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ABOUT ROHATYN | JEWISH STONES UA
A brief description of the Jewish community and cemeteries of Rohatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, 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 Rohatyn Jewish Community

Jewish wholesale egg packing in Rohatyn, interwar period. Source: Steinmetz Family Collection.

Jews were present in Rohatyn since the 15th century, and settled as residents in Rohatyn as early as the middle of the 16th century. The Jewish community formed an integral and dynamic part of Rohatyn life for four centuries, until the Holocaust. In 1633, the Jewish community of Rohatyn was granted privileges by the Polish king Władysław IV Waza, giving them municipal rights to build a synagogue and a cemetery, and to trade. Over time the community grew and diversified; during the late Austrian era (second half of the 19th century) when Rohatyn was part of the Kingdom of Galicia, the town's more than 3000 Jews comprised over 40% of the total population of Rohatyn and its adjacent village of Babintsi.


A bird's-eye view of the destruction of Rohatyn in WWI. Source: Tomasz Wiśniewski Collection.
During World War I, Rohatyn was engulfed in battles of the eastern front and alternately occupied by Russian forces and the allied armies of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. In two waves of the shifting front during the first year of the war, the town was burned by the retreating Russian army, destroying most of Rohatyn's building stock including Jewish homes and synagogues. During the second retreat in 1915, Russians forcibly deported more than 500 Jewish men from Rohatyn to Kyiv and then to Chembar (Belinsky), Russia; the men were unable to return to Rohatyn until 1917. From 1916 the Central Powers armies led by Germany established a military camp and training center outside of Rohatyn, where they remained as reserves behind the front line for most of the rest of the war. A number of Rohatyn Jews served in the Austro-Hungarian army during this time, until the defeat of the Central Powers in the west and the collapse of the three empires in the alliance.


Hebrew school kindergarten class in Rohatyn, 1937. Source: Rohatyn Yizkor Book.
After WWI and residual regional conflicts, all of Galicia became part of the Second Polish Republic, and Rohatyn's Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish communities began rebuilding the town; the Great Synagogue was rebuilt from its ruined shell, and Jews rebuilt the market square and their homes from the rubble left by the fires. With modernization the Jewish community further diversified, now represented by Rabbinic, Hasidic, and secular Jewish families, and a growing interest especially among the young in the Zionist movement.


A view of the Rohatyn ghetto, from the 1943 Katzmann report. Source: Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.
During the Soviet occupation of Rohatyn from September 1939, Jewish ownership of businesses largely ended, and Communist administrators arrested, tried, and deported wealthy Jewish families and politicians. With the German occupation of the town from July 1941, the Holocaust in Rohatyn began. One of the earliest Jewish ghettos in the region was formed in Rohatyn, imprisoning thousands of Jews from Rohatyn and eventually incorporating Jewish communities from many of the surrounding towns and villages. A series of German aktions in Rohatyn murdered thousands of local and regional Jews at two mass killing sites on the edge of the town , and deported more than a thousand more from Rohatyn to annihilation at the death camp at Bełżec . Of the ghetto population in the several thousands, fewer than 200 Jews survived in hiding in Rohatyn and the forests for the three years of German occupation.

Only a handful of the Jewish survivors remained in the region after liberation; most emigrated to Mandatory Palestine (later Israel), western Europe, the United States, South America, Australia, and other distant places. There they joined prewar émigrés and started new families, creating a new global Rohatyn Jewish community.

About the Rohatyn Jewish Cemeteries


The "old" cemetery seen on the 1846 cadastral map sketch.
Rohatyn still has two Jewish cemeteries , known informally as "old" and "new". The first or "old" Jewish cemetery was likely begun very soon after the Jewish community of Rohatyn was granted rights in 1633, so is now nearly 400 years old. It was originally established outside of the residential areas of Rohatyn and Babintsi , though as the settlements grew over the centuries the site has become incorporated into the fabric of the city. The site is shown and labeled on an 1846 Austrian cadastral (tax parcel) map sketch, adjacent to a mound locally known as "Jerusalem hill". Although the cemetery is fairly large (about one hectare), archival records of Rohatyn municipal proceedings indicate that by the early 20th century the cemetery had run out of space for burials, and the Jewish community intended to expand the cemetery onto land it had previously purchased. Objections to that expansion from cemetery neighbors and an extended legal conflict ended with a decision to seek new land elsewhere for future burials; this separate land became the "new" cemetery.


A few surviving headstones in Rohatyn's "new" Jewish cemetery.
The second or "new" Jewish cemetery was established near the northern edge of Rohatyn sometime in the first decades of the 20th century, in an area which at the time had almost no residences. This site is smaller than the "old" cemetery, and because it was in service for only a few decades before the Holocaust, it likely has a much smaller number of prewar and wartime burials, though one Jewish memoir mentions a mass grave there also. The cemetery does not appear on any known prewar city maps (typically the maps do not extend north to the cemetery), but it is clearly visible in a 1944 aerial photo of Rohatyn taken by the German Luftwaffe during their retreat westward. The aerial photo demonstrates that the current fenced boundary of the cemetery is smaller than the site's original boundaries, but it is not clear whether there are any Jewish burials outside the fence.


