The Cemetary
The Torah scrolls desecrated during the pogrom have been reburied here. Although the gates to the cemetery are elegant and new, but inside the cemetery, except for newer headstones, some with photographs of the dead, the markers of loss and ruin are everywhere. Part of the wall is made of broken headstones on which one can still read Hebrew letters. The graves, many damaged and mostly abandoned, mark the traces of a large community of Jews that no longer exists.
My grandparents left Kishinev in 1906, after two major pogroms (1903 and 1905) in order not to die there. What I feel, wandering through the maze, is the oddness of being connected, through their departure, to what is no more.
In other words, what they and I belong to, is the diaspora.