Cowbell among the matzevot: who preserves the Jewish cemeteries of Ukraine when the communities themselves are almost gone

September 24, 2026, Ukraїner published a report by Vitaliy Poberezhny on old Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine. The author traveled through three completely different places — Yasinya in Transcarpathia, Reni in the Odessa region, and Zhabokrych in Podolia — and spoke not with officials about “heritage preservation” in general, but with those who today actually mow the grass there, put up fences, seek funds, and try to prevent the cemeteries from disappearing.

Author — Anton Pshedinsky

The text in Yasinya begins almost by accident. Poberezhny descends after a hike in the Carpathians, enters an old Jewish cemetery, and hears a ringing among the trees. A cow with a bell around its neck walks between the tombstones.

This scene may seem like just a good report detail. But if you look at what stands behind it, it becomes unsettling: once, almost one and a half thousand Jews lived in Yasinya. Now, from the large Jewish world, there are hundreds of stones, a wooden fence — and a person who must first even guess that there is a cemetery behind it.

For Israel, this is not just a distant Ukrainian local history. Many families here originate from such places — Transcarpathia, Bessarabia, Podolia, Galicia, Volhynia. The name of the shtetl is still remembered, the surname of the great-grandfather is known, sometimes a pre-war photograph has been preserved. But where exactly the people from several previous generations lie, the family no longer knows.

That’s why I delved further than the report itself — into the data of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, JewishGen, historical directories, and documents about local communities. And the three points on the map began to look completely different.

Yasinya: 470 matzevot instead of a vanished shtetl

Yasinya is located in Transcarpathia, near Rakhiv. For an Israeli looking for family roots here, it’s easy to get confused already at the level of the relative’s country of birth: during the 20th century, this territory was part of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the USSR, and independent Ukraine. A person could live practically in one place all their life, but in different documents be a native of different states.

According to ESJF — European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, a European organization that surveys and physically protects old Jewish cemeteries — about 470 matzevot have been preserved in Yasinya.

Matzeva is a familiar word to Israelis מצבה, a tombstone. In old cemeteries in Eastern Europe, it is usually a vertical stone slab with an inscription in Hebrew or Yiddish, sometimes with ornaments and symbols that can also tell a lot about the buried person.

The earliest of the ESJF-discovered matzevot in Yasinya dates back to 1859, the latest to 1988. The cemetery is already marked on the cadastral map of 1863. Its perimeter is about 321 meters; the site is fenced, but researchers recorded dense vegetation and the need for clearing and fence repair.

Now let’s add people.

In 1930, 1,470 Jews lived in Yasinya with a total population of 10,614 people. It was not a handful of families on the outskirts of a Carpathian settlement. Synagogues, religious schools, a mikvah, charitable societies, and Zionist organizations operated. Young Jews were preparing for aliyah and leaving for Eretz Israel even before the Catastrophe.

In 1941, Yasinya became one of the points through which the deportation of Transcarpathian Jews, declared by Hungarian authorities as people without proper citizenship, passed. They were taken to the territory of occupied Ukraine, in the area of Kamianets-Podilskyi, where at the end of August 1941, one of the first mass shootings of the Holocaust of such a scale took place.

For the community itself, the final catastrophe came in the spring of 1944. The remaining Jews of Yasinya were gathered, transported to the Matesalka ghetto in Hungary, and from there deported to Auschwitz. After the war, few returned, some of the survivors later moved to Israel.

There is a photograph that especially changes the perception of the current cemetery. German photographer Walter Möbius photographed Yasinya in 1934. In one of the shots — the Jewish cemetery, matzevot, and the Carpathians behind them. So this place can still be seen when the people buried nearby were part of a living community, not a subject of historical research.

Less than a century has passed. Now a journalist enters there at the sound of a cowbell.

Reni: the cemetery remains, the community has shrunk to a few people

From the Carpathians to Reni — a completely different Ukraine. The city stands on the Danube, near Moldova and Romania, in historical Bessarabia.

For the Israeli reader, an explanation is also useful here. Bessarabia is a historical region between the Prut and Dniester, which at different times was under the rule of the Ottoman and Russian empires, Romania, and the USSR. Today its territory is mainly divided between Moldova and Ukraine. Therefore, family documents of Bessarabian Jews can be in Russian, Romanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and the country of birth of one person in various documents sometimes looks different.

In the Ukraїner report, 57-year-old Liliya Oleynik walks through the Reni cemetery. According to her, she is now the youngest Jewish woman in the city, and there are only four Jews left in Reni.

This number sounds especially strange in a cemetery where the count goes into hundreds of burials.

