Ghost cemeteries: who is preserving Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine?

On my way down from a hike in the Carpathians, I wandered into an old Jewish cemetery in the village of Yasinia. A jingling sound caught my attention from behind a wooden fence surrounded by trees and tall grass.

The sound came from a bell around the neck of a cow grazing among the gravestones. Behind the fence stood several hundred headstones with epitaphs, mostly in Hebrew. Many of them had sunk into the ground. Other matzevot (old Jewish headstones shaped as rectangular slabs) had toppled over or bent, like broken teeth. Someone had painted a swastika on one tall headstone.

No paths ran through the overgrown cemetery. Only two or three headstones at the edge appeared to be cared for. They seemed to be burials from the 1980s. Both gravestones were enclosed by small metal fences and had been painted very recently: splashes of paint were visible on the green grass.

After leaving Yasinia, I wanted to find out whether any Jewish residents remained in the village. Ivan Buntushak, a 73-year-old local historian, told me over the phone that the community is no longer there. Local caretakers repaint the headstones, receiving money from the relatives of the deceased. Ivan had watched the small Jewish community that remained in Yasinia after the Holocaust gradually leave for larger Ukrainian cities or emigrate. He confirmed that he knew of no one who looks after the cemetery as a whole on a regular, systematic basis.

Yasinia is no exception. Ukraine has hundreds of okopyska (a word once used specifically for Jewish cemeteries) that are falling into ruin because the communities that kept them have disappeared. Historically, Jewish cemeteries were established separately from Christian ones. This followed Jewish religious law, which holds a burial site to be sacred and inviolable, as well as the general practice in multi-faith towns and villages, where each religious community had its own consecrated cemetery.

Okopyska can be found all over Ukraine. Some have only a few headstones left today, while others hold thousands of burials. The towns and villages next to which these cemeteries grew up either no longer have Jewish communities at all, or those communities have shrunk so much that they can no longer care for the cemeteries properly. As the communities disperse, the question of who should preserve these places becomes more pressing.

Oleksandr Besarab has overseen fencing for Jewish cemeteries for eight years. He works for the ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, which has an office in Kyiv. Oleksandr trained as a civil engineer and worked on construction projects in Sweden, Sakartvelo (also known as Georgia), and the United Arab Emirates from 2014 to 2018. He then returned to Kyiv and found a job opening at ESJF.
“What interests me is taking part not only in commercial projects, but also doing something useful for society.”

ESJF was founded in 2015, and its main donor is the German Federal Foreign Office. The initiative looks after Jewish cemeteries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Balkans and the Baltic states. As of early September 2026, the ESJF team had fenced 201 cemeteries in Ukraine alone.

Where the Jewish communities have vanished, many cemeteries have no fences marking their boundaries. Fencing draws local people’s attention to the fact that a cemetery exists and helps protect it from further neglect and human-caused damage.

ESJF prioritizes fencing cemeteries at risk of disappearing, as well as those where local authorities take the initiative to preserve them. Without the authorities’ support, the work is harder. Installing a fence usually requires official approval, and the okopyska also need legal status as burial sites, which they often lack. In Ukraine, local administrations are responsible for both.

As with the cow in the Yasinia cemetery, local people in other communities have started using old cemeteries, including Jewish ones, for their own needs, which makes fencing more complicated. Oleksandr recalls a cemetery in Podillia that people had begun using as a vegetable garden, and another where locals had worn a path. ESJF looks for compromises so that fencing these burial sites does not disrupt community life: for example, by keeping the fenced perimeter as small as possible or putting gates in the fence where a path runs through.

ESJF does not restore or move Jewish headstones. Other initiatives in Ukraine care for okopyska, and some carry out restoration work, such as Rohatyn Jewish Heritage or local historian Oksana Savchuk-Tsarynska in the town of Sokal in Halychyna. But according to Oleksandr, the ESJF team does not consider all of its colleagues’ decisions successful. In 2020 and 2021, for instance, the Hasidic organization Ohalei Tzadikim removed the matzevot in the town of Sataniv in Podillia from their original grave slabs, set them into uniform concrete bases, and traced over the epitaphs in paint. The ESJF team believes such heavy-handed renovation destroys the cemetery’s natural beauty.

