Kurenevskoye cemetery is one of the oldest urban necropolises in Kyiv with an area of ​​12.5 hectares. Founded in the middle of the 19th century. It got its name from the village of Kurenyovka, on the territory of which the churchyard was located. Officially closed in the mid 1950s.

In 2005, the city authorities assigned the Kurenevskoye cemetery the status of "semi-closed", allowing related subburials.

According to rough estimates, there are more than 17 thousand burials on the territory of the cemetery, of which more than 6 thousand are at the Jewish site.

In 2011, on the eve of Yom Kippur, IDF (Tzahal) soldiers who participated in the Edim ba-Madim program cleaned up the Jewish section of the Kurenevskoye cemetery, recited the Kadish memorial prayer in honor of the dead Jewish soldiers of World War II.

Kurenevskoye cemetery was founded as an Orthodox one. Since the 1920s, the Soviet government has pursued a policy of eliminating individual Jewish cemeteries and abolishing Jewish burial societies. As part of the policy pursued in the 1930s, a site for Jewish burials was allocated on the territory of the Kurenevskoye cemetery. The necropolis was recognized as a city-wide one.

In 1939, the last representative of the Chernobyl dynasty Shlomo-Bentsion Tverskoy was buried at the Jewish site of the Kurenevskoye cemetery. His ohel was preserved on the territory of the cemetery.

In the mid-1950s, during the liquidation of the Lukyanovskoye Jewish cemetery, some of the burials were transferred to the Jewish section of the Kurenevskoye cemetery.

The main types of gravestones typical for the funeral tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe are presented at the Kurenevskoye cemetery:

                • Traditional matzevahs;

                • Ohelim;

                • Sarcophagi;

                • Gravestones in the form of a chopped-off tree trunk.

Most of the burials in the Jewish section of the Kurenevskoye cemetery occurred in the period before the launching of state anti-Semitic campaigns in the USSR. Therefore, many tombstones contain the image of the Star of David and other national symbols. Inscriptions in Russian on gravestones are duplicated by inscriptions in Hebrew.

For many inscriptions, it is characteristic to indicate not the dates of life and death, but the number of years lived. For example, the grave of Enta Velyaminovna Tevus contains the inscription “She died on April 21, 1947 at the age of 52”. The monument is made in the form of a trunk with chopped off branches. There are Hebrew inscriptions on the slab. Under the inscription with the name and the number of years lived there is an epitaph: "To dear and loving Entochka from your husband, children, mother, brother and nephew who grieve for you."