In a town built on Jewish headstones, still no fixing what the Nazis destroyed

By Ilan Ben Zion

The tombstone of Rabbi Haim Leib Barit atop a pile of gravestones at the Brest Fortress in Belarus. (photo credit: Ilan Ben Zion/Times of Israel staff)

Ariel Sharon’s parents were born here. Menachem Begin grew up here. And then the Nazis came. More than 70 years later, even efforts for a monument to the annihilated Jewish community of Brest are frozen, with just one charity group pressing ahead

BREST, Belarus — A frozen, stony tendril pokes through the damp leaves clumped along the base of one of the burned out houses of the Warburg Colony, where destitute Jews were provided homes after World War I. Nearby, surrounded by leaf litter, plastic bottles, pill packs and condom wrappers, some engraved stone books show through, and beneath them Hebrew letters in the memory of “a man young in years, plucked at the age of 23.” These are decorations atop two Jewish gravestones, two among thousands demolished by the Soviets six decades ago that have surfaced in this western Belarusian city over the past decade.

Since they began turning up after the fall of the USSR, efforts to preserve the headstones have failed to make any progress. Members of the tiny local community have even turned to Israel and the US of late, without much success, for help in erecting a monument to the thousands of Jews who once called this border town home.

Most of the stones that have been collected have, in an ironic historical twist, found refuge a 15-minute drive from the old Warburg Colony at the Brest Fortress, a 19th century Russian fortification straddling the confluence of the Muchavets and Bug rivers, which now serves as a shrine to Soviet soldiery.

They’ve been heaped in mounds beneath a brick vault in one of the fortress’s northern earthworks alongside workshops for the site’s maintenance crews. A crude enclosure made of gravestones stacked 14 high cordons off the accumulation from curious intruders, though few ever venture back there. Some of the gravestones have been stacked in an orderly fashion, like cordwood, but most are strewn in a pile several feet high and some 20 feet in length. A rare few are intact, such as the monumental green lichen-covered tombstone of Rabbi Haim Leib Barit, who died in 5696 (1935/6), but the majority were smashed into tiny fragments, some no larger than a copy of “War and Peace.”

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