Still, the organization is trying to broaden the range of physical work it does and now also restores old fences. This year, for example, Oleksandr will work on restoring a 19th-century Jewish cemetery wall in the town of Polonne in Volyn. The technical and aesthetic requirements for fences are very simple, since their main purpose is to mark out the space.

“It is people, not walls, that protect a cemetery,” Oleksandr says, quoting the organization’s motto.

Another ESJF staff member works with people: Oleksandra Fishel, the director of educational programs. She holds a degree in Jewish studies and runs the organization’s educational events, mainly in places where the team has previously installed fences. We met at one of these events, a student camp in the town of Kryzhopil in Podillia. There, students attended lectures on Jewish heritage and then traveled to the neighboring village of Zhabokrych, where ESJF had fenced an okopysko a year earlier. They cleaned dirt off the matzevot, photographed them, deciphered the epitaphs, and mapped the cemetery.

The participants came from different regions and degree programs and had never worked with Hebrew before. But with the help of a two-page guide that Oleksandra developed, they learned to decipher the dates and names on the epitaphs in just a few hours. She calls it “playing researcher.”

“I hope that the people in whom this spark has already been lit will go on to become real cemetery researchers.”

Oleksandra knows many stories of contempt for and indifference toward Jewish heritage in Central and Eastern Europe. She says that, contrary to popular belief, most Jewish cemeteries were not destroyed by the Nazis during World War II but disappeared in the postwar years. In the USSR, workers and peasants took apart matzevot and cemetery walls because they needed building materials for postwar reconstruction. The greatest damage, however, came from Soviet engineering and construction projects, which put stadiums and apartment blocks on the sites of okopyska. In the city of Dnipro, for example, none of the three prewar Jewish cemeteries survived, and in the town of Ostroh, matzevot were used to lay the floors of military barracks. Some cemeteries were flooded when hydroelectric power plants were built on the Dnipro and Dnister rivers.

Despite the efforts of ESJF and other initiatives, Ukraine still has enough unfenced and neglected okopyska to keep them busy for many years to come.

Reni’s Youngest Jewish Resident

Liliia Oleinik, 57, is currently the youngest Jewish resident of Reni, a small town in Bessarabia. Only four Jews remain here in total. She looks after the town’s Jewish cemetery, which has about 400 headstones. The oldest matzevot here date back to the first half of the 19th century.

Liliia owns a household goods store and is also a writer. She lives with her father, Illia, who helps out at the store and with looking after the cemetery.

The cemetery lies in a neighborhood of private houses, squeezed between homes on either side. At the entrance, Liliia points out a one-room brick building. This is a beit tahara (Hebrew for “house of purification”), a Jewish ritual building where funeral rites are performed. It was here that the family said goodbye to her grandparents, who died in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, empty bottles of alcohol lie on the floor.

Liliia leads me farther in and shows me her grandparents’ graves. Looking around, I notice that this section holds dozens of postwar headstones made of granite in shapes familiar today, with inscriptions often in Cyrillic. The most recent burial dates from 2008. In mid-July, the local authorities officially closed the cemetery, which means Jews can no longer be buried here.

Like the rest of Bessarabia, Reni was part of the Romanian zone of occupation during World War II. Romanian repression of Jews was less severe than that of Nazi Germany, so this part of Ukraine suffered less from the Holocaust. As a result, many Jewish families still lived in Reni after the war. However, emigration to Israel and other countries led to a rapid decline of the community, and Soviet nationalities policy led to assimilation.

Liliia has Jewish ancestry on her father’s side. Her father married a Ukrainian woman and speaks neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. His mother and father both knew Yiddish well, as it was their everyday language, and his father could also read a little Hebrew. But they decided not to pass this knowledge on to their son. Illia built a career at the Reni Sea Port. He sailed on long-distance voyages as a ship’s electrical engineer and later became head of the communications department. His late wife also worked at the port.

Illia says that in the 1950s, when he moved to Reni, there were about 100 Jewish families in town, and the cemetery had a watchman.

About ten years ago, the Jewish community had shrunk so much that Liliia became the cemetery’s main caretaker. By then it was becoming overgrown with thickets, and locals had started using it in new ways, some of which Liliia found outrageous. She recalls how people tried to turn part of the cemetery into a vegetable garden, and how a local herder grazed his cow there, tying its chain to the headstones.

