Medzhybizh today
A quiet town of about twelve hundred people in Ukraine's Khmelnytskyi region, where two rivers meet below a castle. For Jews around the world it is above all the town of the Baal Shem Tov.
The castle
The fortress begun in 1511 still stands on the point between the Southern Buh and the Buzhok. It houses a museum of local history and a large memorial museum to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33.
The old Jewish cemetery and the Baal Shem Tov
North of the town lies the old Jewish cemetery, where the oldest burial dates from 1555. Here lies Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760), founder of Hasidism, and close beside him the Apter Rav, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel. A modern building now shelters the graves of the most revered. His gravestone, destroyed during the Holocaust, has been renewed, and the cemetery has been under restoration. Hasidim and other visitors come to pray at the grave, many of them from Israel.
The synagogue
The Baal Shem Tov's own wooden synagogue was torn down for firewood during the Second World War. A full re-creation has been built on the original site, based on old plans and documents, with a guesthouse for pilgrims nearby.
The new Jewish cemetery and the mass graves
A second Jewish cemetery, its oldest surviving stone dated 1845, holds about a thousand gravestones, part of it badly overgrown. West of the town are the sites where the Jews of Medzhybizh were shot in 1942. Read about the memorial at Beth David.