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ABOUT LVIV | JEWISH STONES UA
A brief description of the Jewish community and cemetery of Lviv, Ukraine, together with information about the Jewish headstone recovery project there, and the documentation project which created this database. Relevant information sources are at the end of this page.
About the Lviv Jewish Communities

Delegates to the first convention of Jewish Socialists of Galicia in Lviv in 1905.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The social, religious, economic, and cultural histories of the Jewish communities of Lviv have been well documented both before and after the Holocaust, and research and discussion continues today, so only a very brief outline is presented here. The Encyclopedia Shel Galuyot: Lwów (see the References/Sources section) describes the early communities as "suburban" (settled around the original city center in the Krakivska district) and "city" (settled adjacent to the new city center from the 14th century), as well as a Karaite community. Jewish traders visited and settled in and around Lviv from at least the start of the second millennium, and became subjects of the successive rulers of Kyivan Rus, Halych-Volhynia, the Kingdom of Poland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Kingdom of Galicia under the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Second Polish Republic, to the start of World War II.


The Tempel Synagogue in Lviv (destroyed in WWII), from a 1917 postcard. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
By the 16th century there were nearly a thousand Jews resident in Lviv, working as merchants and moneylenders as well as leaseholders and collectors of royal income from customs and tolls. Over time and as their population grew, Jews built numerous synagogues and other religious buildings, organized into self-governing communities, attended universities and entered the professions. In the late 19th century, the Jewish population grew rapidly, from about 31,000 in 1880 to 57,000 in 1910; before World War I, Jews made up more than 25% of the city's total population. The interwar period continued the trend of significant growth, beginning at around 77,000 in 1921 and reaching nearly 110,000 by 1939 – at the time, roughly one-third of the total population.


The Jewish community hospital in Lviv (still in service), seen ca. 1925.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Holocaust in Lviv was as intense as Jewish life had been there before the war. Tens of thousands of Jews fled German-occupied Poland from 1939 to 1941, only to join the earlier residents in their fate after Operation Barbarossa. Tens of thousands died in pogroms, in the huge ghetto, in the Janowska concentration camp, and especially at the Bełżec death camp. Only about 3,400 Jews, roughly 3% of the prewar population, registered in Lviv after German forces were driven out of the city in 1944.

Unlike in most cities and towns in western Ukraine, a small Jewish community continues and thrives in Lviv today, with an active synagogue, social and charitable organizations, and a small number of surviving prewar Jewish heritage sites. Volunteer organizations composed of Jewish and non-Jewish Ukrainian and foreign members work to uncover, protect, and preserve the heritage which remains in the city and surrounding areas.

About the Lviv Jewish Cemeteries


A section of the 1849/1853 cadastral map of Lviv, showing the old Jewish cemetery (in red) several of the larger synagogues (in blue), and the central city square (in yellow).
Source: Przemyśl Archive and Gesher Galicia.

Although only a single Jewish cemetery remains in Lviv (in a somewhat damaged state), before World War II there were four major Jewish cemeteries within the boundaries of the city and its attached suburbs; these cemeteries are documented on historical maps and in modern resources.

The first or "old" Jewish cemetery of Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv was established west of the historic city center, on a tract of land which now lies behind the Jewish hospital on vul. Yakova Rappaporta; it is located at GPS 49.84599, 24.01769. The cemetery is truly ancient, one of the oldest recorded in Europe, with a first mention in records in 1414 CE though it was likely in service a century or more earlier. The cemetery expanded in stages over nearly 500 years until the space became quite large, around three hectares, and is clearly marked on many maps from the Austrian era, including both street maps and the cadastral map drawn from an 1849 land survey. When the cemetery closed officially in 1855 and burials began elsewhere, the old cemetery contained an estimated 25 to 30 thousand graves, many with ornate stone markers. In disuse after its closure, the cemetery fell into partial ruin during the following years, but restoration work was undertaken on the service buildings and hundreds of the headstones in the first decades of the 20th century.


An excerpt from the 1943 Katzmann report showing Jewish headstones in Lviv destined for use as building materials. Source: IPN.
Under the German occupation of World War II, large parts of the old cemetery were systematically destroyed and the headstones "harvested" for construction work; the infamous Katzmann report of 1943 includes a photograph of an intact section of one of the Lviv Jewish cemeteries with the caption boasting of the "2000 cubic meters of building materials gained from a Jewish cemetery in Lemberg". After the war, the new Soviet authorities completed the destruction of the cemetery, removing the remaining headstones for paving streets, squares, and the courtyards of public buildings, and for the construction of retaining walls around the city. The large open Krakivsky market was established on the land of the old cemetery in 1947.


