Exhumations in the southern city of Brest, that began after the chance discovery last month, have to date uncovered the remains of 790 bodies
Construction on the site of a former Jewish ghetto in a Belarusian city has unearthed the remains of hundreds of people in World War II-era mass graves, prompting many locals to oppose a planned residential building. , Dmitry Kaminsky, who is overseeing the operation, said. Germany took over Brest in June 1941, after war broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and shot thousands of Jews in the city days later.
Almost all of Brest's surviving Jews were shot in October 1942 in Bronnaya Gora, a mass killing site for Jews from Belarus and Poland. Irina Lavrovskaya, an architect and Brest historian, said she had launched a petition aimed at stopping the construction of a residential building on the site of the new discovery. The site was previously a building that dated back to the times of the ghetto. Roughly 1,000 signatories want a memorial be erected in the area instead.