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Who Decides What Survives? An Encyclopedia, a Cemetery and the Politics of Memory

There are at least two ways to make a person disappear from history.

The first is physical. A house is demolished, a cemetery is built over, a gravestone is broken, an archive burns. Eventually there may be almost nothing left to point at and say: someone lived here.

The second is quieter. The place remains, but the explanation changes. A name disappears from a textbook. A Jewish community becomes one sentence in a city history. An encyclopedia chooses one version of an event and leaves another outside the article. After enough repetitions, selection begins to look like fact.

I keep thinking about this in my work as Victoria Katsman at NAnews. Two recent stories seemed unrelated at first. One concerned scholars discussing encyclopedias. The other concerned human remains, construction and the old Jewish cemetery in Uman.

For NAnews on Friendica, I wanted to put them beside each other because together they ask a much larger question: who gets to decide what survives?

An encyclopedia looks neutral until you ask who wrote it

When we open an encyclopedia, we usually arrive with a particular kind of trust. This is not a personal blog, not a campaign leaflet and not somebody arguing with us over dinner. The format itself says: here is organized knowledge.

That is exactly why encyclopedias are so powerful.

In September 2026, the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies brought together researchers from Ukraine, Israel, the United States and Hungary for a conference devoted to Jews and encyclopedic knowledge from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. When I wrote about the UAJS conference and the question of who decided what the world should know about Jews, what interested me was not the old books themselves.

It was the authority behind them.

Who decided which Jewish writers deserved an entry? Which language was described as central and which as marginal? How was Hasidism explained? How much space did an encyclopedia give to antisemitism, Zionism, Hebrew, Yiddish or Jewish life in a particular city?

An encyclopedia answers questions.

Before that, somebody chooses the questions.

That choice becomes invisible very quickly

Imagine reading an entry written eighty years ago. The author selected several facts, omitted others and used the political vocabulary of the period. Perhaps the article was written under an empire, a dictatorship or a national project with very clear ideas about which identities deserved emphasis.

A later reader may no longer see those conditions. They see only an encyclopedia.

This is one of the strange things about reference knowledge. Opinion announces itself. Reference writing tries not to.

The more successful it becomes, the easier it is to forget that people constructed it.

Jewish history is especially vulnerable to this problem

For centuries, Jewish communities in Eastern Europe lived inside political systems that repeatedly changed around them. The same town could pass through different states, official languages and administrative categories while the families living there remained in place.

Later, historians had to decide how to describe those lives.

Was a writer Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking or several of these at once? Which modern country's history should include a person born under an empire that no longer exists?

The problem cannot be solved by choosing one modern flag and moving on.

Human biographies are usually less obedient than maps.

Sometimes even the spelling of a town becomes an argument

A place can have a Ukrainian name, a Russian form, a Polish historical form, a Yiddish name and a Hebrew transcription. Each one may be correct inside a particular source.

Now imagine building an encyclopedia.

You need one main entry.

One spelling in the heading.

Cross-references.

Search terms.

A chronology.

Every technical decision quietly becomes an interpretive decision.

This does not make encyclopedias unreliable. It makes them human.

The conference itself became part of the story it was studying

The meeting was originally supposed to take place physically in Kyiv in August 2026. Because of the security situation caused by Russia's war against Ukraine, it was postponed to September and moved online.

I find that detail strangely appropriate.

Researchers were discussing how Jewish knowledge travels through books and reference systems while they themselves were forced to move their meeting from a physical city into a digital space.

The subject survived because the format changed.

That has happened to Jewish knowledge many times before.

Communities moved.

Libraries moved.

Books crossed borders.

Teachers changed languages.

The container changed and the conversation continued.

But what happens when the container is the ground itself?

That is where Uman enters the story.

An encyclopedia can be revised. A digital article can be corrected. A new edition can restore a person or subject that an earlier editor ignored.

A cemetery is different.

Once the ground has been excavated, built over or radically altered, no revised edition can put every grave back exactly where it was.

That makes disputes over old cemeteries unusually difficult. They involve religion, archaeology, property law, urban development, local government and historical memory at the same time.

Uman contains all of them.

The pilgrimage is newer than the cemetery

For many Israelis today, Uman immediately means Rosh Hashanah and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Tens of thousands of pilgrims travel there, and the city has developed an entire infrastructure around their arrival.

