Obj. ID: 16038
Memorials  "Black Obelisk" at the Yama killing site in Minsk, Belarus, 1946

On June 28, 1941, the Germans occupied Minsk. On July 19, 1941, an order was given for the creation of a ghetto [The Map of Holocaust by Bullets: Yahad-In Unum].

According to numerous testimonies, in the course of the mass-murder operation carried out in early March 1942, some ghetto inmates were shot at a sand quarry on the ghetto's northern outskirts, near Ratomskaya (present-day Melnikayte) Street, known popularly as "Yama" (the "Pit") [Yad Vashem: The Untold Stories]. 

Shortly after the war, activists from the Minsk Jewish community decided to install the monument in the Pit. However, the city authorities rejected their official application for a monument's construction [Al'tman]. Due to the significance of this mission, a group of activists had started the process without a formal approval. To manufacture the monument they hired a Jewish stone master Mordukh Sprishen who could create it out of old gravestones from the cemetery in the former ghetto [Semenchenko]. The campaign dramatically affected Sprishen. In the early 1950s, he was arrested for "Anti-Soviet activity" and condemned to ten years in the Gulag [Zeltser]. 

According to witnesses, in the early after-war years the monument was surrounded by wild grass and bushes. However, due to the changing political regime, the Yama was transformed from a peripheral wasteland to a significant place of collective remembrance. This happened in the 1970s when the present design of the Pit, including the paved square in front of the monument and the four stairs leading to it, was embodied. 

The Yiddish poet Khaim Maltinski, a combat veteran who had been disabled in the war, wrote a text for the monument's inscriptions in Yiddish and Russian. He approached Minsk authorities to secure approval for the Yiddish inscription. Climbing to the sixth floor of the Government House on his one leg and crutches, he told the head of the Censorship Committee of the Belorussian SSR that the 5,000 persons who perished had included his mother, wife, and seven-year-old son. it was then that he received the Censorship Committe's permission for the inscriptions in two languages that virtually started the same message, and for the monument itself. It is quite likely that the very fact that the monument was erected in 1946 in Minsk, in the city itself, with an epitaph mentioning Jewish victims in Yiddish and Russian, became a key precedent for all of Belarus, and potentially for the Soviet Union as a whole [Zeltzer].

For a long time, the so-called "black obelisk" was the only monument to Holocaust victims in Minsk. Today, however, the Pit memorial consists of several parts installed in different periods and by different actors. In the 1990s an alley to the Belarusian Righteous among the Nations was established near this place. Among the additional monuments are a bronze sculptural composition called "Last Way" and a menorah-shaped stela that were installed in 2000 with the participation of the Belarusian government. There is also an alley dedicated to Righteous among the Nation which was laid in the 1990s. 

In November 2006 the Yama Holocaust memorial was damaged in a vandal attack: vandals splashed white paint on the bronze figures along the steps leading to the obelisk and painted a large white swastika on it [London: BBC Worldwide Limited - BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union].

During the Soviet period, annually on May 9 (the Soviet Victory Day), the Jews of Minsk would gather there to commemorate their beloved departed – despite opposition from the Soviet authorities, who did their best to prevent the Jews from doing this [Yad Vashem: The Untold Stories]. Till today, the monument is the place of the commemorative ceremonies.