This article was originally published in the Jewish Journal: here
It is the culmination of a two-decade effort to restore dignity to a sacred site that was destroyed by the Nazis and paved over by the Soviets. The monument, built from recovered headstones, now stands as a public act of remembrance and reclamation.
When Stephen Grynberg first stepped onto the grounds of Brest’s old locomotive football stadium in 1997, he wasn’t expecting to find fragments of his family’s past buried beneath the turf. The stadium sat atop what had once been the Jewish cemetery of Brest—his father’s hometown, a center of Jewish life before the Holocaust.
“There was a feeling of such deep and buried sadness amidst the silence of the place” Grynberg said.
More than two decades later, the silence has been broken. On July 28, a striking new memorial—Memory Embrace—was unveiled on a portion of the original cemetery in Brest, Belarus. It is the culmination of a two-decade effort to restore dignity to a sacred site that was destroyed by the Nazis and paved over by the Soviets. The monument, built from recovered headstones, now stands as a public act of remembrance and reclamation.
To read more, please click here to view the full article on the Jewish Journal website.