But the Jewish history of that ground did not begin with contemporary pilgrimage.

The old cemetery is associated with Jews killed during the violence of 1768. Rabbi Nachman, who died in 1810, wished to be buried in Uman near those victims, and his grave later became one of the central places of Breslov Hasidism.

The Encyclopedia of Ukraine's entry on Nakhman of Bratslav also records the connection between the Hasidic leader, Uman and the pilgrimage tradition that developed around his grave.

A modern pilgrimage site therefore sits inside a much older cemetery landscape.

That distinction matters.

Because a famous grave can make the graves around it disappear from view

Visitors naturally focus on Rabbi Nachman's tomb. It is the destination.

But historical cemeteries are not collections of independent monuments. They are landscapes of relationships. The famous person was buried among other people whose names may now be much harder to recover.

Once attention narrows to one protected point, there is a danger that everything beyond it begins to look like ordinary urban land.

That is one of the central tensions in the Uman dispute.

How large is the historical cemetery?

Which boundaries are legally protected?

What happens when construction takes place nearby?

And what should happen when human remains appear during earthworks?

In Uman, these questions stopped being theoretical

In July 2026, fragments of human bones were found near Rabbi Nachman's grave during work on electrical communications. Similar discoveries had been reported before.

The issue had already reached Ukrainian courts. In July 2025, the Supreme Court of Ukraine considered the city's historical and architectural planning documentation and found that a municipal decision had not properly respected previously established protection boundaries and procedures.

By September 2026, the controversy had reached discussions involving prominent American rabbis and the White House.

When I wrote about the dispute over Uman's old Jewish cemetery, construction and the discovery of human remains, I was struck by the distance between the physical size of the problem and the political scale it had acquired.

A trench in Uman had become an international issue.

But perhaps that is exactly how memory works

A bone fragment is physically small.

Its meaning is not.

If it belongs to a person buried there centuries ago, it connects today's construction work to a community that no longer exists in anything like its former form.

Suddenly the question is no longer only whether a cable can be laid at a particular location.

The question becomes: what obligations do living people have toward the dead when almost nobody remembers the dead by name?

There is no easy administrative answer to that.

A cemetery is an archive that cannot explain itself

A paper archive has labels.

Files have numbers.

Documents may contain names, dates and signatures.

A cemetery also stores information, but much of it depends on physical context. Position matters. Orientation matters. The relationship between graves matters. A stone separated from its original location loses part of its meaning even if the inscription survives.

And when stones disappear altogether, the ground may become the final record.

This is why historical cemeteries create such difficult preservation problems.

The visible evidence may already be incomplete while the invisible evidence remains beneath modern streets, buildings and infrastructure.

There is a temptation to solve the problem by choosing one authority

Let the historians decide.

Or the rabbis.

Or the courts.

Or the municipality.

Or archaeologists.

Or property owners.

Each group has legitimate expertise, but none possesses the entire problem.

A religious authority understands the rules surrounding Jewish burial. Archaeologists understand material evidence. Historians reconstruct documentary context. Courts determine legal rights and procedures. Municipalities still have to operate a living city where people need roads, electricity, housing and businesses.

Heritage conflicts become bitter precisely because several true things can exist at once.

Uman is not a museum

This is important to say.

People live there.

Children go to school.

Businesses operate.

The city needs infrastructure and development. Tens of thousands of pilgrims also arrive during one of the most difficult security periods in Ukraine's modern history.

Freezing an entire city in the name of history is not realistic.

But pretending that old burial ground becomes ordinary land simply because the people buried there no longer have descendants living next door is not acceptable either.

The difficult work begins between those positions.

The same is true of encyclopedias

An encyclopedia cannot contain everything.

Selection is unavoidable.

If every possible detail received equal space, the reference work would become unusable. Editors must decide what is central, what belongs in another article and which terminology is clear enough for the intended reader.

The problem begins when selection becomes invisible.

A responsible encyclopedia should help us understand not only what is included but also where knowledge comes from, how terminology has changed and what remains disputed.

A responsible heritage policy should do something similar.

Do not pretend uncertainty does not exist.

Mark it.

I think this is one of the most valuable habits historians can teach journalism

Journalism is under constant pressure to simplify.

