In the old Jewish cemetery of the 18th-19th centuries in the village of Kurazhyn, Novoushytskyi district, there is a Jewish mass grave where about three thousand victims of Nazism are buried. More precisely, they were reburied from the site of the mass shooting of Jews in the village of Kalyus. That village, along with several dozen other villages, was flooded during the creation of the Dniester Reservoir, and the grave was moved to Kurazhyn. The burial ground still does not have a protected monument status.
The Khmelnytskyi Charitable Foundation "Hesed Besht" organized an expedition to the reburial site to examine the grave, take photographs, and prepare a number of necessary documents to assign the grave the appropriate status. Together with the foundation's employees and clients, the expedition was attended by and promised to help us solve this problem Deputy Director for Cultural Heritage Protection of the Khmelnytsky Regional Scientific and Methodological Center for Culture and Arts Serhiy Mykhailovych Shpakovsky, senior researcher of the Department of Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments at the above-mentioned center Volodymyr Zakhar'iev, researcher of the same department Oleksandr Klymchuk, director of the Novoushytskyi District Museum Iryna Malyugina and others.
Nature has done its job: in an ancient cemetery in the middle of the forest, visited only by hunters, all the paths to the grave have become overgrown and impassable. After all, there are no local Jews left here, there is no one to visit. Especially to facilitate the work of our expedition, employees of the Kurazhynsk village council mowed the road, cut down and sawed off the bushes on it. A huge thank you to them, because if they hadn't taken care of this in advance, I doubt we would have managed our task by the evening.
Our expedition also got it. In the impassable jungle In the cemetery we found several old matzevs in fairly good condition. We lifted them up, cleaned them, washed them, and photographed them. Now all that remains is to decipher the inscriptions. Consider that we have done another God-pleasing deed. What if, thanks to our efforts, one of our descendants finds out where his ancestors are buried?
Things have moved forward from a dead end. According to Jewish tradition, let us pray that our efforts will bear the expected fruits.
