JEWISH CEMETERY OF CHIŞINĂU

The cemetery covers an area of about 10 square kilometres and contains 23,430 graves bearing witness to the history of the local Jewish community. In the past some parts of the cemetery were not easily accessible and were like a labyrinth where the oldest graves disappeared in the wild vegetation. The Moldovan authorities decided in December 2018 to renovate the cemetery to make it a centre of remembrance, but tree pruning caused damage to some of the graves of victims of the 1903 pogrom in the capital. Depending on the historical periods, the epitaphs on the tombs are written in different languages or alphabets and bear witness to the succession of empires, states or regimes that dominated Moldova during the 19th and 20th centuries. The tombs from the 19th century, when Moldavia was called Bessarabia and was part of the empire of the Tsars, bear funerary inscriptions in Yiddish written in Hebrew characters. The epitaphs corresponding to the period when Moldavia was reunited with Romania (1918-1940) are written in Romanian language and Latin alphabet while those corresponding to the Soviet period (1944-1991) are written in Russian and Cyrillic alphabet. While walking around this place one cannot fail to notice the variety of styles of tombs and monuments but also the absence of graves corresponding to the period of the Shoah (1941-1945).