Memorial to the Jewish Cemetery in Mogilev

Память убитых евреев Могилева / Памяць забітых яўрэяў Магілёва

In the Belarusian city of Mogilev (Belarusian: Mahilyov) and in the neighbouring villages several memorials remember the murdered Jews of Mogilev and surroundings.

History

Mogilev, located approximately 180 km east of Minsk at the Dnieper, was founded in the 13th century. The first Jews settled there in the 16th century. During the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648 the Jewish community was nearly obliterated.
In the beginning of the 20th century about 25,000 Jews lived in the city, making up almost half of the population. In 1904 anti-Jewish excesses occurred once again. Prior to the Second World War Jews made up a fifth of the city's 100,000 inhabitants. Their number rose because of refugees from the part of Poland which was occupied by the Germans in 1939.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union the Wehrmacht occupied the city on July 26, 1941. Many Jews managed to flee but more than 6,500 remained in the city. The occupiers forced the Jews to wear identifying badges and to establish a Jewish Council for the execution of German orders. In August 1941 all Jews had to move to the district of Padnikollie. During the same month the Germans murdered about 80 Jews whom they accused of anti-German activities. Another 113 were caught on the run and shot. At the end of September 1941 a new ghetto was established in the city centre to which also Jews from neighbouring towns and villages were resettled. On October 2, 1941 the occupiers and their helpers led approximately one third of the ghetto's Jews to the car factory »Dimitrov« (today: »Strommashina«) 2 km away and confined them there overnight. The next day they took the more than 2,200 Jews further south to the Jewish cemetery, shot them and buried them in anti-tank ditches. On October 19 and 23, 1941 the occupiers murdered nearly all inhabitants of the ghetto. The victims were buried in a mass grave near the village of Novo-Pashkovo 12 km away from the city.
Up to 1,000 Jews were initially left alive and interned in the newly formed forced labour camp on the site of the factory »Dimitrov« together with non-Jewish prisoners. The majority of the prisoners were murdered until September 1943 and buried near the villages of Novo-Pashkovo and Polikovichi. Some prisoners were deported onward to Minsk.

Mogilev, about 1900, Old city view with synagogue, public domain

Mogilev, 2008, Memorial in the village of Pashkowo, Yad Vashem, Alexander Litin

Victims

On October 2 and 3, 1941 the Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B (Subgroup 8 of the mobile killing unit B) together with members of the Police Regiment Mitte and members of the Ukrainian auxiliary police murdered – according to their own statements – 2,273 Jewish children, women and men at the Jewish cemetery north west of the city. 65 Jews were already shot on the site of the ghetto by members of the Police Regiment. In these days approximately one third of the ghetto's inhabitants were murdered. This happened by command of the High SS and police leader Russland-Mitte Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. During the second »Großaktion« on October 19, 1941 more than 3,700 Jews and four days later another 239 were murdered, thereby obliterating the ghetto. Up to 1,000 Jews were spared the mass shootings and interned in the forced labour camp on the site of the factory »Dimitrov«. There the occupiers went on killing until September 1943. Many Jewish and non-Jewish inmates died of hunger and diseases. Jews from Belarus and Poland were also confined in the Labour camp. After the liquidation of the labour camp the surviving Jews were brought to Minsk.
According to the Soviet commission of inquiry the Germans and their helpers murdered approximately 10,000 Jews from Mogilev and surroundings altogether. The exact number of murdered Jews is unknown. It also remains unclear how many Jews survived the war. Some were rescued with the help of non-Jewish residents. After the war more than 30 locals received the award »Righteous among the Nations« from the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland the north-east of the country was annexed to Soviet Belarus. In summer 1941 the whole of Belarus was occupied by German troops. Over the next three years between one in four and one in three residents met a violent death. Almost all of the towns were completely destroyed. The Wehrmacht or SS systematically annihilated around 620 villages together with theor inhabitants, including Chatyn. The largest extermination camp on occupied Soviet territory was located in Maly Trostenets outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. It is now presumed that at least 60,000 German and Belarusian Jews were murdered there. Up to 85,000 Jews are estimated to have died in Minsk and 230,000 in the country as a whole. From 1941, Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan struggle against the German occupation with over a thousand active partisan groups. The Red Army began to recapture the country at the end of 1943 and the German occupation was considered over by summer 1944. The country was largely destroyed, the society shattered and the people traumatised. Belarus was reincorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944. A large part of the Polish territory annexed in 1939 remained part of the country. National memorial and memory culture in post-war Belarus were dominated by the liberation of the country on 3 July 1944 and the day of victory on 9 May 1945 as the end of a »heroic« struggle in the Great Patriotic War. Memory of the partisan war was also of key importance. The genocide of the Jews was not mentioned directly in the Soviet republics. An obelisk put up at the »Yama«, a pit where mass murders took place in the Minsk ghetto, was therefore an exception in the former Soviet Union. It was erected as early as 1946 and for decades was the sole memorial with a Yiddish inscription and a direct reference to the murdered Jews. The memorial site at Khatyn is also unusual. Here,153 people were burnt alive in March 1943. The memorial site, established in 1969, is notable for its simplicity, its concentration on the human dimension of the plight of the victims amidst the horrors of war and the absence of monumental features otherwise common in the former Soviet Union. After Belarus claimed independence in 1991 the search began for an independent national identity. The number of victims plays a decisive role, especially those killed during the Second World War. However, there is consciously no distinction drawn between the territorial situation of the country pre- and post-1939. Both the crimes of the Stalinist regime and the Holocaust have come to the fore but the nature of the state has prevented public discussion of these aspects. State remembrance continues to be dominated by the war in the years 1941 to 1944. Its main symbol is the monumental new building of the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, opened in 2014. In the meantime, however, the association of Jewish communities in Belarus has established a series of memorials to the victims of mass murder. Since the early 1990s, several German towns have also put up stelae in Minsk to remember the Jews deported and murdered there. The Berlin stele, financed by the federal state of Berlin and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated in an official ceremony on June 25, 2009. There is also movement with regards to a fitting development of the Maly Trostenets area: In 2015, a memorial complex was inaugurated at the site. A second segment which was co-financed by Germany was opened in 2018 by the presidents of Belarus, Austria and Germany. Germany has also pledged to finance the renovation of the Historical Workshop’s historical building on the former territory of the Minsk ghetto, documenting the fates of its victims.

