Memorial sign "In Memory of the Jews of Mogilev who were victims of Nazism"
In 2007, on the initiative of the Mogilev Jewish community, a memorial sign "In Memory of Mogilev Jews who were victims of Nazism" was erected near the Jewish ghetto. The monument was vandalised twice in 2012 and 2017, as can be seen in the photo.
The first time, criminal proceedings were refused; the second time, the perpetrators were found: these were four young men who were members of a neo-Nazi group, two of them were sentenced to terms of up to two years and compensation for the financial costs of restoring the monument.
During the first four months of Nazi occupation (July-October 1941), about 60 per cent of Jews were killed, but until the late 1980s the story of such a large population was ignored by public history. The erection of monuments on Jewish graves remained, for the most part, a private matter for Jewish families. Even then, the descendants of the dead had to be careful in their wording in order not to incur bans and repression for not conforming to the state policy of the Communist Party. Therefore, the word "Jews" is often absent on most monuments erected at burial sites from the 1950s to the late 1990s; the monuments themselves are standard and in most cases do not have any Jewish symbols. During the Perestroyka period the situation changes: inscriptions in different languages with more complete information appear, but this is not a universal phenomenon.
According to the materials of the ChGK (Extraordinary State Commission for the Detection and Investigation of Crimes of the Nazi Occupiers) and the memories of witnesses, mass shootings of ghetto prisoners were carried out in more than five places in the city. Four of these sites have monuments on which the word "Jews" is missing. It is replaced by the euphemism " Soviet civilians". Another monument is erected in the cemetery at the reburial site of the murdered. It was restored by the Jewish community with the help of the Israeli Embassy in 2000, whereby a Hebrew text and a six-pointed star were added.
We want to show the places of memory in the city of Mogilev and its neighbourhood, to tell about the tragic events of these places and to show the changes in public consciousness regarding these monuments in the XXI century. The monuments erected in the late 80s became places of impromptu meetings, the responsibility for the organisation of which was assumed by the newly established Jewish societies. Decades later, with the change of political and ideological course in the country, the state authorities began to try to control these activities. After 2020, state policy gave Jewish graves a new interpretation, using them to reinforce the "theory of genocide of the Belarusian people", while simultaneously erasing the history of the Holocaust and the national side of the tragedy.
