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.