A group from an American Catholic college has restored a Jewish cemetery in a village in Belarus. Fifteen students and four professors from the Franciscan Siena College in Albany, New York, found and erected 120 toppled gravestones at the Rubiazhevichi cemetery. They also rebuilt the entrance to the cemetery with the help of local residents. Those who worked on the reconstruction told the JTA news agency that the cemetery still needed much work. About 400 Jews from the local ghetto who perished during the Holocaust are buried there. The American volunteers, all non-Jews, paid their own way to Belarus. The Voluntas international fund and American non-governmental institutions sponsored the restoration. The US chargé d'affaires in Belarus, Jonathan Moore, visited the site of the reconstruction and told JTA it offered an outstanding example of private cooperation between Belarus and the United States.
