20 | JANUARY 23 • 2020
Jews in the D
ANDREY MARUSHCHAK
A
lex Goldis remembers
going on field trips as
a student in Zhitomir,
Ukraine, where he was born.
He didn’
t realize then that
his grandparents, along with
thousands of other Jews killed
during the Holocaust, were
buried just across the road.
In December, Goldis, 69, of
Bloomfield Hills traveled to
Zhitomir for a religious cer-
emony to unveil a memorial
to those murdered Jews — a
memorial he and his family
designed and funded. The
unveiling was attended by
four rabbis from Jerusalem,
the chief rabbi of Europe,
Zhitomir’
s chief rabbi and
Jewish community members.
An official public opening of
the memorial will take place
May 19.
Zhitomir was a distinguished
Jewish community in western
Ukraine. More than 10,000
of the city’
s 40,000 Jews were
exterminated by the Nazis and
their Ukrainian collaborators
between 1941 and 1943. More
Jews left starting in the late
1970s, when the Soviet Union
allowed Jews to emigrate. By
1992, only about 500 were left,
Goldis said. Now, under the
leadership of Chabad Rabbi
Shlomo Wilhelm and his wife,
Esther, the community has
regrown to about 5,000.
For decades, there was no
official recognition that the
mass graves at the site con-
tained Jewish bodies. In 1978,
Goldis unsuccessfully peti-
tioned the Soviet government
to install a marker. He left
Zhitomir soon afterward and
resettled in the Detroit area.
He met and married his wife,
Cheryl, here.
With Cheryl, Goldis estab-
lished a successful manufac-
turers’
representative firm,
Alexander Associates Inc.,
serving the automotive indus-
try. His son Jason and daugh-
ter-in-law Arica will assume
ownership of the Bloomfield
Hills company in 2021. Alex
and Cheryl also have two
daughters, Jaclyn of Tel Aviv
and Susan Goren of Mexico
City.
SACRED MISSION
Goldis never forgot about
those mass graves. In 2013,
he and his family decided
to fund and build a memo-
rial. To design it, he hired
the Southfield architectur-
al firm Neumann/Smith,
which designed Michigan’
s
Labor of
Love and
Remembrance
A monument now marks a mass
grave of Ukrainian Jews murdered
during the Holocaust.
BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER
“Now, 78 years aft
er the
Nazis marched thousands of
Zhitomir Jews into the forest
to be murdered, I am proud the
memorial honors their memories
and ensures that their fi
nal resting
site remains a lesson on the perils
of evil and anti-Semitism.”
— ALEX GOLDIS
continued on page 22
Alex Goldis stands
beside a monument
he and his family
commissioned to honor
the lives of thousands
of Jews, including his
grandparents, mur-
dered in mass graves
in his hometown of
Zhitomir, Ukraine.