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Cemetery in Bykhov

The fact that the Jewish community existed in the city is known from sources of the 17th century. The Jewish population of Bykhov in various periods of history amounted to half of the townspeople. There were several synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.

By the 1920s, Jews made up 33.6% of the city’s population. By the end of the twentieth century, only one cemetery was preserved. Over time, it ceased to be purely Jewish, and was transferred to the status of "civilian". People from Bykhov of other nationalities were also buried here.

After the Second World War, search units exhumed the victims of the Nazi genocide and transferred their remains to the Jewish cemetery, where they found the last refuge in a mass grave. Holocaust memorials are erected at the cemetery. According to historians, the Nazis killed about 4.5 thousand people in Bykhov.

In 2013-2014, at the initiative of the Jewish communities of the Mogilev region, graves were studied and order was restored in cemeteries. In Bykhov, the Jewish part of the cemetery is fenced. More than 200 tombstones are described. A complete list is available on the website “History of Mogilev Jewry”.

The earliest burials in the cemetery date from the beginning of the twentieth century - 1905 and 1906. Last - 2013 year. The earliest date of birth preserved on the monuments is 1847.

Not all graves have been preserved in good condition. By the beginning of the 21st century, almost no Jews remained in Bykhov. They accounted for 0.09% of the population. There was no one to care for some graves. In the cemetery, cases of vandalism were recorded.

As a result, in the list published on the site of the Jewish community, the names on seven graves were not preserved, and only six were partially preserved. Family members (husband and wife, children) are buried in eleven graves. Opposite the description of the grave of Moses Knopov, who died in 1933, a postscript was made that five people who were killed in 1941 were buried in it.