A walk among the postwar graves and markers in the Lviv new Jewish cemetery in 2011. Source: RJH.
The second or "new" Jewish cemetery of Lviv opened just days after the closure of the old cemetery in 1855 at a site northwest of the historic city center, GPS 49.85098, 24.00146 at the west end of vul. Zolota and near the large Christian cemetery known as "Yanivske". This cemetery also expanded at least twice with further land parcel purchases, and the growing wealth of the Jewish community enabled the construction of several religious (preburial) and administrative buildings near the cemetery entrance. Like the old cemetery, the new cemetery was also heavily destroyed under the German occupation of World War II: the preburial house was demolished, and thousands of grave markers were toppled, removed, and repurposed as building materials – most of the headstones recovered during the past decade from under streets and in walls in Lviv (discussed further below) likely originated from the new cemetery, as they carry dates from the first decades of the 20th century. The new cemetery also contains mass graves, where Jews executed in Lviv during the German occupation were buried. After the war, the survivors of Lviv's Jewish community began using the new cemetery again; walking the paths of the cemetery today shows many postwar Soviet-style grave markers and grave fences.


The Jewish cemetery in the Kulparkiv neighborhood, seen ca. 1930.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Two suburban Jewish cemeteries were also established in Lviv. One was begun in 1872 in the Znesinnia district about two kilometers northeast of the historic city center at GPS 49.85431, 24.05220 according to ESJF and from historical maps, just north of the Lviv castle hill and Kaiserwald; the cemetery served Jewish residents of several districts ringing the old city to the north and west. The Znesinnia cemetery was destroyed during Soviet times and the land was repurposed for a transport depot; today the site is overbuilt with warehouses and industrial facilities. The other suburban cemetery was established around 1884 in the Kulparkiv neighborhood about three kilometers southwest of the historic city center at GPS 49.82062, 23.99455 according to ESJF (and from historical maps); this cemetery was also destroyed during or after the Holocaust and today a concrete products factory operates on the site.

About the Lviv Jewish Headstone Recovery Project


A view of vul. Barvinok and some of the headstones recovered by volunteers in 2018. Source: RJH.
Most of the tombstones taken from Lviv Jewish cemeteries during and after World War II remain under roads and buildings in the city; the precise location of the vast majority of those stones is unknown. From time to time, small or large numbers of displaced headstones and fragments are discovered during road or utility works, building demolition or reconstruction, or even openly in pavement in public squares or sidewalks. Often, passing citizens who notice unearthed headstones will contact Sasha Nazar of the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv (and a longtime leader of the Lviv Volunteer Center, or LVC), who then attempts to organize recovery and removal of the stones to the new Jewish cemetery in Lviv.


Considerable effort was required to extract each headstone from under vul. Barvinok.
Source: RJH.
The largest recovery effort to date in Lviv took place in summer 2018, when well over a hundred largely intact Jewish headstones were extracted from under vul. Barvinok in a southwestern neighborhood of the city. Local residents of the street were aware from past utility work there that at least a few stones were underneath the asphalt, and in 2017 they contacted Nazar to inform him that some headstones and fragments had been removed by utility crews and placed at the side of the street; it was a few weeks before the LVC could arrange to remove the stones and transport them to the new Jewish cemetery.


Exposing, lifting, and stacking recovered headstones proceeded over several days on vul. Barvinok. Source: RJH.


The addition of hydraulic machinery on vul. Barvinok accelerated the exposure and lifting of headstones.
Source: RJH.
The following year, resurfacing of the street had commenced, exposing many more headstones under the road surface. Nazar pleaded with the local city authorities for time to remove the exposed stones, and then quickly organized ad hoc teams of volunteers to help with the manual extraction of as many stones as possible, moving the loose stones to the sides of the street. During this time, the street was unusable by cars, so the work had to proceed as quickly as possible. Social media posts by volunteers of the recovery work in progress gained considerable attention, which also raised funding by the German foreign office so that a truck and hydraulic lifters could be rented to expedite the work and transport the recovered stones to the new cemetery. The overall effort, which spanned six work days over two weeks plus additional days for transport, was documented in detail as a case study on a website documenting Jewish heritage preservation practices in western Ukraine (see the References/Sources section).


As the work proceeded over two weeks on vul. Barvinok, the recovered headstones accumulated on the sidewalks. Source: RJH.


