Unwelcome Memory

Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union

The book examines the connection between the memory of the Holocaust in the USSR and the ethnic identity of Soviet Jews, and describes the grassroots activities of thousands of Jews, banded together in more than 700 separate groups, to memorialize their loved ones murdered by the Nazis. Hundreds of the monuments that they managed to establish included clear ethnic-religious inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, as well as Jewish symbols.