Ukraїner writes about approximately 400 tombstones. During earlier documentation by JewishGen, researchers recorded more than 500 graves: 263 burials were identified, another 241 remained unidentified. The difference can be explained at least by the fact that we are talking about different counts, the condition of the monuments, and the time of the survey.

The earliest JewishGen-read burial dates back to 1832, the latest to 2008. About half of the recorded inscriptions were in Russian, Romanian texts were found, the rest were mainly in Hebrew. Sometimes languages coexist on one grave.

At the entrance, Liliya shows a small brick building — beit-tahara, בית טהרה, literally “house of purification.” In Jewish tradition, this is the place where the body of the deceased is prepared for burial according to religious rules. Liliya remembers how they said goodbye to her grandfather and grandmother there in the 1980s–1990s.

Now there are empty bottles inside.

The cemetery itself has experienced fires, overgrown, required clearing. Part of the funds for maintenance, locals say, at different times came from Reni natives living in Israel.

It turns out to be almost a physical line across several thousand kilometers: a person lives in Israel, transfers money to a small town on the Danube so that they mow the grass around the grave of a person they may have never seen.

There is also a problem in Reni that cannot be solved with just one cleanup. Part of the cemetery approaches a cliff, the ground is crumbling. The report clearly shows how close erosion is already approaching the graves.

This summer, another important thing happened. On July 2, 2026, the Reni City Council officially closed the old Jewish cemetery for new burials — there was practically no free space left. The word “closed” here can be misleading: the cemetery is not being liquidated. It is about stopping new burials, which means the issue of preserving existing graves becomes even more acute.

There is also an unusual monument with an eagle on the territory, associated, according to local testimonies, with Jewish servicemen of the Russian Empire. JewishGen provides information about those who died in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and World War I; a mass grave of Russian soldiers is documented nearby.

History here gradually turns into the archaeology of memory. As long as there is a person who knows what a specific stone means, there is a story. When the last bearer of this story is gone, the inscription remains — if it was photographed and read in time.

That is why NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency recently separately reported on another initiative to preserve Jewish monuments in Ukraine — a special nomination “Jewish Heritage” in Wiki Loves Monuments 2026. The competition list already includes more than 1,400 objects, with more than 800 of them lacking state protection status. We analyzed this project in detail here.

The connection with the cemetery in Reni is direct. Sometimes the first thing you can do for a disappearing place is not to restore it, but at least manage to document it properly.

Zhabokrych: no more Jews, but people who care have appeared

The third point in the report is Zhabokrych in the Vinnytsia region. There are not even those four people left who remained in Reni.

There is no longer a Jewish community in the village.

31-year-old Olena Prysyazhnyuk told Poberezhny that she first visited the local Jewish cemetery just a couple of years before his arrival. Although she lived nearby, she simply did not pay attention to the overgrown plot among the trees and bushes before. There was no fence.

“The cemetery looked more like a piece of field with trees,” she says in the report.

And yet, once the Jewish population here was huge for a small shtetl. In 1847, the community numbered 665 people. The 1897 census recorded 1,307 Jews among 6,252 residents — more than one in five. In 1923, there were 823 people left, before World War II, in 1939, — 679.

There were synagogues, cheders, then a Jewish Soviet school. For some time, there was a Jewish agricultural collective.

In the summer of 1941, this world began to physically disappear. At the end of July, the Jews of Zhabokrych were killed in several places near the village. In the fall and winter, 245 deported Jews from Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia were also brought here; together with about two hundred local Jews who survived the first killings, they ended up in a ghetto.

Here arises a term that is easy for an Israeli to misunderstand. The historical Transnistria of the Holocaust period is not the current unrecognized Transnistria near Moldova. This was the name of the large Romanian occupation zone between the Dniester and Southern Bug in 1941–1944. There, Romanian authorities massively deported Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina; people died from shootings, hunger, epidemics, cold, and terrible living conditions.

After the war, Jewish life in Zhabokrych finally faded. The last burial in the local cemetery dates back to 1992.

And then something happened, for which, it seems, the entire report was worth writing.

Olena Prysyazhnyuk showed the abandoned cemetery in her blog. The story gained publicity, contacts, conversations, organizations appeared. In September 2025, ESJF, with financial support from the German Foreign Ministry, installed a metal fence around the cemetery.

Not a decorative plaque. A real perimeter.

According to the ESJF survey, its length is about 428 meters. There are approximately 300 preserved tombstones on the territory. The oldest matzeva, whose date specialists managed to read, dates back to 1914, the last to 1992, although the cemetery itself is much older and probably appeared in the 19th century.

The story did not end there. On July 13–15, 2026, a youth field camp Stones of Remembrance was held in Zhabokrych and neighboring Kryzhopil. Participants cleared the area, photographed matzevot, learned to work with Jewish epitaphs, and mapped the cemetery.

