RJH Annual Report 2024

This is a descriptive annual report for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage (RJH) covering the calendar year 2024, representing our eighth consecutive year of operation as a volunteer-led non-profit NGO in Ukraine. As in past years, this report summarizes our project progress and events together with an outline of our NGO finances. This year our organization struggled even more in an irregular work mode caused by the ongoing Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, which is impacting our future plans as well. See our report for 2023 for comparison (prior years’ reports are also accessible in the news section of this website). Many sections of this review are hyperlinked to pages with more information, on or off of our website.

Ця сторінка також доступна українською.

CLEARING AND CARE OF THE JEWISH CEMETERIES AND MASS GRAVE SITES

For a second full year, all of the care and maintenance of the Jewish burial sites in Rohatyn was managed for us by two local men working for hire. Continuing the approach we first trialed in 2022, we renewed the working relationship again this year with the same men and they served our needs well throughout the vegetation growing season, from mid-spring to mid-autumn.

Our news report from the end of October records the details of this year’s effort, which included as usual cutting and removal of dead tree branches at the sites. During the season the men send us a number of photos of the four sites (two cemeteries and two mass graves) so we can follow the progress during periods when we cannot visit Rohatyn ourselves. We are grateful to both Ihor Zalypko and Vasyl Yurkiv for their hard work again this year, and we are especially pleased that they have both agreed to continue this work again in 2025. Both men regularly monitor the sites to alert us for any needed maintenance or repairs.

Last year, for the first time since we began visiting the city for heritage work in 2011, we recovered no Jewish headstones from areas of town outside the two Jewish cemeteries. However, at the end of February this year we were alerted by Tetiana Petriv, director of the museum at the UNESCO-listed Holy Spirit wooden church in Rohatyn (and a steadfast supporter of all types heritage preservation in the city and region), that a large headstone fragment had been discovered near the property at vul. Zavoda 10A, where a number of large stone fragments had been found in five previous years. Tetiana helped to make arrangements for recovery of the stone, and it was returned to the old Jewish cemetery for us by city workers under the direction of Vasyl Myts. We suspect that the smaller number of headstone recoveries during the past two years is another change brought by the ongoing war, as both the City and private property owners are postponing the kinds of projects which reveal repurposed headstones. We still have many friends in Rohatyn who have notified us of discovered stones in past years, so we remain confident that when stones are found, we will hear and be able to respond.

HERITAGE SIGNS FOR THE JEWISH KILLING SITES AND MASS GRAVES

Apart from ongoing care for the Jewish burial sites, our only physical project in Rohatyn during 2024 was the development and installation of large-format information signs at Rohatyn’s two wartime Jewish killing sites and mass graves. In 2022 and 2023 we had partnered with the NGO ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative for development and installation of new signs at each of the cemeteries, and early this year we created new content for signs at the two mass grave sites, both in fields south of town (for the March 1942 killing event) and north of town at the vodokanal facility (for the June 1943 ghetto liquidation).

As at the cemeteries, the signs at the mass graves incorporate our English-language texts about the history of Rohatyn’s Jewish community and about the individual sites, with translations to Ukrainian by our friends Natalia Kurishko and Vasyl Yuzyshyn, with editing by our friend Iryna Nebesna, and to Hebrew by Rohatyn descendant Ruthy Erez. The signs are enhanced by a map of the Jewish and other heritage sites in Rohatyn, and by a handful of prewar photographs of Rohatyn Jewish family members generously donated by Rohatyn descendants, members of the online discussion association and web resource the Rohatyn District Research Group (RDRG).

ESJF arranged for our friend Sasha Kolb, a member of the Lviv Jewish community, to collect the signs and prepare their frame materials in Lviv, and then transport everything to Rohatyn for installation, with a small amount of help from Marla and me. As for much of our work in Rohatyn, successful completion of the project required many cooperating hands to overcome obstacles and interruptions due to the war, but we are grateful for the help our friends and colleagues provided and we are satisfied that the signs will serve an important purpose for several or many years to come, providing historical context for visitors to the two mass grave sites, whether Jewish and other tourists or the Rohatyn region population.

REMEMBERING LOCAL HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Again this year we resolved to defy the war and hold memorial ceremonies at both of the Rohatyn Jewish mass grave sites on dates which recall the two largest Holocaust killing events in the city. Marla and I are grateful to the friends in Rohatyn and the region who joined us for both of these commemorations.

