» מאמרים » Jewish cemeteries in Dnipro (Zapadnoye and Krasnopolskoe), Ukraine

Jewish cemeteries in Dnipro (Zapadnoye and Krasnopolskoe), Ukraine

In Dnipro, a Jewish community existed since the beginning of the 19th century. It is known that the first Jewish cemetery was in the village of Novye Kaydaki, which eventually became part of the city of Yekaterinoslav. It was used as a city Jewish cemetery. Already at the end of the 1830s, the Jewish community turned to the authorities with a request to allocate a new plot of land for burial.

According to the historical publication-reference book entitled "All Yekaterinoslav", dated 1913, there were two Jewish cemeteries in the city.

The first was located in the area of ​​Uyezdnaya and Novoselskaya streets (now - Darwina).

The second is on the site of the present Pisarzhevsky square. It was called the New Jewish Cemetery. It functioned officially since 1903. By the middle of the twentieth century, about 90 thousand people were buried there.

During the Holocaust, the invaders carried out executions of Jews on its territory.

From the post-war era to the 1960s, authorities attempted to use the cemetery land. A park was laid on its territory. During the days of independent Ukraine, the Jewish community achieved the installation of the Matseva memorial complex in it. In the summer of 2020, the city authorities began reconstruction of the park. It received memorial status.

The only historical Jewish cemetery that has survived in Dnipro is located in the Zapadny residential area. It covers an area of ​​over a hectare. There are at least 2.5 thousand graves on it. Here you can see the plots that were allocated by the Yekaterinoslav authorities. The oldest burials date back to the end of the 19th century. The cemetery is unique in that you can see "male" and "female" burials. At the beginning of the 20th century, this tradition disappeared. There are also many family graves in the cemetery.

In 2013, the local Jewish community began renovating the dilapidated cemetery. The volunteers cleaned up the territory, put in order the graves at 10 Jewish sites (200-300 graves on each).

The second famous necropolis of Dnipro is the Krasnopolskoye Jewish cemetery. It covers an area of ​​more than a hectare and is considered the largest of the functioning Jewish cemeteries in the region. The graves of the Krasnopolskoye Jewish cemetery are cataloged. Some of them date back to the late XX - early XXI centuries. In the catalog, early burials are dated 1999, and later ones - 2017. Many burials have a double dating according to the Christian and Jewish chronology.