RAKOV CEMETERY PROJECT

 

Cemetery Graves List
SURNAMES	A-F	G-K	L-R	S-Z
GIVEN NAMES	A-F	G-H	I-L	M-N	P-Z

 

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. 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.  The work included a detailed mapping of 527 graves.

Click HERE for the cemetery map.

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. In this work the map of the cemetery was divided into sections and the mapping of all the graves, 909 in number, was done by sections only.

Click HERE to get a view of the cemetery divided into sections.

Check the following table to match a grave to a cemetery area.

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)

Searching Rakov Cemetery Data

Some of the documented graves have surname and given name. Some of the graves have only given name.

The graves can be searched by using the "Cemetery Graves List" table.

The location of Graves 1-527 are individually mapped Here.

The location of Graves 528-909 are mapped only into sections as well as the first 1-527.

To find the location of a grave in the section map use the number of the grave returned from the Cemetery graves list to find the section. Search Rakov Section List using the grave number. Once you found the grave, scroll up to the nearest Section number. The sections order is displayed Here.

Cemetery Graves List
SURNAMES	A-F	G-K	L-R	S-Z
GIVEN NAMES	A-F	G-H	I-L	M-N	P-Z