Remains of local ghetto prisoners reburied in Brest

On May 22, an unusual ceremony took place at the Northern Cemetery of Brest. The remains of the 1,214 executed prisoners of the Brest ghetto accidentally discovered in the city center during the construction of an elite residential quarter were reburied.

The mourning ceremony was attended by several hundred people, TUT.by reports. Among them were representatives of the city and international Jewish organizations, diplomats, officials, caring citizens. The remains were buried in 120 coffins with Jewish symbols, placed in a large common grave.

Officials spoke about the horrors of the Holocaust and called for combating xenophobia and intolerance.

"For us, the Holocaust is an event with which we continue to live. The proof we see here today. We are at a funeral. A funeral is the end of life. The fact that this end happened more than 70 years ago is irrelevant," said the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Israel to Belarus Alon Shoham.

"The war ended 75 years ago, but we still come back to the cemetery, we do it again and again. When will this end? Today we are gathered here so that this would never happen again," the Brest Jewish community chairman Boris Bruk continued.


After the official speeches, Rabbi Haim Rabinovich read a prayer. People honored the memory of the dead with a minute of silence and threw a handful of earth into the grave. Then the coffins were covered with white rectangular bedspreads -- taliths -- and prepared for burial.

The mass graves in the center of Brest were accidentally discovered at the end of January 2019 during the construction of an elite residential quarter. The workers noticed bones in an excavator bucket and called the police. Soon the search teams of the Ministry of Defense arrived at the site. They worked on the site in February and March.

Although exhumation is allowed only in exceptional cases under the religious norms of Judaism (for the Jews it is important that the remains were untouched), excavations began at the construction site. The area was 40 meters long and 4 meters wide. Human bones were found at a depth of 1.5 meters. Many skulls had bullet holes.

A memorial sign will appear in place of the terrible find. The Brest authorities have already handed over its design to representatives of the Jewish public for evaluation.