Belarus Workers Move Bones from Jewish Cemetery to Dump

Workers rebuilding a sports stadium on top of an 18th century Jewish cemetery in Gomel, Belarus, consign the bones to city dumps reflects a pattern of indifference toward Belarus' Jewish heritage since Belarus was a Soviet republic. The Gomel cemetery was destroyed when the stadium was built in 1961, but the remains lay undisturbed until this spring when reconstruction began and a bulldozer turned up the first bones. Jewish leader Vladimir Gershanok asked the builders to put the bones into sacks for reburial at a cemetery with a monument to Holocaust victims.

But city authorities ruled that the construction resume because the bones are more than 50 years old. Some of the bones have been carried off by stray dogs. Jews settled in Gomel in the 1500s and by the 20th century made up more than half of the population. In 1903 they made history by being the first to resist a pogrom, defending 26 synagogues and prayer houses. Most of Gomel's 40,000 Jews managed to flee before the Nazis arrived. The 4,000 who remained were shot in November 1941. The workers who are rebuilding the stadium today are not happy about digging up human bones; but if they find a gold tooth they celebrate. Jewish graves also have been disturbed in Ukraine.

Ukraine's chief rabbi Yaakov Bleich says it is not just a Jewish issue, but part of the general Soviet legacy; that Jews were not respected while they lived and certainly are not respected when dead. Yaakov Basin, vice president of the Belarusian Jewish Council, says the government is erasing Jewish history. Of the 1 million Jews living in Belarus before WW II, 800,000 died in the Holocaust. Today they number 27,000 in the country of 10 million. Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko suggested in a radio broadcast in October that Jews turned another town (Bobruisk) into a pigsty, just as Jews have done to Israel.