Sasha Nazar points to a Jewish headstone embedded in a retaining wall on vul. Konotopska in Lviv in early 2020. Source: RJH.
Other discoveries followed the major recovery work on vul. Barvinok and in the same area of the city but on adjacent streets. One quick LVC volunteer recovery event in February 2020 extracted some 50 Jewish headstone fragments from a retaining wall behind a house on vul. Konotopska (a block away and parallel to vul. Barvinok); see the References/Sources section for an online news report about that event. Then in April and June of 2021, several loose Jewish headstone fragments were discovered and then recovered by the LVC adjacent to campus buildings and the botanical garden of the National Forestry University on vul. Pryrodna, a short distance from vul. Konotopska.


Volunteers working to recover fragments of Jewish headstones on vul. Konotopska in 2020. Source: RJH.

Smaller recoveries are also organized occasionally in response to reports of single loose stones, or stones embedded in surfaces around the city of Lviv. The heritage activists associated with the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv and other groups anticipate that additional large groups of Jewish headstones will surface in the future, e.g. from the as-yet unexplored block of vul. Barvinok.

About the Unrecovered Jewish Headstones at the Site of the Former Prison on vul. Lontskoho

Not all displaced Jewish headstones uncovered in Lviv can be recovered and transported to the cemeteries soon after their discovery. A large collection of headstones currently remains at the site of the former "Lontsky" prison southwest of the Lviv city center, GPS 49.8341, 24.0183, awaiting an opportunity and the resources for recovery, but well over 250 of those stones and fragments have been documented for this database.


Jewish headstones under asphalt in the yard of the former prison at the start of excavation in July 2020. Source: Sofia Yavorska for Gal-info.
The discovery and current holding site for the stones is a notorious building complex today bounded by the streets named vul. Kopernika, vul. Bandera, and vul. Kalynets; the last of these streets was known as ul. Łąckiego (named for the 17th-century Polish war hero Eliasz Jan Łącki) from the 19th century until 1943, as Eschenbachgasse (to commemorate a German-language writer) during the last two years of the German occupation of World War II, as вул. Лонцького (Lontskoho, the Ukrainian transliteration of Łąckiego) during the first two years of the second Soviet occupation, then as вул. Брюллова (for Karl Bryullov, a 19th-century Russian painter) from 1946 until 2022. The current street name honors the Ukrainian poet and Soviet dissident Iryna Kalynets (née Stasiv), who was arrested by the Soviet KGB in January 1972 and incarcerated at the prison on vul. Lontskoho for six months during their investigation; she was convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and sentenced to six years of hard labor in Mordovia (now part of the Russian Federation) followed by three years of exile in the Chita Oblast (in Siberia).


The headstones laid out in the yard after excavation in July 2020. Source: Sasha Nazar.
The notoriety of the site derives from the long history of political imprisonment, torture, and killing which took place there, with the terror persisting (and intensifying) even as governments changed. The site's history is contentious, with some versions exhibiting omissions, falsehoods, and propaganda to favor the ethnic or political group in power over others. Part of the complex was constructed near the end of the 19th century as an Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie, a militarized police force responsible for public order. After World War I, the new Polish government constructed offices at the site for a department of the state police responsible for suppression of anti-government organizations, e.g. the OUN and Communists; this added building became a detention center for political prisoners.


Headstones piled up in the yard after excavation in July 2020. Source: Sasha Nazar.
At the start of World War II in 1939 and the occupation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, the building complex became a a large NKVD prison (one of several operating in the city) as well as a regional state security administration office. After Nazi Germany suddenly invaded Soviet-held territories in June 1941 and the Soviets hastily withdrew eastward, most prisoners in Lviv could not be evacuated and were murdered by Soviet security staff at the prisons, in basements, cells, and in the prison yard; more than a thousand Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews were killed at the vul. Lontskoho site by guns and/or grenades and buried in the prison yard or bricked into their cells. When German Wehrmacht units arrived in Lviv shortly after, the bodies were discovered, the victims misrepresented, and the killings falsely blamed on "Jewish Bolsheviks", triggering a series of anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres in July by German Einsatzgruppen death squads, the OUN, and Lviv residents, which further supported German propaganda.


Most of the excavated headstones are fragments, and some are worn illegibly, but many have enough epitaph data to name the deceased. Source: Sasha Nazar.
From then until 1944, the prison was employed as a Gestapo detention center and an office of the Einsatzgruppen. It is very likely that during this time, Jewish headstones stolen from the new ("Yanivske") Jewish cemetery in Lviv were used as paving material in the prison yard, as under vul. Barvinok (described above), while the near-complete extinction of Lviv's Jewish population proceeded in and around the city. With the return of the Red Army to Lviv in 1944, control of the site reverted to the NKVD, and following the war to the NKVD's successor organization the KGB, continuing the emphasis on state security and secret police; during this time anti-Soviet Ukrainians (OUN and UPA) were imprisoned there. When Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, ownership of the prison site passed to the Ukrainian state security service (the SBU); a museum managed by the SBU opened on the site in 2009, intending to memorialize the victims of occupation regimes.


