Jews settled in Kharkov from the end of the 18th century. The first mention of the Jewish cemetery dates back to 1799. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jews constituted 8% of the urban population. There is information that already in 1913, due to a shortage of land, the Jewish community acquired a new plot of 2.5 acres of land for the cemetery.

Exact information about the number of Jewish cemeteries in Kharkov has not been preserved. In the city, the tradition of giving confessional names to cemeteries is combined with the numbering of cemeteries.

So, according to the data of local historians, from the 1930s to the 1960s, there was a separate Jewish cemetery on Akademika Pavlova Street. The victims of the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and those killed during the Holodomor were also buried there. Then, on the site of the cemetery, the city authorities laid out the Komsomolsky Park (now the Park of Memory). In the 2000s, mass graves were discovered in the park.

At the same address, Akademika Pavlova Street, there is the city cemetery No. 3, also known as Saltovskoye. This is one of the 50 formally existing cemeteries in the city and one of 18 cemeteries with serial numbers. Now the cemetery is closed for burials. According to local funeral services, the cemetery was founded in the 1940s during the Second World War. The Jewish site appeared on it in the late 1950s, which coincides with the date of the construction of a separate Jewish cemetery under the Komsomolsky Park. Burials in the Jewish section of cemetery No. 3 were carried out until the early 1990s. According to local historians, the site was filled up.

Over time, cemetery No. 3 turned out to be within the city limits. Nowadays, the metro station named after Academik Barabashov is located not far from it. After the mass emigration of the Jewish population of Kharkov in the 1990s, the graves at the Jewish site were left without care. The books for the Jewish section of the cemetery have been lost. The administration sold plots in the cemetery for new burials until the official closure of the cemetery.

No one was involved in maintaining order in the Jewish section of cemetery No. 3. As a result, the cemetery was overgrown with vegetation. In addition, according to the testimony of local residents, it was chosen by semi-criminal elements, drug addicts, persons without a permanent place of residence. Together with ownerlessness and uncontrolled growth of vegetation, this led to the destruction of burials. Many tombstones were destroyed, were not in place.