
Visit to the Museum of Jewish Resistance, Novogrudok - June 23rd 2024
By Tamara Vershitskaya
On the 22nd and 23rd June, The Together Plan along with its Belarusian partners (Dialog and the Jewish Religious Union in the Republic of Belarus) and the Russian Holocaust Centre (Moscow) organised a significant seminar in Belarus for educators from 10 Russian regions and Belarusian secondary school teachers. Fifty people participated in thematic lectures and workshops, an visited Holocaust and war memorial sites in Brest and Novogrudok. The first day of the seminar, 22 June, was held in Brest, which is a date that holds particular significance as it was on this day and in this place that the tragic events of the Great Patriotic War began in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The seminar participants honoured the memory of those killed near the Brest Fortress and then travelled on to Bronnaya Gora, the site of the mass murder of over 50,000 Jews.

Workshop on day one of the seminar in Brest, 22nd June 2024
Both Brest and Novogroduk are incredibly significant landmarks in the history of World War II for the countries of the former Soviet Union. The defenders of the Brest Fortress heroically fought the Nazi invaders for one month and one day, despite the fact that the German army had advanced as far as Smolensk and was well beyond it when the last battle in the fortress took place on July 23 1941.
Novogrudok is the location of the most successful Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. It was in this town that ghetto prisoners dug a 200-metre tunnel from a residential barrack – the longest tunnel ever built by ghetto prisoners during the Holocaust. It was in the Novogrudok area that the most successful rescue of Jews by Jews took place. The Bielski brothers, who organised a purely Jewish partisan unit, successfully saved the lives of 1,200 Jews.
“For us the trip to these two cities is very important. It was in Brest that our first Summer School-Seminar for teachers from the countries of the former Soviet Union was held back in 2001. We continued to run this annual event for 10 years. We would visit the Brest Fortress, at 4 o’clock in the morning, with participants of International conferences for schoolchildren together with Roman Levin, a poet and one of the characters of The Brest Fortress, a famous novel by Smirnov, writer, and author of 30 books.”
Ilya Altman, co-chairman of the Holocaust Centre and Professor of the Russian State University for Humanities.
Roman Levin was in Brest when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and was one of 19 survivors of the Brest Ghetto. He is known as ‘the boy from Brest’. It is because the famous Soviet writer Smirnov wrote a whole chapter about Roman Levin in his book about the Brest Fortress, that the story of the ghetto in Brest became known (read more here).

Visit to the Museum of Jewish Resistance, Novogrudok – June 23rd 2024
The first day of the conference-seminar, dedicated to the memory of Roman Levin, who passed away in 2022, was held at the Brest State University which is named after Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet. We then travelled to Novogrudok, the town where twenty years ago I was invited to a seminar for Belarusian teachers organised by the local history museum in cooperation with the London Jewish Cultural Centre (now JW3) and Jack Kagan, a survivor of the Novogrudok tunnel escape and a Bielski partisan. It was there that I learned about the escape from the ghetto through the tunnel and visited the place where, a few years later, thanks to my efforts, the amazing memorial Museum of Jewish Resistance was created. I was delighted that our two day seminar enabled teachers from Russia to have the opportunity to visit these places and learn about these stories.
This is an exciting step forward in the field of Holocaust education in the former Soviet Union and we are delighted that we are playing our part in being able to facilitate this much needed development.