A headline needs a subject.

A conflict needs two sides.

An article needs a conclusion.

But history constantly warns us that some subjects become less accurate when forced into clean opposition.

The Uman dispute is not simply “Jews versus Ukraine.” Ukrainian state institutions themselves protect the site, organize pilgrimage security and participate in negotiations with Jewish organizations. At the same time, disputes continue over construction, legal boundaries and the treatment of possible burials.

Both facts matter.

Removing either one produces a much easier story.

It also produces a worse one.

The question of who writes history is never separate from power

For a long time, Jewish history in Eastern Europe was frequently written by institutions that did not necessarily consider Jewish experience central to their national narratives.

The Soviet system provides an obvious example. Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were often commemorated under broader formulations such as “peaceful Soviet citizens.” The people were remembered, but a central reason they had been murdered could disappear from the public description.

Nothing physically changed about the grave.

The language around the grave changed.

That is enough to change memory.

The opposite can happen too

A later generation may decide to restore specificity.

This was a Jewish community.

These people were murdered as Jews.

This building was a synagogue.

This cemetery had larger historical boundaries than the visible monument suggests.

A forgotten Yiddish writer receives a new encyclopedia entry. An old document is digitized. A gravestone is identified.

None of this literally brings back the destroyed world.

But language can return distinctions that previous systems erased.

Sometimes a database is a form of restitution

We usually think of restitution as returning property.

But there is also informational restitution.

Restoring the correct spelling of a name.

Connecting a photograph to the right family.

Identifying a town.

Adding the Jewish name of a place to a catalogue.

Correcting an encyclopedia entry after new evidence appears.

These actions do not look dramatic, but they restore relationships.

And history is largely made of relationships.

This is one reason digital knowledge fascinates me

In print, an encyclopedia edition becomes fixed at the moment of publication. Errors survive until another edition appears, sometimes decades later.

Digital reference systems can change immediately.

That is an enormous advantage.

It is also a new danger.

If a page can change without leaving a visible history of the edit, we may know the current version while losing the argument that produced it.

The ideal system therefore needs two things that seem contradictory: the ability to correct and the ability to remember corrections.

Version history is not clutter.

It is evidence.

Physical heritage needs its own version history

What did the cemetery boundary look like on an eighteenth-century map?

What did municipal documents show in the twentieth century?

Where were structures built later?

What archaeological findings were recorded?

Which legal decisions changed the protection regime?

Without a chronology, every new dispute begins as though nobody had discussed the place before.

That is how historical conflicts become permanent.

People inherit conclusions but lose the reasoning.

There is another uncomfortable issue: famous people receive better protection than ordinary people

Rabbi Nachman's grave is internationally known.

That visibility protects it.

Pilgrims arrive. Israeli officials know the site. American Jewish organizations follow developments. Ukrainian authorities cannot treat it as an obscure local monument.

But what about the unknown people buried nearby?

They do not have movements named after them.

No thousands of visitors travel specifically to their graves.

Their protection depends on whether society accepts a principle: a person's historical importance should not determine whether their burial deserves respect.

This sounds obvious.

History repeatedly demonstrates that it is not.

Encyclopedias have the same bias

Famous people get entries.

Ordinary people become statistics.

We know the rabbi, the writer, the political leader, the wealthy donor. We may know almost nothing about the teacher, shopkeeper, midwife or child who lived on the same street.

Reference works cannot give every person a biography.

But historians increasingly work with sources that allow us to recover at least fragments of ordinary lives: census records, letters, school registers, business documents, immigration records, photographs and testimonies.

The historical lens slowly widens.

That changes what a community looks like.

A town becomes different when we stop describing it only through its famous residents

Uman is Rabbi Nachman's burial place.

That is true.

Uman was also a city with generations of Jewish families whose lives cannot be reduced to pilgrimage history.

Kyiv produced famous Jewish writers and political figures.

It was also home to shopkeepers, students, craftspeople, children and families whose names rarely appear in reference books.

The difference matters because famous biographies can make a lost community look like a collection of exceptional individuals.

Real communities were full of ordinary people.

That ordinariness is part of what was lost.

This is where the two stories come together for me

The conference asks how knowledge about Jews was organized.

Uman asks how Jewish memory is organized physically.

One concerns categories on a page.

