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ABOUT THE PROJECT | JEWISH STONES UA
A brief description of the Jewish Stones UA project to document displaced Jewish headstones at cemeteries and other locations in western Ukraine. Relevant information sources are at the end of this page.
Addressing a Need in Western Ukraine

At left, the Jewish cemetery of Pomoriany (Lviv oblast), denuded of its matzevot. At right, some of the headstones used in the foundation of a Soviet collective farm.

The majority of Jewish cemetries in western Ukraine were partially or completely stripped of their stone grave markers (matzevot) during the German occupation of the region in World War II and in some cases also during the postwar Soviet occupation. These actions were intended not only to "harvest" the headstones for use as building materials but also as a form of cultural genocide , to intentionally erase visual signs of Jewish culture after the Jewish communities tied to those cemeteries had been destroyed in the Holocaust. Today many of these cemeteries retain few or no surviving matzevot, not even broken stones.


The destroyed Jewish cemetery of Zboriv (Ternopil oblast), repurposed after WWII as a space for private auto garages.
Cemeteries are holy places in Jewish tradition, and in the modern era they can serve not only as sites of remembrance and prayer but also as study sites to document and understand the life and art of entire Jewish communities, as open-air cultural history museums. Some of this value is lost when headstones are displaced from the graves they originally marked, especially when the headstones are lost altogether. Recovery of displaced headstones and their return to erased cemeteries, or their installation as part of memorial monuments elsewhere when the cemeteries have been destroyed, can help to restore some of this lost value. This restoration motivates the efforts of civic organizations and cultural heritage activists to struggle with the heavy stones and return them both physically and symbolically.


Transcribing epitaphs on recovered headstones returned to the erased Jewish cemetery of Zaliztsi (Ternopil oblast).
The epitaphs and designs carved into Jewish headstones can also be a source of genealogical information; many individuals and organizations have captured images of matzevot and published lists, articles, and books or databases to help others search for personally relevant stones. Unfortunately, these documentation projects mostly ignore Jewish cemeteries where the surviving headstones have been recovered from wartime displacement, so are few and often broken or significantly fragmented. The project presented on this website is intended to address this gap in documentation for western Ukraine, where the need is significant, and to create a resource which larger Jewish cemetery/headstone database projects can draw from to enable broad access to the data.


Recovering Jewish headstones stolen from the city of Lviv's new Jewish cemetery and used as road substrate material during WWII.
The database was designed to permit recording of almost 30 characteristics of each stone, some of which are recorded in three languages (Hebrew, English, and Ukrainian), and which include some data types unique to recovered stones (e.g. recovery date and location). Records for individual stones need not be complete; the database permits additions and edits at any time. The priority for recording is on images and epitaphs, from which much of the data is derived; initial transcriptions and translations of epitaphs may be reviewed with the stored images by database users anywhere in the world, and alternate interpretations proposed. The website and its database are created bilingually, in English to serve Jewish descendants of families from western Ukraine wherever they may live, and in Ukrainian to serve interested people in the region, especially those who currently live in communities where these cemeteries are located.

Users can simply browse the headstone data for each cemetery, but this website also includes a Guide to the Database which explains the data search function and defines each of the stone data characteristics with examples to highlight the various data formats.

Volunteers Throughout the Region, and Abroad


Extracting and recovering a Jewish headstone fragment lodged in a tree in Rohatyn (Ivano-Frankivsk oblast).
This is a loosely-organized volunteer project, with both large and small contributions from many people in all aspects of the work. In addition to anonymous and unknown contributors, the following people have given their time and effort to the first implementation of the project:

Overall project concept and management: a joint project of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv and Rohatyn Jewish Heritage

Database design and development: Vasyl Yuzyshyn, using CodeIgniter framework and MySQL database; funding by Christian Herrmann, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, and other donors


Jewish headstones and fragments gathered by residents of Sokolivka (Lviv oblast) and returned to the Jewish cemetery in the village by ESJF.
Headstone recovery: most of the headstone recovery projects described on these pages were organized and conducted by the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv, with volunteers from the Lviv Volunteer Center (LVC) (an arm of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Charitable Foundation "Hesed-Arieh"), Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, and many other individuals and non-profit organizations

Headstone recording (images and measurements): images of headstones are typically taken during recovery operations, with some additional captures after recovery or monument construction, and are described on the town "About" pages; all headstone images were created by or for the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv and are licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License

Transcription and translation: transcriptions of Hebrew epitaphs from headstone photographs (or directly from the stones) and translations to English and Ukrainian were made by volunteers in Ukraine, Israel, and the US – see each town's "About" page for the individual(s) who worked on the data set; translation of the overall database structure and web pages from English to Ukrainian is by Vasyl Yuzyshyn

Data entry and maintenance: database records are added and edited by Vasyl Yuzyshyn, Jay Osborn, and Sasha Nazar

Project Contacts

For questions or comments about the database, send a message to the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv via its director, Sasha Nazar.

References/Sources

General and geographical information about Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine:

Other databases documenting Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine:


The main page on the JGB website about Tovste (Ternopil oblast) documenting the Jewish cemetery with headstone images and epitaphs.

Resources to aid reading, interpreting, and documenting Jewish epitaphs and symbols:


Reading epitaphs on surviving headstones in the damaged Jewish cemetery of Burshtyn (IvanoFrankivsk oblast).