The general consensus has been that in the Soviet Union, one could not reference the Jewish identity of the Nazi genocide's primary victims. Rather, scholars have argued, although there were memorials in nearly every town to the victims of Nazi genocide in the Soviet Union, these obelisks, statues, and other physical monuments universalized them as “peaceful Soviet citizens” or “citizens of all nationalities.” This understanding even shapes Soviet Jews’ own understanding of how Holocaust memory worked in the Soviet Union. Boruch Gorin, one of the most visible figures in contemporary Russian Jewish life—a leader of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow and editor of the Atlas of the History of the Jews in Russia—writes in the Atlas that Soviet epitaphs generally do not “mention the victim's ethnicity” (20). In his book Unwelcome Memory, Arkadi Zeltser, a research historian at Yad Vashem, shows that on the contrary, Soviet Jews memorialized the Holocaust in the Soviet Union similarly to Jews elsewhere in the world, through divergent strategies of silence and active memorialization.

Silence on the part of Holocaust survivors is not a new revelation. In fact, it was presumed to be the only way Soviet Jews were able (or not able) to memorialize the racially-motivated violence meted out against Jews during the war. Or if not silent, Soviet Jews would remember their families shot on pits, wells, forests, or other locations on the outskirts of towns at annual civic memorial events commemorating the victims of fascism during the “Great Patriotic War.” Zeltser suggests that there was an alternative to silence.

He shows that Soviet Jews actively memorialized their loved ones by: petitioning local governments to establish memorials with specific references to Jews; collecting funds among the local Jewish community to build and maintain memorials; designing them with specific Jewish symbolism; and making annual pilgrimages to Jewish memorials on the date of the local execution. Unwelcome Memory shatters the “myth of silence” among Soviet Jews. Like American, English, Australian, and Israeli Jews, Soviet Jews, too, publicly memorialized their victims and with approval from state authorities.

Zeltser's well illustrated book—including nearly ninety photographs drawn primarily from Yad Vashem's archives—displays images of memorials across the Soviet Union that very clearly identify the victims as Jews. He emphasizes that local government decision making, and not a single Union-wide policy, led to the way each memorial did (or did not) come to be. In 1946, for example, Minsk's Jewish survivors were permitted to establish a Jewish memorial, while at Cherven, just 60 km from the Minsk memorial, local authorities prohibited one. Local decisions shaped not only if a memorial would be established, but what it would look like. Would it use Yiddish or Hebrew; have particular Jewish symbols such as the six-pointed Star of David as opposed to or in addition to the five-pointed red Soviet star; or mention specific names or even use the word “Jew.”

Some of these memorials Zeltser refers to as “Jewish,” which means that “some purposeful action by Jews to commemorate Holocaust Victims” (35) resulted in a memorial. One memorial, the 1965 “Woman in Mourning,” was initiated by a local Jewish community in Rudnia and built on a Jewish cemetery where the German occupying forces executed local Jews. Therefore, it is a Jewish memorial. The “Woman in Mourning,” however, became a ubiquitous symbol of memorializing the murder of peaceful Soviet citizens in the 1970s and 80s. In this case a Jewish memorial became a universal Soviet one. By establishing monuments and holding annual memorial ceremonies at sites where Holocaust victims had been killed or reinterred, Zeltser shows that Jews attempted to move Holocaust memory from what Jan Assmann calls “communicative memory”—which was cultivated primarily orally in the private sphere at the family level—to the status of “cultural memory,” which aspired to be publicly transmittable to the generations that followed.

Zeltser's book adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that Jews in the Soviet Union expressed a distinct Soviet Jewish identity after World War II. They did so by showing up at the synagogue on the Jewish high holidays, especially Simchat Torah; by showing pride in Israel's victory during the 1967 Six-Day War, and as Zeltser shows, by commemorating the Holocaust in both intimate and public ways.