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The
Rakow Jewish Cemetery is
located along Pushkin Street
close to the market square. [According to Yuri Dorn, head of
the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus, there is an
archived record, documenting the purchase of the land for a
cemetery in 1684. According to an archived document the
land for cemetery was purchased in 1684. As far as we know,
the cemetery had no formal name. In some records it is named
“Jewish Tombs.”
After
WWII, Rakow citizens
exploited the fact that the Jewish
population had vanished from the town. On cemetery
land, they built a grocery story, expanded the area of the
market, and abused the tombstones. Many of the tombstones
disappeared. The cemetery that we can see today is only
about 50% of the cemetery that existed before 1956 when
Soviet authorities confiscated part of the cemetery to
expand the market.
Here
are some comments about Rakow Cemetery from
David Fox:
“I
did visit there in 1999 and walked through the cemetery,
taking my photographs. While I did not see any overt
vandalism, the cemetery was not adequately protected by a
fence and young children were playing soccer in the
cemetery. There were many readable stones, but there were
also stones that had fallen over face down and others that
had sunken below ground level that were not readable. As
with most cemeteries in Belarus, overgrown
vegetation made it difficult to reach certain parts of the
cemetery.”
At the
time David wrote his account of the state of the cemetery,
only about 100 tombstones were considered to exist on the
cemetery plot.
In the
year 2002, Yuri Dorn with the financial help of sponsors
Gurewicz Family from South Africa, and the Grinholtz Family
from Israel, raised a fund
and a fence was built around the Rakow cemetery.
In
October 2003 the Wilnai family contributed its share to the
memory of the Lifshitz and Rothstein family members that
were born, married and raised their sons and daughters in
Rakow from the early 19th century. The project
was led by Yuri Dorn.
In the
process the tombstones were raised, cleaned, photographed
and documented. The students of Rakow School participated in
the project by helping lifting the tombstones. The work
started in October 2003. Snow and extreme cold temperatures
made for slow progress, but about 183 tombstones were
lifted. Ten monuments were too heavy to be raised. The
process of documenting (restoring?) the cemetery lasted
longer than we estimated because of inclement weather. The
project ended with the discovery of about 900 hundred
tombstones. The list and photographs were donated to JOWBR.
As
result of the project Ahron Grinholtz found the graves of
his parents and brother in the list of the tombstones and
asked Yuri Dorn to renovate the tombstones of his close
relatives.
The
current site publishes the list and examples of photos. If
you find a name and you would like to see the photo of your
relative’s tombstone in the site, please let me know and I
will display them.
While
working on the cemetery project Yuri Dorn heard from the
local citizens of Rakow about the tragic event where at the
beginning of the WWII, a month after Germans invaded Rakow,
they took 132 Rakow Jews away from Rakow, about 2 km away,
and murdered them. The case is remembered in Rakow Yizkor
books, but the exact location was unknown. Yuri believed
that the location is in the centre of the cemetery near the
gully. The size of the mass grave
is about 7x2,5 m. In 2005 the Jewish Community of Belarus
together with Charitable Fund of
Mark Lazarus (England) built a memorial to
commemorate these young Jewish men murdered by the Nazis at
the beginning of WWII. At the opening ceremony of the new
monument in Rakow the following people were present: The
mayor of Rakow, Diana and Michael Lazarus, Rakow residents,
Minsk ghetto survivors, and young people from
Minsk "Gilel" organization.
(See the photos of the event)
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