“Now they know the Terminator Auntie will show up and give them an earful,” Liliia jokes.

From time to time, the town authorities or acquaintances in the diaspora who send money help her hire workers. But the upkeep is mostly limited to clearing the grounds or setting fallen headstones back up, and does not include more complex work such as restoration. The cemetery has a monumental headstone marking the mass grave of Jews who fought on the tsar’s side in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878. On top of the pedestal stands a sculpture of an eagle, now so badly chipped on all sides that it is barely recognizable as a bird.

Apart from the story of the eagle monument, Liliia knows little about the history of the cemetery and the town’s Jewish community. She says she doesn’t know of any locals who hold this knowledge, and that the archives are in Bucharest and Odesa. Reni is not popular with tourists: few cultural heritage sites have survived here, and Ukrainian humanities scholars show little interest in studying the town. A cashier at a local restaurant called Reni “a backwater in the middle of nowhere.” The town’s Jewish cemetery could become both a source for research into Reni’s history and a cultural calling card for visitors.

Thinking about the cemetery prompts Liliia to write. After our meeting, she wrote a poem about it. Before that, she wrote an essay about one of its headstones, which struck her with a detailed epitaph about the life of the deceased woman and her descendants. In the essay, Liliia reflects on the epitaph as a way of expressing gratitude and preserving a person’s memory.

On the side opposite the entrance, the cemetery ends at a steep cliff above an overgrown valley. Because of a landslide, the edge of the cliff is slowly creeping toward the graves, and less than a meter now separates it from the nearest headstones. This will be far harder to deal with than the undergrowth.

Liliia believes there should be a state program to protect old cemeteries, and not only Jewish ones.

“There are Cossack cemeteries too, and they’re overgrown as well. People come across them and say, ‘Look, our history is right under our feet,’” she says.

The Good People of Zhabokrych

Olena Prysiazhniuk, 31, has lived her whole life in the village of Zhabokrych in Podillia, but she visited its okopysko for the first time only two years ago. Before that, she had never noticed the cemetery, since it had no fence and was surrounded by thick trees and bushes. There is no longer a Jewish community in the village, and the last burial in the okopysko dates to 1992.

“The cemetery looked more like a patch of field with trees in it,” Olena says.

She was struck by the beauty of the headstones but upset by their condition, so she posted a video from the cemetery on her blog. Olena restores old village houses in Zhabokrych, grows flowers, and bakes and smokes meat to sell. About 400,000 people follow her online.

The video drew a lot of attention, and eventually ESJF took an interest in Zhabokrych. In the summer of 2025, the initiative put up a metal fence around the cemetery, and a year later it held the student camp described above, which Olena also attended.

Olena’s great-grandmother, who was also from Zhabokrych, used to tell how she helped Jews survive the Holocaust. She secretly brought food to a girl and a man who were hiding from the occupying army and administration. Jews were shot right in the village, and later a ghetto was set up there. Both of the people she helped survived. What’s more, the girl taught Olena’s great-grandmother cross-stitch embroidery, and the man, a skilled carpenter, made her a wooden table as a gift. The table is still kept in the family.

“It’s extremely important to preserve not only the history of Ukrainians, but also the history of all the people who lived here.”

Olena is not the only one in Zhabokrych who thinks so. In addition to the regular school curriculum, local history teacher Taisiia Chepil runs local history lessons where she talks about the Holocaust in the village and the history of its Jewish population. She gave the ESJF camp participants a tour, showing them the memorials at the sites where Jews were shot in 1941, as well as the synagogue.

While the students work in the cemetery, a brush cutter hums nearby. Petro Bondar, a Zhabokrych resident, is clearing the undergrowth between the headstones. Next to him is a whole stack of dry brush: Petro and his wife, Valia, had already mowed most of the cemetery. The couple lives a few minutes’ walk from the okopysko. The house was Valia’s parents’, and she remembers funerals taking place at the cemetery when she was a child. While her parents were alive, they tried to look after the okopysko themselves.

“My mom used to clean around every little grave with a sickle,” Valia says. Now she and Petro try to mow the grass at least once a year.