At the grave site south of Rohatyn, on March 20 we observed the 82nd anniversary of the first major aktion during the German occupation, during which more than 3000 Jewish citizens of Rohatyn and nearby villages were executed in a single day. Marla and I were joined for a prayer and a commemorative speech by Iryna Nebesna, a friend and journalist in Ternopil who has supported us and others in many heritage research and preservation events across western Ukraine, and by Alex Dunai, a friend for many years as well as a genealogist and family history researcher who has aided many descendants of Galician Jewish families. As usual for our first trip to Rohatyn since winter, we also visited all of the heritage sites and spoke with our local friends and colleagues in the city.

On June 6th we marked the 81st anniversary of the start of the Rohatyn Jewish ghetto liquidation during which thousands of Jews from Rohatyn and many towns in the Rohatyn district were assembled, marched, and killed at a clay quarry site (today the city’s vodokanal) north of the city over three days. We were joined for this solemn ceremony by Ihor Zalypko, engineer at Rohatyn’s vodokanal and who for the past several years has been caring for the Jewish mass grave sites in Rohatyn, and again by Alex Dunai, friend, lecturer, and family researcher.

As noted last year, our concepts for enhancing the physical protection of the mass grave at the south site have been set aside because of the resource constraints due to the war and for lack of the significant funds needed to undertake the construction work. Our efforts through our friend and NGO attorney Wito Nadaszkiewicz to secure legal registration and protection of the Jewish mass grave sites in Rohatyn are stalled while regional and national authorities are heavily focused on managing war-related relief efforts. We are reassured that the Jewish grave sites continue to get needed regular attention and care, and that circumstances in Ukraine today have further raised awareness of past victims of militarized terror on these lands.

Local discussion and news coverage of our information signs project at the Jewish mass graves helped to prompt a local man to report to Mr. Zalypko that while operating construction machinery in 1999 at a commercial site not far from the Rohatyn train station, his machine became stuck in an area of unstable soil. While the machine was being extracted, an elderly man who lived above the work site walked down and told the workers that during the German occupation of Rohatyn in World War II some German soldiers had killed Jews on the spot and the bodies were buried there. With the two known and marked Jewish mass graves, and a likely mass grave in the new Jewish cemetery (as described in Borys Arsen’s memoir), this site could represent a fourth Jewish mass grave in Rohatyn, though we are not currently able to further research this possibility.

OTHER PROJECTS IN ROHATYN AND THE REGION

Although the three-year Ukrainian-German program Connecting Memory in which we participated ended at the close of 2023, we remain in contact with the coordinators (now each in new roles in other organizations) and their network of specialist historians and researchers. The program end interrupted a joint project in progress between Connecting Memory and a German university using historical aerial photographs (like the 1944 Luftwaffe photo of Rohatyn) to help identify new sites of significance related to WWII and the years of Soviet occupation. With the project on hold, key program coordinator Svetlana Burmistr provided us with three detailed aerial photographs of the Rohatyn region taken by high-altitude CIA spy planes in the 1970s and 1980s over what was then the Soviet Union. We have already made an initial review of the images; two show the city of Rohatyn, and at least one of those will provide a useful follow-up to the 1944 photo when presented in overlay format. We intend to process the photos in 2025 and include them in the Mapping Rohatyn collection on this website. We are grateful to Svetlana and her colleagues in the Connecting Memory program for their continued support of our heritage and memory projects.

This year we continued to participate in a project loosely organized by our close friend Sasha Nazar for the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv and the Lviv Volunteer Center of Hesed-Arieh, to recover Jewish headstones displaced from other cemeteries in the region during or after WWII and to return them to their burial grounds of origin (or if the cemeteries are destroyed, to other safe Jewish cultural sites). This regional work parallels our own headstone recovery project in Rohatyn, and we have reported about the effort in annual reports in 2018 and in 2019, as well as on Facebook, and in detail in a case study documented as part of Marla’s Fulbright-sponsored research project on preserving Jewish heritage in western Ukraine. The work is almost entirely volunteer-driven, in groups numbering from a few to a few dozen people, and has been ongoing now under Sasha’s leadership for nearly a decade.