Maintenance work in Rohatyn's "old" Jewish cemetery.
No burial records for either of the Rohatyn Jewish cemeteries have survived. WWI-era photographs and a 1930s film of the "old" cemetery show remarkably dense arrays of tall Jewish headstones – almost none of which still remain today. During the German occupation of WWII, and possibly also during the postwar Soviet era, nearly all of the headstones in the cemeteries which had marked the graves of Jews for hundreds of years were removed and used as construction materials for roads, new building foundations, and other masonry and fill purposes, mostly disappearing under street surfaces and building facades. The cemeteries were practically denuded of markers, and with them the physical memory of the Jewish community was destroyed at the same time.

In the 1990s survivors and descendants of Rohatyn Jewish families joined to reestablish the two cemeteries as memorial spaces, fencing the boundaries and erecting memorial stelæ to commemorate the Jewish community and its destruction. Today the cemeteries are owned by the Rohatyn civil community, and both the "old" cemetery and the "new" cemetery are regularly maintained by Rohatyn Jewish Heritage in cooperation with the Rohatyn City Council and funded by donations from Rohatyn descendants and other interested people.

About the Rohatyn Jewish Headstone Recovery Project


Headstone recovery work in progress.
Efforts to recover displaced Jewish headstones in Rohatyn began almost as soon as Jewish survivors could return to the town after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Fischel Kirschen led and funded most of the early efforts, in partnership with local teacher Mykhailo Vorobets, a longtime activist in the multicultural history of Rohatyn. By the time Kirschen passed away before 2011, the "old" Jewish cemetery had about ten intact or broken standing headstones and a similar number of loose headstone fragments and grave covers, while the "new" Jewish cemetery had three intact standing headstones, several mostly-intact downed headstones, and about 25 loose fragments.

In 2011, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage joined with the Rohatyn District Research Group to fund and coordinate Jewish headstone recovery in the town, renewing the partnership with Mykhailo Vorobets for local communication, labor arrangements, and payments. For more than a decade, recovery efforts by townspeople, by the City, and by Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and its volunteers, have gathered more than 500 headstone fragments and an occasional intact headstone from around the city and returned them to the "old" Jewish cemetery for safekeeping. Rohatyn residents have assisted the effort by reporting discovered headstones and in some cases even moving individual stone fragments to the "old" cemetery themselves.


A group of Jewish headstone fragments during recovery work from under a kitchen garden in the center of Rohatyn.

From the long history of the Rohatyn Jewish community and the known size of its population, it is evident that the recovery work to date, while significant, represents a very small percentage of the total number of headstones which once stood in the two cemeteries. It is thus expected that the recovery work will continue for decades to come.

About the Rohatyn Jewish Headstone Documentation Project


Photographing headstone inscriptions in Rohatyn's "old" Jewish cemetery in 2011.

Documenting headstone sizes and locations in Rohatyn's "old" Jewish cemetery in 2019.
Photographic documentation of existing headstones and fragments in the Rohatyn Jewish cemeteries was made by Dr. Alexander Feller and Jay Osborn for the Rohatyn District Research Group in May 2011, along with photos in that month of the first headstone recoveries since the passing of Fischel Kirschen. For the remainder of 2011 and through the years to the present, photographs of newlydiscovered headstones (both as or after they were recovered from outside the cemeteries and returned, plus occasional discoveries of sunken stones within the cemeteries) were taken by Marla and Jay Osborn for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage. The database project on this JewishStonesUA website was developed to enable organization of the partial data already available, free public access to the data in a bilingual (English and Ukrainian) format, a search function, and a scheme for collecting more complete data on the larger set of recovered stones in the future, as time and conditions allow.

Working from the photographs spanning 15 years, transcription of the hundreds of partial and complete epitaphs in Hebrew and subsequent translation into Ukrainian was done by Tetiana Fedoriv, with 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.


Tetiana working to decipher an epitaph in the new Jewish cemetery in Rohatyn.
Tetiana Fedoriv is a local historian from Zbarazh, a teacher of history and law, and a graduate of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University. She also completed the one-year Polish Government Scholarship Program for Young Scholars at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the International Interdisciplinary Certificate Program in Jewish Studies. She currently works in the Department of Tourism and Cultural Heritage Protection at the Department of Economics and Investment of the Zbarazh City Council. Among her other projects, on her own she completely documented the new Jewish cemetery in her home town for a book and for this database website, and has significantly contributed to the data for every other town covered here.

