THE JERUSALEM REPORT FEBRUARY 28, 2011 31

JEWISH WORLD

Remembering GaliciaThe Ludmer Fund aims to highlight the history of the Jews of Galicia and Bukovina

ICE COLD AIR RATTLES THEcorrugated tin roof and burststhrough the gaping windows.Through the vacant entrance, its widedoors long gone, replaced by tall

trees and thick weeds, the engraved inscrip-tion over the lintel is barely legible: “This isthe gate of the Lord through which the right-eous may enter” (Psalms: 118:18).

This imposing synagogue in Podhajce,Ukraine, with its distinctive tall buttresses,dates back to the 17th century. Until theHolocaust, it commanded its surroundings.Now it is in ruins. The original ceiling col-lapsed years ago, and inside, the cavernousstructure is dank and dark. The plaster has rot-ted, leaving only spots of the colorful floralornamentation that once decorated the nichewhere the holy Torah scrolls were kept.

Across the dirt road is the Jewish cemetery,its gravestones, the earliest dating to 1420,leaning lopsidedly, many destroyed. The tomb-stones crowd around each other, but there arelarge gaps, where the stones were taken awayby the locals to use for paving roads; even thestairs that lead to the cemetery are paved withthese tombstones.

Podhajce (Pidhaistsi in Ukrainian) is a for-gotten town in a forgotten region of a strug-gling country. But once it was a valuable trad-ing town, the site of repeated conquests byTartars, Cossacks, Nazis and Russians. And itwas home to a flourishing Galician Jewishcommunity, the birthplace of famous rabbisand scholars.

The Ludmer Project is a philanthropic funddedicated to collecting oral testimonies, docu-menting cemeteries and synagogues, and col-lecting other information that can still be foundin situ in what was once the region of Galiciaand Bukovina, now in the Republic of Ukraine.In cooperation with the Hebrew University inJerusalem and the Petro Jacky Program for theStudy of Modern Ukrainian History andSociety at the Lviv National Ivan Franko

University and the Catholic University, the pro-gram also provides Ukrainian doctoral andpost-doctoral students with scholarships to pur-sue research about the Jews of Galicia andBukovina and spend a year at the HebrewUniversity, studying Jewish history, Hebrewand Yiddish.

To bring attention to their activities, theLudmer Project brought a small group of histo-rians, researchers and journalists, includingThe Jerusalem Report, to observe their currentand future projects. In the summer of 2011,members of the Ludmer Project hope to cometo Podhajce to document the cemetery andruined synagogue. These ruins may not last formany more years.

“JEWS LIVED IN GALICIA FORhundreds of years, and then theydied a horrible death in the

Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and theUkrainians,” says David Wallach, a memberof a group of families, most of whom main-

tain their anonymity, who helped establishthe Ludmer Fund. “Records, artifacts andinformation are being lost every moment, aswe speak. If we do not preserve even theselast traces of their existence, they will dieanother death.”

Tall and dignified, with a well-trimmed,graying beard and elegant demeanor,Wallach, 64, is a professor of molecularbiology at the Weizmann Institute inRehovot. Only a few years ago, he began toresearch his own family’s history, after hefound among his deceased father’s belong-ings a black suitcase, filled with pho-tographs and documents that he had takenwith him when he emigrated to Palestine.“My parents never talked about their rela-tives who died in the Holocaust,” he sayspainfully. “These were things that you didn’ttalk about with children.

“My mother told me not to come here,”he says, nearly tearful. “She told me thatGalicia is soaked with the blood of Jews.But I have already come several times and Imust keep coming. We must try to learn asmuch as we can about our past, so that wecan understand where we come from andwho we are.”

Quoting from the Sayings of the Fathers(2:21), he says, “‘You are not obligated tocomplete the work, but neither are you freeto desist from it.’ We must learn as much aswe can and preserve as much as we can.”

Dr. Vladimir Levin, 39, who immigratedto Israel from St. Petersburg, Russia, head ofthe Architectural Section of the Center forJewish Art at the Hebrew University,accompanies the group. “When we docu-ment Jewish history, we always think aboutthe spiritual – the religious life, the philoso-phy and thought. But Jews produced mater-ial culture, and from this material culture –buildings, cemeteries, synagogues – we canlearn about their lives,” Levin says. “Beforethe Jews of Galicia died, they lived, and we,today, are not the descendants of their deaths– we are the descendants of their lives.”

Eetta Prince-Gibson Lviv, Ukraine

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REVIVING RUINS: By documenting andrestoring ancient Jewish cemeteries,researchers hope to keep the memoryof the Jews of Galicia alive

THE JERUSALEM REPORT FEBRUARY 28, 201132

JEWISH WORLD

IN SOLOTVYN, A SMALL SHTETLbefore World War II, the group sees anothercemetery, in another small Ukrainian town

that seems to subsist in an earlier time. Thecemetery is at the top of a low, muddy hill. At thefoot of the hill are family farms, with smallplowed fields dotted with haystacks. A womanleans over a tin tub outside her house, washingclothes by hand in the wet cold. A dog barks inthe distance and chickens cackle in a small coop.

