Ukraine: Uzhgorod mass grave located

According to the JTA, A Nazi-era mass grave for 200 Jews has been located in Uzhhorod (Uzhgorod) , a western Ukraine city that was part of Hungary prior to WWII, and then known as Ungvar. The city is on the Slovakia/Ukraine border.

The city's chief rabbi, Mendel Teichman, recently discovered an open area in the local Jewish cemetery. It was not fenced; there were no headstones.

Historical documents revealed the site was a mass grave for more than 200 Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Teichman went to the Rabbinical Center of Europe with the news. The RCE is now seeking relatives of those murdered to seek funding to build a fence and a memorial.

Mass Graves: Babi Yar and former Soviet territory sites

Numerous mass graves are located throughout Ukraine and in the eastern territories of the former Soviet Union.

Created by Nazi German and local collaborators, the principal objective of the Einsatzgruppen (a mobile killing task force) was the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies and Soviet political commissars. As a result, 1.3-1.5 million Jews were killed between 1941-1943.

Two memorials mark the area of the Babi Yar Massacre. The first erected did not specifically mention Jews as victims although a commemorative plaque in Yiddish was added later. This second memorial, in the form of a menorah, was erected by members of the Jewish community to specifically commemorate the Jewish victims who were murdered at Babi Yar.

Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine where 33,771 victims were systematically murdered September 29-30, 1941. The Babi Yar massacre was the largest single mass killing and is considered the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust. In the months that followed, thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people, mostly Jewish civilians, were murdered by the Nazis there during World War II.

According to a report published in 2005 by the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, over 550 additional mass gravesites have been identified throughout the eastern territories of the former Soviet Union.

(LEFT) Located near Babi Yar, this gravestone in Lukyanofka Jewish Cemetery reads in Hebrew and in Russian: M(alka) Leah Shindelman 1886-1956, Srulig Yosevich 1911-1941, Raisa Yosovna 1917-1941. The photos are Malka and her son Srulig.

Malka Leah Karger SHINDELMAN died a natural death and was buried at the Lukyanofka Cemetery in Kiev.

Her photo appears on the gravestone, which is not a Jewish custom. During the Soviet era, it was a national tradition, regardless of religious affiliation, for Russians to include a personal photo on gravestones.

Flowers are not customarily left upon Jewish graves either, but on Russian Jewish graves, it also remains a common practice to see carnations representing a Soviet-era tradition.

Malka survived the war by fleeing from Berdichev, Ukraine on a train to Lake Balkash, Kazakhstan. When Bronia Shindelman Brenner erected Malka’s gravestone in 1956, she added a second photo to the stone as well as the names of two of Malka’s adult children. She did this to commemorate her siblings, Ruchel Shindelman AVRUM and Srulig SHINDELMAN, who were Shoah victims.

Srulig was last seen alive in the Jewish Prisoner of War (POW) camp adjacent to Babi Yar. One of the only 13 Jewish survivors of Babi Yar and a relative of ours, Yakov KAPER wrote in his memoir - “Thorny Road” - about last seeing Srulig alive. Yakov escaped from the P.O.W. camp; Srulig chose not to accompany him and was never seen again.

Ruchel was last known to be alive in the shtetl of Ruzhin, Ukraine in 1941 when the German Wehrmacht occupied the region. 24 years old and pregnant with her first child, it is unknown how she perished, but there is a mass grave in Ruzhin where Jews were killed. She is presumably buried in it.

(RIGHT) Mass graves in small rural communities have simple markers or none at all. This one in Lyubar, Ukraine was placed in the early '90s by Jewish relatives of those murdered. A second marker was erected nearby to commemorate partisans. Low metal fences surround both mass graves.

Resources for documenting mass grave victims in the former Soviet Union are scarce. These possible sources include Yizkor memorial books, Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and materials at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

The Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory housed at both the USHMM in Washington, DC and at Yad Vashem in Israel, is a compilation of testimonies from residents after the war and lists victim and collaborator names by town. The sequence of local events during the War is often detailed in these files.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes published Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, which includes a detailed account of Einsatzgruppen activities and includes an extensive bibliography of materials in German archives.

Other historical books about Babi Yar and the mass graves include Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, The Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union by Lujan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock, and French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois’ recent memoir, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, which uses forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts and archival research to document the murders of Jews in the former Soviet Union.

Father Desbois will be the keynote speaker at the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy August 2-7, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA.

Ukraine: Czernowitz Cemetery's Ottawa Project

At the 2002 International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, Prof. Alti Rodal reported on a project to digitally photograph all tombstones in the Czernowitz Jewish Cemetery.

This project, sponsored by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Ottawa, Canada, was spearheaded by several members working with Dr. George Bolotenko of the Canadian National Archives (Ottawa). It goal is to produce a free, searchable, internet database of names linked to images of tombstones.