For an outsider, this may sound like a very small matter. Young people clean old stones in a Ukrainian village for three days.

But if a grave is not mapped, the inscription is not read, and the photograph is not saved anywhere, after the monument is destroyed, it is often impossible to restore this information.

Here everything is not only held by funds

The most lively people in the history of Zhabokrych do not work in international organizations at all.

History teacher Taisia Chepil tells children about the Jews who once made up a significant part of the village’s population and takes them to places of mass killings. The spouses Petro and Valya Bondar mow the cemetery. Valya recalls that her mother used to go there with a sickle and manually clear the graves.

Olena Prysyazhnyuk’s family has its own plot from the Holocaust times. According to family memories, her great-grandmother secretly brought food to a hiding Jewish girl and man. The man was a carpenter and made a wooden table for the family.

The table has been preserved.

Such things do not fit well into large formulations about “historical memory.” An old table in the house, a few names, a grandmother’s story, a cemetery behind the trees — often this is what memory consists of until it begins to be collected in archives.

Why cemeteries disappeared even after the Holocaust

It would be a mistake to explain the state of these places only by the destruction of Jewish communities during the war.

ESJF’s Director of Educational Programs Alexandra Fishel in the report reminds of the Soviet period. Old matzevot were used as building material, fences were dismantled, and the cemeteries themselves were sometimes given for construction, stadiums, and other objects. After the disappearance or departure of the community, the place often simply had no people left capable of protecting it.

Therefore, the fence that ESJF puts around the old cemetery solves the most primitive and at the same time fundamental question: it shows the boundary.

Here is no longer wasteland.

Here are graves.

ESJF has been working with such places since 2015. By 2026, the organization reports 4,140 surveyed Jewish cemeteries in ten countries and more than 400 projects of their fencing and physical protection. Ukraine occupies a special place in this work simply because of the scale of the destroyed Jewish world here.

In parallel, UNESCO is conducting a project to preserve the Jewish documentary heritage of Ukraine. The program is designed for 2025–2027, funded by the European Union, and includes digitization, archive preservation, work with Holocaust history, and educational projects.

It turns out to be several completely different levels of one work. Somewhere they scan a document. Somewhere they photograph a matzeva. Somewhere they put up a metal fence. And somewhere a neighbor just takes a scythe.

The war added another risk

After the Russian full-scale invasion, the issue ceased to be only about the aging of stone and the overgrowth of cemeteries.

Synagogues, cemeteries, memorials, and buildings of former Jewish communities are located in the same Ukrainian cities that are being hit. Some objects are already damaged or destroyed. Sometimes the last pre-war photograph of a monument unexpectedly becomes a document of how it looked before destruction.

That is why the current special nomination “Jewish Heritage” in Wiki Loves Monuments has gained a different meaning. In 2026, there are more than 1,400 objects on its list. For an Israeli, among them may be not an abstract “architectural monument,” but a synagogue where a great-grandfather went, a family house, or a cemetery of that very shtetl, the name of which has been pronounced at home for decades.

Large places of memory are easier to notice. Almost everyone knows about Babyn Yar; this year marks 85 years since the mass shootings of Kyiv Jews, and commemorative events were held in both Ukraine and Israel. NAnews detailed the ceremony at Yad Vashem and the connection of Babyn Yar’s memory with the two countries.

But the history of Ukrainian Jewry consists not only of Babyn Yar.

There is Reni.

There is Yasinya.

There is Zhabokrych.

And hundreds more places where official delegations do not come and where the only person who knows the way to the Jewish cemetery today may be a neighbor from the nearest house.

What remains after the community

Once, 1,470 Jews lived in Yasinya. Now specialists count the preserved matzevot.

In Reni, the community, according to the heroine of Ukraїner, has shrunk to four people. Meanwhile, hundreds of graves remain in the cemetery over almost two centuries.

In Zhabokrych, there are no Jews left at all. But there is a fence, schoolchildren study the history of the community, people clear the cemetery, and young researchers photograph inscriptions while they can still be read.

For me, this is where the Ukraїner report stops being a story about three old cemeteries.

It’s about what happens to memory after the one who was obliged to keep it disappears.

Sometimes this obligation is taken on by a distant relative from Israel. Sometimes an international fund. Sometimes a Ukrainian teacher who explains to children why there are stones with letters they cannot read behind the trees. Sometimes a family that has been mowing someone else’s graves for decades simply because they consider it wrong to leave them in the weeds.

And sometimes it all starts without any intention to save anyone.

A person walks through the Carpathians, descends into Yasinya, hears the sound of a cowbell behind a wooden fence — and decides to see what’s there.

Behind the fence is a cemetery.

And behind the cemetery — a vanished world.

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