Walking up the soft slope in the gray win-tery light, the monuments, tipped and titled,dark against the overcast skies, look at first likethe stumps of a burned forest. Eerily, the frozengrass in the cemetery is charred and still smellsburned – the local residents burn the ground toretard the growth of weeds and keep away wildanimals.

In the summer of 2009, a group sponsoredby the Ludmer Project worked in this cemetery,cleaning up the area and documenting the tomb-stones, then uploading the information to theproject’s website. Enthusiastically, Levin pointsout the engravings, the decorations in the formsof quills, foliage, and florals, the letters chiseledor carved in relief, the traces of color paintedinto the stone, and the languages, Hebrew,Polish and German – all signs of different socialclasses across different periods of time.

He points to a grave from 1648, inscribedwith a Hebrew inscription, which usually refersto a Jew killed by a non-Jew; the stone, heassumes, marks the grave of a man killed in thesavage Cossack uprising, led by BohdanChmelnitsky, who attacked that Jewish com-munity with vicious cruelty in 1648-1649.Another grave, nearby, is dated 1655 and indi-cates that the man died a natural death. “Fromthis,” explains Levin, “we can learn that theJewish community came back to this regionafter the Chmelnitsky pogroms much soonerthan was previously assumed.”

At the top of the hill, two farmers in heavyrubber work boots, neither threatening norinviting, lean against a decrepit pick-up truck,watching the group of researchers.

WHAT WAS ONCE KNOWN ASGalicia is now southeasternPoland and northwestern

Ukraine. More than one million Jews livedin this area before the Holocaust, mostly inthe larger towns and smaller shtetls. Sincecoming to the area, probably as early as the14th century, the Jews lived in a hateful har-

mony with their neighbors, a tense anti-Semitic status quo marked by outbreaks ofvicious violence and savage pogroms acrossthe centuries. The area was conquered andreconquered so many times through history,that many of the towns and cities are stillknown by their Russian, Polish, German –and Yiddish – names.

As a minority posed between Polish andUkrainian nationalism, in a region occupied bythe Austrians, the Poles and the Ukrainians, theJews were often in a precarious situation,although, during the second half of the 19thcentury, Jews were particularly noteworthy fortheir political participation in affairs of stateand for establishing modern institutions andsocieties.

Despite the simple peasant life that sur-rounded them and endemic poverty, the Jewsof Galicia formed a hub of cultural activitiesand Jewish studies. Traditionally oriented, theyabsorbed the Hasidic movement and foundedthe dynasties of Belz, Tzanz, Viznitz, Sadigoraand others. At the same time, Jews in the regionwere also receptive to the ideas of theEnlightenment and liberalism; in later years,Jewish writers, including S.Y. Agnon, ItzikManger, Mordechai Gebirtig, Paul Celan,Joseph Roth and Henry Roth came from thisregion, as did artists from the fields of drama

and film, including Lee Strassberg, BillyWilder, and Otto Preminger.

The Jews of Galicia were known asGalicianers. And this, says Rachel Manekin, aprofessor at the Meyerhoff Center for JewishStudies at the University of Maryland, whoseresearch focuses on the Jews of the region, wasmuch more than a geographic designation. InEastern European Jewish folklore, theGalicianer had all sorts of qualities – most ofthem negative, yet talked about with a certainsense of endearment. Galicianers were reputedto be troublemakers, shrewd operators, money-grubbing religious fanatics who spoke a sim-ple, vulgar Yiddish dialect.

At the same time, in the contradictory way ofstereotypes and perhaps because of their experi-ence with political liberalism due to the longyears of the Habsburg rule, the Galicianers werealso considered to be more moderate in their pol-itics. Although some Jews from other regionsthought that the Galicianers were too willing tocompromise, others noted that they were moremoderate in their politics and maintained Zionistsocieties without being inclined to join the moreradical Bundist-type organizations.

The Galician Jewish community wasalmost completely annihilated by the Nazis,aided, practically more than in any other coun-try under Nazi occupation, by the willing local

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FORGOTTEN GLORY: The synagogue in Podhajce, now in ruins, bears witness to theflourishing Jewish community that existed here from the 15th century until the Holocaust

THE JERUSALEM REPORT FEBRUARY 28, 2011 33

population. Under the subsequent Soviet occu-pation, almost all memory of the Jewish com-munity was annihilated. And after the break-upof the Soviet Union, Ukraine, which through-out history has had strong nationalist trends,continued to erase the past and the presence ofany non-Ukrainian peoples.

UNLIKE POLAND, UKRAINE HASnot experienced a Jewish renewalnor a philo-Semitic movement.

“Jewish history is simply not part of theagenda of modern Ukraine,” states YaroslavHrystak, director of graduate studies at theUkrainian Catholic University. “If Jews arementioned at all, they are mentioned as partof the Holocaust, not as part of the economy,or the social fabric. But how can we teachthe history of Ukraine if we do not study theJews? The Jews were an integral part ofUkrainian society for centuries.”

“Poland has rewritten its narrative toinclude and even embrace the Jews,” Hrystakcontinues. “But Ukraine has not even begunthis process. Ukrainian history has always beentaught as local history and only now are weattempting to integrate that local history into itsglobal context.”

