A photo catalog of the burials of this cemetery is available at the LINK 

Ovruch is a city in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine, where, according to the 1939 census, 3.8 thousand Jews lived. They made up 33% of the local population. Researchers believe that a significant part of the city's Jews managed to evacuate before the arrival of the Nazis. Some of the Ovruch Jews were drafted into the ranks of the Red Army.

German troops occupied the city on August 22, 1941. Even before their arrival, during the inter-government period, a Jewish pogrom took place in the city. Local residents organized it. During the occupation, the newspaper "Our Struggle" described the event as revenge of the inhabitants of Ovruch to the Bolsheviks and Jews, who, on the eve of the retreat, killed several hundred townspeople.

According to some sources, on August 22, 1941, the Nazis killed about 500 people on the eastern outskirts of the city, including many Jews.

Already on September 7, 1941, the first SS motorized infantry brigade shot 18 people. The aktion took place near the railway bridge over the Norin River. The victims were not only Jews, but also people accused of having links with the partisans. The pregnant woman managed to escape from the place of execution because the German officer did not give the order to shoot her in the back. Subsequently, she was the only witness to the crime. After the war, it turned out that the bodies of the victims were piled into two pits.

Local historians managed to establish the names of three Jews who suffered in the extermination aktion. These were the spouses Baytman Aron and Reizia and their grandson Mikhail Rozman. The latter cried before being shot, since the family was kept from hand to mouth for several days in the basement of the church in the village of Khaicha. The Nazis buried him alive.

A week later, the Nazis killed 12 Jews in the city center. A mass grave appeared at the place of their death in the post-war years.

In Ovruch itself, in the building of the Regional Consumer Union, the Nazis created a ghetto for Jews. It did not exist for a long time and was used as a place for short-term detention of Jews before extermination. Already in September, the prisoners of the ghetto were shot outside the city under the walls of the monastery of St. Basil the Blessed. According to various sources, from 75 to 83 Jews were killed there, including 13 children. In the 1970s, a memorial with a mass grave was erected at the site of the execution.

Ovruch became a local extermination of not only local Jews, but also Jews from the Belarusian Yelsk. The Nazis drove them in organized columns and shot them in the same places as the Jews of Ovruch. According to various sources, from 120 to 248 Jews of Yelsk perished on the outskirts of Ovruch.