January, 2014, Peter Seltser
Existing Soroki Jewish cemetery was established in the middle of XIX century. At that time town Soroki had an expanded Jewish population. By the end of XIX century the Jewish population of Soroki was about 8400 people. After the World War II the Jewish population in Soroki was counted as 1426 people in 1989. At the end of 2013 year the Jewish population in Soroki doesn't exceed even 100 people.
The Soroki cemetery is divided into two separate areas: one is considered as the old cemetery (gravestones are engraved in Yiddish without last names – first name and name of father, date of birth and death); the new cemetery (burials are from 1880th) has inscriptions written mostly in Russian.
People, who contributed to the process of indexing the Soroki Jewish cemetery: the leader of Soroki Society of Jewish Culture, Zakhar Dorokhovskiy, from
1996 to 2008 year, devoted a lot of his time in organizing and taking care of Jewish cemetery, members of Jewish community: Mirochnik Arkady, Dorokhovskaya Mina,
Sofa Akkerman, Inna Greenshpun, Zhelobchastnaya Galina, volunteers Belov Bronislav and Burlaku Andrey. The Soroki web site www.soroki.com (web-master- Michael Seltser) published a lot of pictures of Jewish teachers, doctors and other
outstanding people of the town. The site has a special folder devoted to the memory
of Jewish people of Soroki with pictures from Jewish cemetery. The Soroki website donated the database of new part of the Jewish cemetery with about 1300 names to site JOWBR at www.jewishgen.org.
In 2000-2012 businessmen Brock Bierman (USA) started a self-funded project to record all engravings from gravestones of the old side cemetery, creating a map of graves of the whole Jewish cemetery and photographing all gravestones of the old and new parts of the cemetery. Our group will soon organize the photos with associated records and upload them to JOWBR.
The funds that Soroki society of Jewish culture gets now from Jewish organizations of Moldova capital (Kishinev) and international Jewish organizations are very limited. It is a tradition that Jewish people who come to visit the cemetery from abroad, stop at Soroki Jewish temple and leave donations.
Soroki Society of Jewish Culture (SSJC) takes care of the cemetery. Twice a year they are hiring contractors to trim and cut trees, to make general cleaning of the whole cemetery area. Soroki cemetery requires a 4 season constant eye on all spread weeds, trees and bushes, snow in the winter time and leaves in the fall, which can be an obstacle to get to some graves.
See Cemetery Report with all information, maps, photos, etc. Data courtesy of Bessarabia SIG. See more information on their website.
Click here for:
Overview
Another overview
Third overview
Fourth overview
Cemetery gate.
Another view of cemetery gates.