In fact, Ukraine has been singled out manytimes by Jewish and international organizationsas the country that has done the least to restituteJewish property and compensate Jewish com-munities and individual Jewish heirs. At thistime, says Wallach, there is a “window ofopportunity, in which the authorities are willingto let us do our work. Who knows what will bein the future. In Russia, for example, we hadfree access to archives, until Putin decided toclose them.”

In August 2010, the Executive Committee ofthe Lviv City Council announced anInternational Competition for the Sites ofJewish History in Lviv, also known as Lvov, orLemberg. But at the same time, despite domes-tic legislation that protects historical sites, manyof the sites of Jewish cemeteries, synagoguesand public buildings have been razed or falleninto abject ruin and neglect, as in Podhajce.

Wallach speaks gingerly, aware that rela-tionships with the Ukrainian Republic are com-plicated, based not only on the history of anti-Semitism but also on the diplomatic relationsthat the State of Israel is attempting to forge,irrespective of the country’s treatment of itsJewish legacy. In August 2010, for example,

Israel and Ukraine signed an agreement can-celing visas between the two countries, in amutual attempt to increase tourism.

“At the least,” Wallach says, “we couldexpect the authorities to obey their own domes-tic legislation, which mandates that they pro-tect historic sites.”

Dr. Semion Goldin, from the LeonidNevzlin Research Center for Russian andEuropean Jewry at the Hebrew University anda researcher for the Ludmer Project, adds care-fully, “It is important to understand that we, asJews and Israelis, are not coming here to takerevenge – we are hoping that as they build theirnew, modern nation, there will be a place forJewish history, too. There are Poles andUkrainians who can trace their family lineageback to the 16th century – but I, a Jew, don’tknow the names of my great-grandfathers. Themajority of us did not come from well-knownor high-placed families, and so it is as if we donot have a past. As individuals and as a people,we must know where we came from to knowwho we are. The Ukrainians understand this.”

AT THE CENTRAL HISTORICALArchives of the Ukraine in Lviv,Manekin confidently holds a heavy

book of archives, bound in dark brown, itsancient pages yellowing and giving off thepaper-smell of history.

Because Lviv was under Austrian rule forso many centuries, careful records of all kindsof written documents have been kept, all cata-logued and grouped according to a precise sys-tem that, once decoded, enables historians likeManekin to research the lives of Jews.

But it is a highly complicated process.Goldin notes that archival research aboutJewish communities in a multicultural regionlike Galicia, which went through so manyupheavals, requires sensitive, in-depth socio-political knowledge and, in the case ofUkraine, familiarity with at least six languages:Polish, German and Russian, because of thechanging sovereignties; Yiddish and Hebrew,used by the Jews; and Latin, the official lan-guage of the courts and the church.

The Ukrainian authorities have made asmall room and several volumes of archivesavailable to the group. Many of them list gen-erations of births, deaths, weddings and censusaccounts, some dating back to the 16th century.Excited, clearly in her academic element,Manekin explains that “archives reveal much

more than these lists.” She holds a volume ofrecords, dating to the early 18th century, inwhich she finds the protocol of the trial andverdict of the Reitzes brothers, Jews who wereaccused of trying to convince an apostate toreturn to Judaism and were tortured and even-tually burned in Lviv. “Until this record wasdiscovered,” she says, “it wasn’t even known ifthis was a legend or an actual event.”

She finds a receipt for a debt paid by theJewish community, recorded in Latin, onwhich an unknown 17th century court registrarhas drawn an anti-Semitic caricature of a groupof Jews holding bags of money and added theword, “stinking,” in Ukrainian. “He must havebeen bored, so he doodled,” Manekin quips.

In another part of Lviv, now a city ofsome 900,000 residents, the tiny Jewishcommunity has established a small hostel,kosher dining room and community center.The room is long and dank, electric wiresstrung precariously along the walls, sid-durim (prayer books) scattered over tablesand a small holy ark in a corner.

Meylech Sheykhet, affiliated with theChabad movement, greets the group. A formerexpert in telecommunications systems, he hasbecome increasingly involved in Jewish lifeand now lives as an Orthodox Jew. Sheykhet isusing his own and donated funds to buy up for-mer Jewish properties throughout the Ukraine,hoping to make at least some of them intomuseums that would attract Jewish travelersand bring some income to the financially andorganizationally struggling community.

At the end of the long room that doublesas dining and prayer room, a wooden doorleads out to a littered courtyard. At the farend, a heavy gate opens into a vast space.Here, too, the lintel over the entrance revealsthat this was once a synagogue, now overrunwith trees and weeds, recognizable only to adreamer like Sheykhet.

“This was a wonderful synagogue, hun-dreds of years old” he says. “We will rebuildhere, too.”

“The Jews have been erased from Galiciaand Bukovina,” says Wallach. “We at theLudmer Fund want to respond to this – to bringthe history of the Jews to consciousness, in theUkraine and among the Jewish people.

“This region is covered in the blood ofJews,” concludes Wallach. “The study oftheir lives is the memorial we are obligatedto create.” •