(JNS) The remains of more than 1,000 Jews shot by the Nazis during the Holocaust that were uncovered in Belarus in February were reburied on Tuesday, May 21. The burial was administered by volunteers from the Israeli emergency response group Zaka and was supervised by a local Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, reported the news website Jewish.ru. In a Jewish ceremony, the remains were inserted into several coffins and then buried. 

They were originally unearthed by Belarusian soldiers in a pit at a construction site for a luxury housing project in Brest, a city along the Polish border. The historic city of Brest was the location of the Union of Brest and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At least 28,000 Jews lived in the Brest ghetto between 1941 and 1942.

Some 17,000 people were known to have been shot in October 1942 near the Bronnaya Gora rail station, as thousands more were presumed to have been massacred. Some 66 percent of Belarusian Jews perished in the Holocaust, according to American historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The War Against Jews.