A new component of this effort is the documentation of the symbols and epitaphs on recovered headstones in both photographs and transcriptions, with translations to Ukrainian and English where possible. Working with our colleagues, in 2022 Rohatyn Jewish Heritage architected a database to capture images and texts in a searchable format, initially for recovered Rohatyn headstone fragments but expandable to include all of the past and current recovery projects in the region. This year we populated the database with smaller sets of recovered stones from Dobromyl, Sokal, and Zbarazh, and as the year ends we are currently working on the more than 200 Jewish headstones and fragments recovered and returned to the new Jewish cemetery in Lviv. The database website, known as Jewish Stones UA, has now been published, including not only the searchable data but also for each town a brief history of its Jewish community, the cemetery (or cemeteries), the headstone recovery project, and the documentation project. The photos and texts give a glimpse of the many volunteers involved in these recovery and documentation projects – and of the key people who volunteer again and again to bring these broken stones back to life.

The database is open to all for browsing and searching in both Ukrainian and English (the Hebrew epitaph texts can also be searched), and we are working with other database projects such as JewishGen’s JOWBR to include our data in better-known resources. An initial draft of the Rohatyn section of the database which served as a technical trial for us is online, and photographs of the more than 500 headstone fragments recovered during the past decades (plus a few prewar photographs) have been organized, but the transcription and translation task will require considerable effort in 2025 and beyond, hopefully with volunteer contributions from the Jewish descendant community of the Rohatyn District Research Group (RDRG).

Not all of our activities in 2024 involved heavy lifting or technical challenges. In September this year Marla was very pleased to participate in an event in the public program called “Homing” organized by the Center for Urban History in Lviv (five years ago the Center hosted Marla’s Fulbright research project). Within the program, Marla joined a public discussion moderated by Vladyslava Moskalets, senior lecturer at the Department of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University and coordinator of its Jewish Studies program as well as a long-time researcher at the Center for Urban History, and in dialog with Areta Kovalska, an American with Ukrainian and Polish roots who has lived for many years in Lviv and who created and curates the multicultural (Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish – and more) history blog “Forgotten Galicia”, one of the best windows we know into how the past in Lviv and the region surfaces in fascinating ways today.

The discussion was called “Remembering Home: Stories of Returns” and took as its departure point the fact that both Areta and Marla were born abroad to families which had left eastern Galicia (today’s western Ukraine), and both made an intentional choice to return to Lviv and the region to live and work. It was a very interesting discussion about the emotional and intellectual decisions and effects of returning by choice to places of family memory – including some dark memories for both Areta’s and Marla’s families. Lviv gets many foreign visitors, including some who come because of past family connections and others who stay for a while for research or business, but people born into diaspora families who return to live for years in the region are very rare, and it was clear that the audience for this discussion was intrigued by the motivations and the experiences of both women. A video of the entire 90-minute discussion in both English and Ukrainian is available on the Center’s event page. We encourage everyone to further explore the Forgotten Galicia website and Facebook page, and the breadth and depth of the programs of the Center for Urban History.

ADMINISTRATION

Our friend Wito Nadaszkiewicz who serves as our NGO’s attorney and chief executive, and who is a longtime regional heritage advocate, supported our NGO again this year through his firm LawCraft Legal Services and Consulting in Lviv, continuing with his staff attorney Bohdan Zdanevych to maintain our NGO in legal and tax compliance with Ukraine’s laws, as they have since our incorporation in late 2016, and between them they manage all other corporate administration for us as well.

This care is remarkable considering the challenges created by the war, and especially because of the almost superhuman effort both of these men make to support Ukraine and Ukrainians through their separate and joint non-profit initiatives Poland Helps and Siepomaga, and You Will Never Be Alone, each of which raises ever-increasing funding amounts, then purchases and delivers humanitarian aid (food and medicines, clothing, space heaters and cookstoves, etc.) into Ukraine for benefit of the civilians who are internally displaced or trapped in places near the front battle lines, as well as military scoping equipment and drones, specialized clothing, blankets, medical devices, hospital supplies, prosthetic devices and medical support for injured soldiers, and much more. This year they also increased their development and management of first aid training classes and other self-protection and quick-response courses for civilians, coordinated volunteer French-Ukrainian bread-baking classes and donations in Kherson, and in their scarce free time also donated blood several times to aid the wounded. Fortunately our NGO’s legal needs are relatively light now, and the war relief efforts of Wito and Bohdan can continue to take top priority.

