Larry Luxner | JTA

For most of her life, Peruvian-born Yvette Merzbacher wondered where her four paternal great-grandparents were buried. All she knew was that her grandparents came from Bessarabia, and that her grandmother, Liza Bronstein, had emigrated to Lima, Peru, in 1932 with her two older sons, following her husband, Yoil, who had moved there five years earlier.

Researching the Peruvian National Archives in 2010 led to the family’s place of origin: Edineț — a town in what is now northern Moldova. It had been known as Yedinitz in the Yiddish of the Jews who once lived there, and now are present only in its cemetery.

Merzbacher’s curiosity led her to establish LivingStones, a Swiss-based nonprofit that’s leading efforts to preserve Jewish burial grounds throughout Moldova and prote

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