Some of the great variety of headstone styles, materials, and epitaphs. Source: Sasha Nazar.
Rumors about Jewish headstones under the asphalt in the prison yard had circulated in Jewish heritage groups for many years since Ukraine's independence, as had rumors about the bodies of additional victims still remaining in the yard's soil. An investigative archaeological excavation in 2015 and 2016 turned up the remains of 23 victims in the yard, and research continued. In early July 2020, additional excavations searching for human remains were begun, and immediately an extensive layer of Jewish headstones was discovered and extracted; most of the headstones were laid out in the yard facing up or down, but a portion of the headstones and fragments were piled nearby by the machinery.

As noted above, the stones remain in place in the yard of the former prison, now a museum. The stones are protected from further abuse there, though the circumstances are not ideal for preservation. Constraints on resources and manpower due to the Russian war of aggression inhibit arrangements to move the headstones and fragments to the new Jewish cemetery in Lviv, but Nazar and other heritage activists remain alert to opportunities

About the Lviv Jewish Headstone Documentation Project


Sorting and stacking headstones in the new Jewish cemetery for a future memorial monument always requires muscle. Source: RJH.
Documenting each recovered headstone for the database typically includes photographing (sometimes after light cleaning, or wetting the stone face to improve legibility of the epitaph), line-by-line transcription of the Hebrew and other (Polish, German, etc.) characters of the main and supplemental epitaphs, translation of the epitaphs to Ukrainian and English, and uploading of the image and text data to the database. Each of the volunteer headstone recovery actions which added stones to this database demonstrated a common issue in recovery work: there are rarely enough volunteers and enough time available during the necessarily brief actions to fully document every stone as it is extracted from roads and other public spaces before their transport to safety in the cemetery. Nonetheless, even during the somewhat chaotic multi-day flash-mob-style volunteer recovery effort on vul. Barvinok in 2018, photos of headstones emerging from under the street were taken by many volunteers and passers-by, including more than 300 photos of the stones and the work process by Marla Raucher Osborn of the Ukrainian NGO Rohatyn Jewish Heritage.


Cleaning the faces of the recovered headstones makes the epitaphs more legible, but not all of the texts can be read, even in part. Source: RJH.
During the two-day follow-up stone sorting and photographing effort in the Lviv new Jewish cemetery in September 2024, the recovered stones were separated and lifted into vertical rows by members of the Lviv Volunteer Center including Sasha Nazar, Stanislav Kyryllov, Ilya Vollis, Aleksey Vollis, Dmytro Lalinich, and others. During this process the stones were cleaned and photographed by volunteers Tetiana Fedoriv, Iryna Nebesna, Marla Raucher Osborn, and Jay Osborn on behalf of the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv; more than 800 additional headstone images were created during that action, from which the best (most legible) documentary work was selected for the database. Christian Herrmann, Sasha Nazar, and Marla Raucher Osborn contributed an additional hundred images of stones both in situ before other recovery actions between 2017 and 2021, and at the new cemetery after recovery. A small number of additional images of displaced Lviv headstones and the recovery projects are included in Wikimedia Commons (see the References/Sources section) but are not included in the database because of duplication.

For the headstones extracted from under asphalt in the yard of the former prison on vul. Lontskoho, Sasha Nazar of the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv was granted brief access to the yard to take photos a few weeks after the excavation, in late July 2020. Nazar took more than 200 photos in less than half an hour, from which the documentation of those headstones and fragments in this database was made.


Photographing one of the hundreds of Jewish headstones in good light for later transcription and translation. Source: RJH.

Working from the photographs, transcription of the epitaphs in Hebrew and subsequent translation into Ukrainian was done by Tetiana Fedoriv, with assistance from Sasha Nazar and technical support by Vasyl Yuzyshyn. Translation from Hebrew and Ukrainian to English was done by Jay Osborn and Marla Raucher Osborn. Image and text data entry and verification was done by Vasyl Yuzyshyn with support from Jay Osborn.

Not all of the displaced headstones and fragments recovered in Lviv have been documented, and of course only a small fraction of the thousands of headstones displaced during and after WWII have been recovered at all. Fortunately, updates, corrections, and additions to this section of the database can be made at any time.

References/Sources