Bialystok Jewish Ghetto Cemetery

The cemetery was founded in 1941 as there was a need for it in the Białystok Ghetto. It was located approximately 850 southwest of the city centre, in the western part of the ghetto. It was the burial site of victims of executions and there were about 5,000 people buried in mass graves. After the war, the area was expanded and surrounded by a wall, and was used by the Białystok Jewish community for burials. It also was the burial site for bodies exhumed from various parts of the city, including the people who fought in the ghetto uprising. In 1945, the surviving Jews erected a Holocaust memorial; in 1946 a memorial for the ghetto fighters was erected; and in 1948 a sizeable monument was erected in memory of both victims and fighters of the ghetto. In 1964 the local government closed the cemetery. At the time it had a rectangular shape with an acreage of approximately 0.95 hectares and housed over 3,500 tombstones. In 1971 the cemetery was shut down, and currently no traces of it remain aboveground. Human remains were re-buried in a designated place, part of the area was given over to residential plots, and part of it was designated for building a square. In 1993, the square was maintained and, in place of a memorial, a recovered matzevah from 1946 was placed in the square. Later, further memorials were erected in the square. Part of the surrounding wall of the cemetery has survived.