FINANCE

As always since the legal founding of RJH we maintained dual-track US and Ukrainian bank accounts to keep our NGO flexible and reliable in receiving donations and covering project expenses. We aim for transparency by publishing our NGO income and expenses here, as in past years. We also record and acknowledge all donations (26 individual donations in 2024), and every donation goes directly to project expenses (less banking and transfer fees). Marla and I contribute additional money from our personal savings to cover all administrative, tax, and operational costs, including our own salaries, plus some incidental project expenses (e.g. we continue to personally fund the non-Rohatyn portion of the headstone database project).

Donations were higher this year than last year, and slightly higher than 2022, but low compared to many past years. In light of the ongoing Russian hostilities in Ukraine and our inability to plan and launch major practical projects, the loss of supporting funding is understandable. Project expenses exceeded donations again this year, in part because of our decision to pay forward for the burial sites groundskeeping for 2025.

NGO income and expenses for the calendar year 2024 are listed below in US$ and using a nominal exchange rate of US$1=41UAH to allow for transfer fees and rate fluctuation:

NGO projects & operations: US+UA bank accounts
  start balance:                   +$11,632
  -----------------------------------------
  2024 burial sites groundskeeping -$ 2,800
  2025 burial sites groundskeeping -$ 3,400
  headstone recovery               -$     0
  misc. project labor              -$     0
  tools, parts & accessories       -$     0
  ground transport Lviv/Rohatyn    -$   600
  transcription & translation      -$ 1,448
  signage: design, const, erect    -$ 1,030
  printing, books, archive fees    -$     0
  project legal services           -$(comp)
  website domain, hosting, apps    -$   430
  banking & wire transfer fees     -$     0
  -----------------------------------------
  net change 2024:                 -$ 9,708
  carryover 2023 expenses debt     -$     0
  individual donations via GG      +$ 6,174
  other donations                  +$     0
  -----------------------------------------
  end project banking balance:     +$ 8,098
  2024 unreimbursed expenses       -$     0
  -----------------------------------------
  net end project balance:         +$ 8,098
  [balance = +$1,402+$6,696 US, +$0 UA, -$0 debt]

NGO administration, salaries, etc.: UA bank account
  start balance:                   -$ 1,610
  -----------------------------------------
  permit and gov't fees            -$   767
  accounting and bank fees         -$ 1,335
  salaries+benefits+taxes          -$ 4,316
  -----------------------------------------
  net change 2024:                 -$ 6,418
  Osborn personal contribution     +$ 3,767
  Osborn US transfer reserve       +$ 6,696
  -----------------------------------------
  end admin balance:               +$ 2,435

The figures shown here are current, and may include updates since first reporting to include late-year donations or expenses, and a final reckoning by our NGO accountant.

As always, this year we gladly and gratefully thank Gesher Galicia for its volunteer contributions, and in particular their Membership Chair Marsha Shapiro, CFO/Treasurer Darcy Stamler, and President Steven Turner, for making the donations process to Rohatyn Jewish Heritage tax-deductible for US taxpayers and simple for everyone.

Marla and I continued to volunteer our own time throughout the year to support project work and administration of the NGO in Ukraine and from the US. 2025, however, will be different.

LOOKING FORWARD: CONTINUING, BUT WITH CHANGES

Lviv is still hundreds of kilometers from the attacking Russian ground forces in the east, north, and south of Ukraine, and suffers perhaps the fewest assaults of the major cities, but nowhere in the country is safe. Lviv city and the region were again struck by missile and drone attacks this year, including a set of strikes against residential buildings in early September not far from our apartment which killed seven people including nearly an entire local family; eight children were among the nearly 50 wounded, and the damage affected dozens of buildings in the UNESCO architectural heritage buffer zone including three schools and an arts center.

Air warning sirens have broken many of our days and nights, closing businesses as people shelter from potential attacks, and repeatedly disrupting sleep. Missile and drone strikes on regional utility infrastructure again caused frequent and persistent electrical power outages this year; breaks were common in spring and autumn, and during the summer we went without power for up to 14 hours per day. Worse for our projects, the military conscription of Ukrainian men over the past nearly three years means that skilled workers, drivers, and other manpower resources are seldom available to us. In the more than 1000 days since the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian military personnel and civilians (including most of our friends) remain defiant but the hope for restoration of an unbroken and undivided independent Ukraine is fraying.

