The remains of about 40 Jews killed during the Holocaust and found in a mass grave were laid to rest Monday in an emotion-filled ceremony in northeastern Romania.
Five rabbis from Britain and the United States performed the funeral service under a grey and cloudy sky.
Dressed in black, they carried the remains, unidentified and contained in paper bags and cardboard boxes, and put them into a single grave in the Jewish cemetery of Iasi, overlooking the city.
"We have come here to help these people rest in peace. We believe it is God's will", British rabbi Meir Twersky, whose grand-parents are buried in Iasi cemetery, told AFP.
"We are gathered here today to remember these men, women and children who were brutally murdered in a forest in 1941 (...) only because they were Jews", Israel's ambassador to Romania, Dan Ben-Eliezer, said during the official ceremony.
According to the Elie Wiesel National Institute, the victims were killed in the summer of 1941 at Popricani, close to Iasi, by the Romanian army, an ally of the Nazis during World War II.
They were among more than 15,000 Jews killed in Iasi during pogroms in 1941.
A Romanian historian, Adrian Cioflanca, found the site thanks to the testimonies of Romanians who had witnessed the killings.
"We will continue the historical research in order to try to determine where the victims came from, whether it was from Iasi or the surrounding villages", the director of the Elie Wiesel Institute, Alexandru Florian, told AFP.
The exact number of victims, including women and children, has not been determined, but Cioflanca told AFP, "We found the skulls of at least 35 people but there were other body parts so we can talk about at least 40 people."
The victims were buried just a few metres (yards) away from thousands more Jews killed during the pogroms.
"I ask the forgiveness of the deceased for the suffering that has been brought to their holy bones", rabbi Meir Schlesinger said, referring to the belief that the remains should have been left where they were originally found.
But Abraham Ghiltman, the president of the Iasi Jewish community, said it was a "relief" to see "those whose memory was forgotten" to be lying next to their fellow citizens in the Jewish cemetery.
"We hope that the events we witnessed during the Holocaust will never happen again, neither in Romania nor in the rest of the world", he added.
According to an international commission of historians led by Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, himself a Romanian-born Jew, between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in territories run by the pro-Nazi Romanian regime during 1940-1944.
The Popricani mass grave is the first to be discovered since 1945, when 311 corpses were exhumed from three locations in Stanca Roznovanu, close to Iasi, according to the Wiesel Institute.