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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
For questions or comments about the database, send a message to the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv via its director, Sasha Nazar.
General and geographical information about Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine:
- Links to Identified Jewish Cemeteries in Western Ukraine, on the website of the project A Guide to Jewish Cemetery Preservation in Western Ukraine
- Cemetery Surveys Map, on the website of ESJF (the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative)
Other databases documenting Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine:
- JOWBR (JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry) of the Jewish genealogy organization on JewishGen, with epitaph data from nearly 10,000 Jewish cemeteries in more than 140 countries; as of November 2023, the database includes partial or complete data for 41 cemeteries in western Ukraine
- Great Heritage , on the website of the organization Jewish Galicia & Bukovina (JGB), including database search pages with (as of November 2023) 17 cemeteries in western Ukraine and more than 17,000 epitaphs with photos (some from former Bukovina)
- Jewish Funerary Art, a searchable database of more than 200,000 images on the Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art, a project of the Center for Jewish Art, which includes a large number of images dating from before WWII to the present of cemeteries and individual headstones in western Ukraine
- Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine by city, a category page in Wikimedia Commons with crowd-sourced images of Jewish cemeteries and headstones, including (as of November 2023) more than 50 cities in western Ukraine; some individual cemetery pages include many images
- Memory in Stone, a database project of Virtual Shtetl (an online portal of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews) covering more than 100 cemeteries in historical Greater Poland, including three in western Ukraine, with images of the sites and a small number of headstones
Resources to aid reading, interpreting, and documenting Jewish epitaphs and symbols:
- Deciphering Jewish Gravestones, on the website of B&F: Jewish Genealogy and More
- Jewish Gravestone Symbols, on the website of B&F: Jewish Genealogy and More
- Reading Hebrew Tombstones, an InfoFile on the website of JewishGen
- Tombstones, by Marcin Wodziński, on the online YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
- Jewish Cemeteries in the Classroom – An ESJF Guide, developed by ESJF (the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative)
- Jewish Cemeteries and Tourism Development – An ESJF Guide, developed by ESJF (the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative)
- The Guide: Site Surveys and Research, on the website of the project A Guide to Jewish Cemetery Preservation in Western Ukraine
- References: Site Surveys and Research, on the website of the project A Guide to Jewish Cemetery Preservation in Western Ukraine
- PEACE Project: Portal of Epigraphy, Archaeology, Conservation and Education on Jewish Funerary Culture; a search engine spanning five European and Israeli databases featuring especially the EPIDAT database and system developed by Thomas Kollatz with the Steinheim Institute of Germany; see also Kollatz's chapter on EPIDAT in the book Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy
- Folk Beliefs, Mystics, and Superstitions in Ashkenazi and Karaite Tombstone Inscription from Ukraine; Michael Nosonovsky; Association for Gravestone Studies, Markers Vol. 26, 2006; pp. 120-147.
- Old Jewish Cemeteries in Ukraine: History, Monuments, Epitaphs; Michael Nosonovsky; The Euro-Asian Jewish Yearbook – 5768, Pallada, 2009; pp. 237-261.
- Reading Hebrew Matzevot: Key Words, Abbreviations, & Acronyms, by Ronald D. Doctor, on RootsWeb
- Jewish Calendar Conversions in One Step, on One-Step Webpages by Stephen P. Morse
- Deciphering Jewish Tombstones by Madeleine Isenberg, on Academia
- The Complete Visual Guide to Jewish Headstones, on the website of Cousinist: Family Tree and Genealogy
- Мистецтво останніх слів, interview by Anna Zolotniuk with Tetiana Fedoriv of Zbarazh, in the online Ukrainian-language journal Zbruč
- The Tombstone Engraver, by Heidi M. Szpek, on the website of The Jewish Magazine
- Jewish Cemeteries and Burial Culture in Europe, in the ICOMOS online archive
- A Practical Guide to Jewish Cemeteries; Nolan Menachemson; Avotaynu; Bergenfield NJ, 2007
- Reading Stones Basics, on the website of Cemetery Conservators for United Standards
- Gravestone Symbols from A to Z; blog post on the website of BillionGraves.com