Obtain information about specific graves (photograph, approximate location according to the current cemetery map, burial register information), by writing to Bruce Reisch, the Czernowitz-L list moderator. He has been coordinating data transcription for the JGSO, which led the effort to photograph all the tombstones and to obtain copies of burial registers.

The exact location of individual graves is not known, as the current cemetery map does not correspond until 1946.

In August 2007, information on 4,293 burials were sent to JGS Ottawa, and subsequently posted on the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) along with corresponding images. In May 2008, data on 3,992 additional burials were sent to JGS Ottawa but have not yet been forwarded to JOWBR. Altogether, information on 11,376 burials has been transcribed, including the two datasets above.

There are more than 28,000 tombstone photos in the collection (some are duplicates) so there's still quite a bit of work ahead before the project is complete. Prior to transcription of data from the tombstones, all burial registers prior to 1946 were transcribed into Excel spreadsheets.

Congratulations to the team of volunteers who have dedicated countless hours transcribing data and trying to read barely decipherable tombstones in multiple languages for this project!

Ukraine: Cemeteries and more

Travel writer Ruth Ellen Gruber's Jewish Heritage travel blog often comments on Jewish cemeteries visited during her travels. Here she writes about Dolina.

I wrote the other day about my visit to Bolekhiv and Stryj with Sergei Kravstov and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

After leaving Bolekhiv, we stopped briefly at a couple of other places en route back to L'viv.

At the village of Dolina, we looked at the synagogue...

Bolekhiv (Bolechow) of course, is the ancestral town of Daniel Mendelsohn, which he visited and described so vividly in his best-seller book, "The Lost."

She adds that from Dolina, they went to Galich (Halych), and what looked like a normal Jewish cemetery but was in reality that of the Karaite community. Ruth includes seven photos of the stones, most of which have very clear inscriptions.

Many writers confuse the origins of the Karaite movement, some call it Turkish or Iraqi in origin.

However, the truth is that the Karaite movement was founded in 9th-century Persia in the city of Nahavand and spread extensively across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A large community existed in Cairo and other Middle Eastern countries, in the Russian Empire and in Iran.

A family friend back in Iran once tried to describe this group of people who lived in their small town. Our friend did not use the term Karaites or Karaim (Hebrew), but referred to them as Sabbateans or people who observed Shabbat strictly but were not really Jews, adding that there was complete separation between the traditional Jewish community and the Karaites.

The breakaway Jewish sect - there is a community in Israel and most of them came from Cairo - recognize the Torah and celebrate major holidays, modify other traditions, reject the Talmud and rabbinical Judaism. During the Holocaust, its members managed to convince the Nazis they were not Jews. Some Persian traditional Jews, caught in Europe at the wrong times, claimed they were Karaites and were saved in that way.

In Israel, the tradition exists that men and women marrying with traditional Jews must follow rabbinical Judaism. The Karaites, among other unusual customs, will not use fire (or electric), or eat warm food, etc. on Shabbat.

Ukraine: The Czernowitz Cemetery

The old Jewish cemetery - Czernowitz (today Cernivtsi)
The town is located at 48°17'N; 25°56'E.
Originally in Austro-Hungary, Bukovina, then Romania, it is today in Ukraine.
Researchers interested in the Czernowitz-Sadagora area will find in the Czernowitz-L Discussion Group website a diverse and extensive collection of material concerning the Jewish community, as well as a wealth of information on the cemetery, including historic and contemporary photographs along with images of burial register pages.

In fact, researchers considering a collaborative project for their shtetl will also find excellent ideas that may be adapted.

Recently, the group participated in a Cemetery Clean-up Project.

Here are links to some of the material on this project:

- A PowerPoint presentation of the 2008 Work Camp Cemetery Clean-up Project. Photos by Joanna Liss; PowerPoint by Hardy Breier.

- Report and photos from Christian Herrmann and Mimi Taylor on the 2008 International Work Camp Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- Photographs from the sucessful 2008 Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- The 2008 Czernowitz Cemetery Clean-up Project.

- The Burial Register Transcription project: A chronological description of activities by Bruce Reisch, along with images of the various burial registers connected with the first project.

- Photographs of the Czernowitz cemetery by Cornel Fleming (2004)

- Czernowitz cemetery restoration project

- The Mortuary (Leichenhalle or Zeremonienhalle) Restoration Project of Helmut Kusdat

- The Czernowitz cemetery map from Mimi Taylor Bruce Reisch's cross referenced map of the new areas compared to the old parcels at the cemetery.

- May 2006 Reunion photos of the memorial service at the Czernowitz cemetery, from Rita and Gidi Shilo.

There is much more to explore on the Czernowitz site http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/.