To aid in organizing the Rohatyn headstone images and data for this database, the individual stones and fragments were divided and coded into three categories to distinguish those which are grounded and likely to remain where they have always been found, those which are loose and almost certainly separated from the graves over which they originally stood, and those which we know only from prewar photographs and which may never be found. The three categories are identified in each stone ID with a prefix (RG, RL, or RX), and are briefly described here:


Vasyl, Marla, and Jay standing at the oldest surviving headstone in the old Jewish cemetery in Rohatyn.
RG – Grounded Stones: There are only a total of 54 headstones still anchored in the ground in the two cemeteries, and of those most are stumps broken off near the ground with no legible inscriptions, meaning the larger parts of the stones with information about the deceased are either among the loose stone fragments recovered since Ukrainian independence, or still hidden under Rohatyn streets and in buildings, or lost forever. Three remarkably intact and ornate stones still stand in the new cemetery; in the old cemetery, a few stones still stand upright or leaning, most of which are broken with incomplete epitaphs. However, the oldest known intact surviving stone, of Elisha ben Yehoshua who died in the mid-18th century, still stands in the old cemetery and is a frequent gathering point for visitors thanks to its prominent place near the top of the site. Because the stone was lying flat in the cemetery 30 years ago, it is possible that the stone had been recovered and returned to the cemetery before then, and was set upright later at a spot which does not correspond to the original grave. But there is some solace that the stone has survived at all.


Vasyl recovering stones RL0419 and RL0420 from a tree in 2022, These fragments from the same original headstone were returned to the old Jewish cemetery.
RL – Loose Stones: This category makes up roughly 80% of the entries in the database to date, more than 400 photographed and documented individual headstones and fragments in total. The majority of these were recovered from around Rohatyn and returned to the Jewish cemeteries since 2011, but some had been recovered earlier, including most of the large and intact loose stones. In nearly every case, it is not known where in the cemeteries the grave associated with the stone is located, though most clearly originated from somewhere in the old cemetery. Unfortunately, most of the loose stones are fragments, typically either a half or a third of an original stone (presumably broken at the time of their theft from the cemeteries for use as building and road reinforcement material), though a great many are smaller and often irregular fragments. Because of the damage to these headstones it can be difficult or impossible to identify names and dates in the epitaphs; some fragments have no remaining epitaph at all. Where a headstone or fragment was discovered outside the cemeteries in pieces, the recovery effort endeavored to keep the pieces together; those pieces were assigned separate stone ID numbers but also assigned a group number to allow tracking and interpretation as for a single stone. (This group field also allows the virtual joining of other separate fragments which appear to be from a single original stone.)


The red box highlights stone RX0221 for Sara, daughter of Yisrael Yehuda, died in late 1913, in a prewar photo provided to RJH by collector Tomasz Wiśniewski. Further research identified her as Sara Kreisler, died at age 70 and buried in Rohatyn.
RX – Missing Stones: This category attempts to recover images and epitaphs from Rohatyn Jewish headstones which are known only through pre-WWII photographs. To date, eleven historical photographs have been provided to Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and the Rohatyn District Research Group by an art institute, a library, a museum, and a longtime collector of postcards and other images of prewar Jewish life. Some of the original negatives were labeled "Rohatyn" by the image authors, others by later researchers based on the files in which they were found or clues in the images themselves. To date none of the 58 headstones fully or partially visible in the photos match any among the documented grounded and loose physical stones now in the Rohatyn Jewish cemeteries; these photos may forever be the only record of the epitaphs they depict. Unfortunately the image quality of some of the photographs is poor; advanced image processing may be required to enhance and extract portions of those epitaphs, and even to verify that some photographs were taken in the Rohatyn cemeteries. However, some of the photos are quite clear and beautiful, and further research confirms the headstones as belonging to known individuals buried in prewar Rohatyn; the highlighted stone in the image shown here is a wonderful example.

Jewish vital (birth, marriage, death) and other records for prewar Rohatyn are incomplete; a very good summary of what is currently available has been compiled with indexing and image links by the Rohatyn District Research Group. Religious and civil records have made it possible in several cases so far, including the example above, to overcome the traditional Jewish convention of omitting surnames on headstones in favor of patronymics, or to bridge over other gaps in the engraved record to identify the unique individuals to whom these stones once belonged. Jewish descendants of Rohatyn families and other interested researchers can help to fill in missing information at any time; the database is easy to update/correct.

A "Final" Note

Death is final, and the gradual decay of the headstones which marked the graves of Rohatyn's Jews is inevitable, but this database and the volunteer effort to build it is an attempt to allow the lost Jewish community of Rohatyn to linger in awareness and memory for a while longer, both in the city itself and online. As noted above, only a very small fraction of the thousands of headstones which once stood over graves in the Rohatyn Jewish cemeteries have been found to date, and the labor to transcribe and translate the fragmented epitaph record into this database still continues. The Holocaust and the postwar Soviet occupation of Rohatyn cast a long shadow over Jewish heritage and memory in the city; although damaged, the record in stone that this database presents can still illuminate some of the lives of those who came before.


Images of stone RL0090 shortly after its recovery from under a roadway in 2012 and its gradual decay over a dozen years in
Rohatyn's old Jewish cemetery.
References/Sources