"Final Chapter" in 80-year old Double Murder of JDC Relief Workers

On August 27th, 2003, in a remote Ukrainian forest two Jewish families stood together and brought to an end, the final chapter in an 80-year old double murder.

At a ceremony in Ukraine, the American and Israeli descendents of Rabbi Bernard Cantor and Dr. Israel Friedlander dedicated a memorial stone for the two Jewish relief workers from the JDC, who were shot by Soviet troops in 1920, on the road to Kiev.

Rabbi Bernard Cantor of the Hebrew Union of Congregations and Dr. Israel Friedlander, a Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, set off from New York to set up feeding programs in Poland for 600,00 Jewish victims of post-WWI Anti-Semitism. After succeeding in their initial mission, they ventured into Ukraine to offer much-needed relief to Jews living there.

After much protest and pressure from the United States, the Soviet Government in Moscow admitted their mistake and offered an apology for the murders. But the families had only scant details of the actual incidents and never found out what became of their loved ones’ remains. Those facts would stay locked up behind the Iron Curtain for over 60 years.

Sixty years later, a twist of fate brought Rabbi Cantor’s descendent - Warren Grover from New Jersey - on a tour of St. Petersburg, Russia. His tour guide, Michael Beizer would later make aliyah to Israel and take a job with the JDC, helping Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union reclaim and restore their synagogues.

It was during his work in Ukraine, that Beizer heard of Cantor and Friedlander and what befell them. He knew that their graves had been lost to history, but now, with the old regime gone, Beizer had access to information.

Where the Jewish cemetery had been though, the Soviet army had long ago planted a forest, a common practice next to military installations. The trees and shrubs displaced and covered most of what had been a Jewish cemetery.

In a historically ironic twist, it was the modern revival of the Jewish community, supported by JDC, which inspired two local Jews to write a history of their community. In it, Beizer found what no one else could. Though local maps indicated no modern-day Jewish cemetery in Yarmolytsi -- the shtetl where the two JDC workers had been killed and buried, the new book stated that the cemetery did, in fact, still exist.

Armed with this knowledge, Beizer asked members of the local Jewish community to help him find the graves.

The small band of friends set out on a rain-soaked day and began unearthing the long-forgotten gravestones. There, in the woods, using broken branches and even their bare hands, they tore away at the mud and the moss that had grown over the faded stones - barely recognizable as memorials to the 1,000 Jews buried there.

Hours later, in the heart of the forest, they stumbled across two granite slabs, fallen and half-buried, but larger than most of the other stones. There, they found the names they had been looking for: Israel Friedlander and Bernard Cantor. Each stone bore a similar Hebrew inscription: "Emissary of American Jewry who fell sanctifying God’s name. July 10, 1920."

At long last, they had found their answer.

And so, Warren Grover and other descendents of Cantor and Friedlander traveled from Israel and the United States to stand in a forest near Yarmolitsi. There, they stood witness to the dedication of a small monument in honor of two men who set out nearly a century ago to ease human suffering.