To protect and preserve our mental and physical health, Marla and I have made the decision to leave Ukraine and make our permanent home in the US again, a break from our lives for most of the past 25 years, including eight years resident in Lviv with no other home. We did not make this decision lightly, though given our ages we had been mulling when would be the right time to “retire” from our life outside the US even before the full-scale Russian invasion in early 2022. We were stubborn about remaining in Lviv for the first two years of the open war, but after watching our health decline during 2023, earlier this year we concluded we should move to where we can manage our health care more easily and reliably than in Ukraine.

We remain committed to our volunteer work in Rohatyn and the region, however, and we intend to continue those projects which we can manage remotely and with occasional visits to Rohatyn and Lviv, one or more times per year for as long as travel is practical for us – just as we did during the six years before we moved to Lviv. We ceased to be employees of Rohatyn Jewish Heritage in the last quarter of 2024, which makes us ineligible for residency in Ukraine but saves considerably on our personal legal and administration costs, and Marla and I will both retain our formal responsibilities in the NGO, as president and project manager respectively. We named Wito Nadaszkiewicz, our friend and the NGO’s lawyer, as CEO, and he will continue to direct the organization from his offices in Lviv with occasional visits to Rohatyn as needed to support our contacts and ongoing projects.

With the war and with ongoing political changes in the US and Europe, we cannot now say for certain but Marla and I anticipate visiting Rohatyn and Lviv in summer 2025, to meet with friends and colleagues and to review the status of the heritage sites we care for. From our new more remote perspective, we will endeavor to take up the following projects for 2025:

• ongoing vegetation clearing and maintenance at the Jewish cemeteries and the mass grave sites
• as-needed headstone recovery where and when fragments are found
• progressing the Rohatyn section of the Jewish Stones UA recovered headstone database with input from descendants
• continuing research and reporting on the history of the Jewish community of Rohatyn, as opportunities arise

As noted above, some past and ongoing projects must be reduced or have been put on hold to acknowledge the more difficult circumstances now in Ukraine, and also our less frequent presence in Rohatyn. However, even remote we are in near-daily contact with our friends and colleagues in Ukraine, and our personal support (not using RJH project funds) of war relief and Ukrainian military causes will continue as it has since the outbreak of the full-scale war. Nothing we are now doing in Rohatyn will much matter if Ukraine does not remain free…

THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS

Now more than ever it is clear to Marla and me how the progress we make on our projects depends significantly on our supporters and partners, including volunteers with whom we work in Rohatyn and the region, those who donate to cover the costs of our project work, and those who share ideas and encouragement with us as we continue our efforts.

It is always a pleasure for us to highlight our supporters in news articles and other publications, but of course some essential work is done in the background, not captured in photos or in public discussion. As for every year of our NGO’s operation, our dear friend and core RJH team member Vasyl Yuzyshyn has played a key role in nearly all of our activities, helping us communicate with people in Rohatyn, translating texts for a variety of purposes, and as the technical “engine” for much of our digital work, including the recovered headstone database. In all of this different kind of work, Vasyl is attentive, careful, and thorough, and he is courteous with all of our colleagues and contacts, giving our NGO a kind presence wherever he goes.

It is with pride and admiration that Marla and I have watched our friends and colleagues help each other and their fellow citizens across Ukraine during this long and grinding war. Somehow each of them continues to contribute to war relief directly or indirectly while caring for their families and managing their work. We encourage anyone who can to help them help each other and bring this war to a positive end.

Especially in the face of war-related challenges, we are grateful to receive both tangible and intangible support from the City of Rohatyn and from our NGO partners (and friends) the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv, the Lviv Volunteer Center, ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies (UCHS), the former coordinators of Connecting Memory, Yahad – In Unum, the Rohatyn District Research Group (RDRG), and Gesher Galicia.

We would like to again acknowledge the individual donors who provided funding this year to sustain our work in Rohatyn, many of whom have donated in years past as well. We are pleased and proud to list this year’s and past donors on our website.

The Covid epidemic and the war have undermined many businesses in Ukraine, including our “branded” t-shirt supplier, and we have been unable to buy RJH shirts for a few years; our stock has now completely run out. Sadly, this may be the last year we can assemble a collage of photos of friends and volunteers to whom we’ve recently given our colors as thank-you (and informally spreading awareness of our work). But it’s another great collection of images, which always make us smile with affection and pride. Our annual reports are always long; here’s a small reward for making it all the way to the bottom!