A memorial honoring Holocaust victims has been officially dedicated in Moldova

On September 29, a ceremony was held in the Cosăuți forest near the city of Soroca, Moldova, to unveil a monument dedicated to the memory of thousands of Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The memorial is erected on the site where 6,300 Jews were executed in 1941. The initiative to establish the monument was led by Soroca native, President of the Moscow Jewish Religious Community (MEOR), and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Grigory Roytberg, whose relatives are buried at this site. The Jewish Community of Moldova, along with its head, Alexander Bilinkis, who also serves as Vice President of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, contributed actively to the construction.

The ceremony was attended by members of the Jewish community of Moldova, descendants of the Jews executed during World War II, President of the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC) Yuri Kanner, officials from Israel and Moldova, and diplomats from several nations.

Speaking at the ceremony, Grigory Roytberg noted that the symbolic meaning of the memorial aligns with the well-known Jewish scripture: "The premature passing of any individual is akin to a torn page from the Torah."

"We often view the casualty count as a statistic—6 million people. However, the loss of a single loved one is no longer a statistic; it is a tragedy. This ground holds 6,300 such tragedies. Most of them were children," Roytberg added. "Today, I earnestly hope that we do not forget this. We need this, and perhaps those who lie here do as well."

During the ceremony, EAJC Vice President Alexander Bilinkis pointed out that this is the fourth Holocaust memorial inaugurated by the Jewish community of Moldova in the past two years.

"For 30 years now, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, preserving cultural heritage, and combating antisemitism have remained our core mission. Regrettably, the tragedy of war remains part of our present reality. We are failing to compromise, and we are not learning from our own history," he stated.

The memorial to the executed Jews near Soroca consists of twenty marble steles, symbolizing severed tree trunks. The front row displays the names of one thousand executed Jews whose identities have been established to date. The name of the memorial reflects the total number of victims among the region's Jewish population: "The site of torment and death of 6,000 Jews annihilated by the Nazis in 1941."

According to Holocaust researchers, many events that took place in Moldova during World War II remain unexamined by historians due to decades of silence. From the onset of the war, the country's territory was occupied by Romania and incorporated into Transnistria—the region between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers in southern Ukraine. Before the war, over 300,000 Jews resided there. Transnistria was established in August 1941 and existed until the latter half of March 1944. Critics note that, unlike the German operations, the Romanian genocide of the Jews was unsystematic and chaotic.

All authority and clearances regarding the liquidation of the Jewish population were left to the discretion of unaccountable local administrators. In the winter of 1941–1942 alone, approximately 250,000 Jews perished in Transnistria. In total, over 300,000 Jews died in concentration camps in this region during the years of Romanian occupation.