Remembrance

Mogilev was liberated by the Red Army on June 28, 1944. In 1946 the Jewish community re-established itself numbering 8,000 members. In the 50s and 60s relatives of the victims marked many of the mass graves and erected the first memorials. Today the Jewish community has only about 3,000 members. Most of the Jews emigrated between 1989 and 2004 to Israel and to other countries.
In 1950 a memorial was erected north west of Mogilev. The Russian inscription reads: »Here lie buried innocent civilians who were shot by the fascist occupants during the war«. On top of the memorial is the red star. The memorial on the Jewish cemetery was erected in 1953/54. It commemorates the first mass shooting in Mogilev on October 3, 1941. After the war relatives of the victims reburied the corpses from other mass graves on the Jewish cemetery. In 2003 the memorial was restored and a Star of David was added.
In 1968 a memorial mound was erected in the village of Polikovichi. Steps on the side of the mound lead to a memorial, its Russian inscription reads: »Bothers and Sisters! Let us lower our heads to commemorate the more than 10,000 of our fellow citizens who were shot, tortured and burned on this site by the fascist occupiers between 1941 and 1944«. The memorial was restored in 2002. In the 1990s a memorial stone was erected at the site of another mass shooting in the borough of Kazimirovka. On the initiative of the Jewish community a memorial remembering the victims of the Mogilev ghetto was erected in 2008. The memorial stone displays chiselled handprints. The Yiddish and Russian inscriptions read: »In remembrance of the Jews of Mogilev – Victims of National Socialism«. At the building of the factory »Strommashina« a memorial plaque remembers the victims of the labour camp.

Mogilev, 2008, Memorial on the Jewish cemetery, Yad Vashem, Alexander Litin

Mogilev, 2008, Memorial in the village of Polikovichi, Yad Vashem, Alexander Litin

Open

The memorial is accessible in the context of a visit of the Jewish cemetery. The other memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.mogjewshistory.ru/

mogjewshistory@gmail.com

vul. Oltschinskaja
212030 Mogilew

Mogilev, 2012, New memorial in memory of the ghetto, Vadim Akopyan

Mogilev, undated, Memorial plaque on the building of the former labour camp, Factory »Strommashina«

Mogilev, 1941, Jews from the surroundings have to resettle to a ghetto, Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-138-1091-06A

Mogilev, 2018, Memorial for the victims of the ghetto, Stiftung Denkmal

Mogilev, 2008, Memorial in the borough of Kazimirovka, Yad Vashem, Alexander Litin

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