Among the hundreds of monuments that form the stark and moving Sheepshead Bay Holocaust Memorial – monuments bearing familiar names like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and Babi Yar – one stone, the most recently engraved, stands out. It stands out because you have never heard of the village it memorializes – Bogdanovka.
On Sunday morning, May 8, as President Bush and Russian President Putin prepared to celebrate the end of World War II in Red Square, a small group, representing the remnant of those tragic victims of Bogdanovka, together with Rabbi Mayer Okunov, chairman of F.R.E.E., gathered in the Sheepshead Bay Holocaust Memorial Park to dedicate the new monument – and to remember.
More than 60 years before, in 1943, only women, children and old men inhabited Bogdanovka because all males of military age were enlisted in the battle against Nazi Germany. Utilizing as cruel and demonic a ruse as can be imagined, the Nazis gathered the 472 residents of the town together on the day of Yom Kippur, ostensibly to commemorate the holiday.
Instead, every one of the elderly men and women, mothers, infants and children were thrown alive into an abandoned well by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Only two young children managed to escape into the woods.
The dedication ceremony, moving in its simplicity, was organized by Alex Yusupov, grandchild of one of the victims of the Bogdanovka massacre. If not for his passion and tenacity the memory of this incredible atrocity would have been swept into the dustbin of history.
Surrounded by the hundreds of granite monuments that comprise the memorial, Rabbi David Hollander, spiritual leader of the Hebrew Alliance of Brighton Beach, declared that the plight of the Jews during World War II was met by a world whose “hearts had turned to stone.” Rabbi Hollander’s words resonated as he proclaimed, “the very stones weep.”
The village of Bogdanovka was a Jewish collective farm among the huge collectives of the fertile Stavropol region near the Caucasian Mountains.
Stavropol, besides being p breadbasket of Russia, was also the birthplace of Nobel prize-winning author Solzhenitsyn and first president of the USSR Gorbachev, among other notables.
Small as it was, Bogdanovka was efficient and productive and considered a model farm. The Nazi invasion ended that and, more tragically, the lives, the hope and the futures of its Jewish inhabitants, most of whom perished at the front or in the massacre.
Saved from this horror was Mrs. Zoya Yusupova who had just married and moved to another village. She learned the fate of her father, mother and sister from gentile eyewitnesses. Still later she learned that her husband had been killed in action.
Years later after remarrying and immigrating to the United States with her two sons, her older son, Alex, came in contact with F.R.E.E., the Chabad-Lubavitch organization devoted to assisting new immigrants from the FSU. In time, Alex Yusupov became very close to Rabbi Mayer Okunov, of the FREE Headquarters.
Inspired by the dedication of Rabbi Okunov he became reacquainted with his Jewish roots, which had become a distant memory during the years of Communism, the Nazi nightmare and the upheaval that followed.
Along with this came the mission to memorialize the martyred souls of Bogdanovka. With the creation of the Sheepshead Bay Holocaust Memorial Park and its many monuments it seemed that Alex’ dream would become a reality.
“It was not that easy,” according to Alex, “only after five years of negotiating and red tape was permission given to place a monument in memory of the victims of this unspeakable crime.”
“My mom was only 17 at the time,” he continued, “We want to show our kids what happened to our grandfather and grandmother.”
Many at the Sheepshead Bay Memorial were brought to tears as Mrs. Yusupova spoke and Rabbi Ephraim Okunov of F.R.E.E. chanted Keyl Malei.
The program continued at the F.R.E.E. Center of Brighton Beach where the group was addressed by Alex Yusupov and many of the older participants.
