the museum building — it stood a little further — when the Jews realized they needed to save themselves, as it was clear that the day of the ghetto’s complete destruction was approaching, they dug a hiding place in the basement for two families. But someone else found out about it, and in the end, 26 people gathered there; half of them survived until liberation, and these are the only surviving prisoners of the Minsk ghetto who did not escape from it.

Sources:

wikimapia.org/11782914/en/Jewish-Memorial-Park

https://votezde.org/d-11728-memorialnuy-skver.html