The other concerns boundaries on a map.

But in both cases, drawing the boundary determines what receives protection.

Inside the encyclopedia entry: relevant.

Outside it: omitted.

Inside the protected cemetery zone: heritage.

Outside it: potentially developable land.

Lines have consequences.

The solution cannot be to stop drawing lines

We need categories.

We need maps.

Cities need planning boundaries. Archives need catalogues. Encyclopedias need entries. Laws need definitions.

The goal is not to abolish classification.

It is to remember that classification is a tool rather than nature.

When new evidence appears, the line may need to move.

Good institutions must be capable of saying: our previous description was incomplete.

That sentence requires more courage than it seems

Institutions like certainty.

Governments like final decisions.

Publishers like authoritative editions.

Newsrooms like definitive headlines.

But historical knowledge grows because somebody eventually notices that the old explanation no longer accounts for the evidence.

Revision is not necessarily proof that earlier scholars failed.

Sometimes it is proof that scholarship works.

New documents appear.

Archives open.

Technology makes damaged text readable.

A forgotten source is translated.

A cemetery survey changes the map.

Knowledge moves.

Israel should understand this process particularly well

Israeli society contains family histories from dozens of countries and former empires. One household may have documents in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish and Russian; another in Arabic, French and Judeo-Arabic; another in Amharic.

Names were changed.

Places were renamed.

Borders moved.

Transliterations changed from one bureaucracy to another.

For anyone working seriously with Israel news, Jewish biography or genealogy, the lesson arrives quickly: a single spelling is rarely the whole story.

The person stayed the same while the databases changed around them.

The dead cannot correct our metadata

That may be the simplest way to explain why all of this matters.

A living person can say: you spelled my surname incorrectly.

This was not my birthplace.

That photograph is not my father.

The cemetery does not speak.

An erased community cannot submit a correction request.

Once the chain of witnesses breaks, future generations depend on records created by people who may never have imagined how important their precision would become.

That creates responsibility for anyone handling the record now.

Accuracy is therefore not only a technical virtue

It is a form of respect.

Knowing the exact boundary of a cemetery matters because bodies are not abstract heritage.

Correctly identifying a Jewish community in an encyclopedia matters because historical groups should not disappear into convenient general categories.

Distinguishing established fact from community claim matters for the same reason.

Accuracy prevents memory from becoming mythology.

Mythology is much easier to share

It has clear heroes.

Clear villains.

A beginning.

A moral.

A satisfying ending.

History often offers none of those.

That makes it less comfortable but much more useful.

The old Jewish cemetery in Uman does not give us a neat ending. Courts rule, organizations negotiate, pilgrims arrive, construction continues to create questions, and the physical landscape still requires investigation and protection.

The conference on encyclopedias does not give us one correct encyclopedia either.

It gives us a better awareness of the people and systems that manufacture reference knowledge.

Perhaps that is the point

We cannot preserve every building.

We cannot write every biography.

We cannot recover every grave.

We cannot put every fact into an encyclopedia.

Loss is unavoidable.

But there is a major difference between unavoidable loss and careless erasure.

The first is part of history.

The second is a choice.

What survives depends on thousands of small decisions

An archivist keeps a box instead of discarding it.

A researcher notices a name.

A translator makes an old text readable to another audience.

A court asks whether a municipality followed heritage law.

An archaeologist records a location.

A community objects when construction reaches burial ground.

An editor decides that Jewish life deserves more than a footnote.

None of these actions can preserve an entire world.

Together they determine how much of that world remains accessible.

And that is why I no longer think of memory as something we simply inherit

Inheritance sounds passive.

Someone before us preserved something, and we receive it.

Real memory requires maintenance.

Every generation receives an incomplete archive and decides what to do with it. Some gaps can be repaired. Others cannot. New mistakes will inevitably be added.

The responsibility is not to create a perfect past.

It is to hand the next generation something more accurate than convenient.

An encyclopedia entry and a cemetery seem like very different things

One is made of words.

The other of earth.

One can be rewritten in seconds.

The other may contain graves hundreds of years old.

Yet both are places where society draws a line around the past and says: this matters enough to preserve.

That line should never be treated casually.

Because outside it are not merely missing facts or unused land.

Sometimes there is an entire human world waiting for someone to notice that it has been left out.