The south mass grave memorial today. Photo by Sasha Nazar for RJH.
For the second year in a row, Jay and I were unable to be present in Rohatyn on March 20th to bear witness in person at the mass grave south of city center where on March 20, 1942, more than 3000 Jewish Rohatyners were executed and buried – young and old, men, women, and small children – under circumstances impossible to imagine. Jay and I first visited the site fifteen years ago and had an encounter there which led to our deepening involvement with Rohatyn’s Jewish heritage and history; many other descendants of Rohatyn Jewish families have visited the site to commemorate after the war, and especially since Ukraine’s independence in 1991.
The prayer at the memorial site today. Photo by Iryna Nebesna for RJH.
Present at the site today on behalf of Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and Jewish descendants of Rohatyn were our longtime friends and colleagues from the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society of Lviv, Sasha Nazar and Denis “Benya”, in a visit organized by Wito Nadaszkiewicz, attorney, heritage activist, and CEO of Rohatyn Jewish Heritage. Separately, heritage advocate and journalist Iryna Nebesna of Ternopil also went today to say a prayer at the memorial site. No strangers to Rohatyn and its Jewish history, these dear friends accompanied us on dozens of past trips to Rohatyn, meeting with city officials, librarians, historians, and students, and bearing witness at memorial events of remembrance of Jewish Rohatyn, including Iryna in March 2025 and Wito, Sasha, and Benya in June 2025. Keeping with Jewish tradition, Sasha read El Malei Rachamim (אֵל מָלֵא רַחֲמִים), a prayer for the souls of the departed innocents.
The view over farmlands from the memorial.
Photo by Sasha Nazar for RJH.
For those of us with family in the common grave at this remote south site, may we find comfort in Sasha’s, Benya’s, and Ira’s presence. These Jewish victims – our families – are again not forgotten.
While in Rohatyn, our friends also visited Rohatyn’s “old” and “new” Jewish cemeteries and the memorial grounds at the “vodokanal” – mass graves north of the city center connected with the summer 1943 killings in the final liquidation of the Jewish ghetto. All these burial sites appear to be in good order (no new issues to report with fences, gates, etc.) and all four information signs we installed in 2023 and 2024 remain solid and in good shape despite this year’s unusually low temperatures and heavy snowfalls in western Ukraine.
Benya climbs to the top of the old cemetery. Photo by Sasha Nazar for RJH.
On a separate but related topic, we can report some progress in Wito’s ongoing legal efforts to seek registration and official protection of the Jewish mass graves in Rohatyn – an important project begun five years ago during the Covid19 pandemic while we were participating remotely in the joint German-Ukrainian program “Connecting Memory”. Wito has been in discussions again with the city of Rohatyn and officials in the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast administration, as well as those within the Ministry of Culture at the national level; he expects to address the Rohatyn City Council soon so that an official city recommendation can then be issued. It is hoped that with this formal recommendation by the city, the registration process can advance to the next stage at the oblast level.
The view over the old cemetery today. Photo by Sasha Nazar for RJH.
This is welcome news for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, since, as mentioned, official legal protection of these burial grounds is and has been a priority project for us since 2011, although it wasn’t until 2020 that the legal process was begun in earnest. Unfortunately, Russia’s 2022 invasion then thwarted these efforts, as all resources at all levels of Ukrainian society and government shifted to a war footing, postponing cultural and heritage protection projects in favor of war-related relief efforts, as we discussed at the end of our NGO’s 2025 annual report. We are cautiously optimistic that despite now being in the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Wito will somehow be able to advance this project this year.
Visiting the new cemetery today. Photo by Sasha Nazar for RJH.
Finally, although Jay and I could not be at the south mass grave for this year’s remembrance, we do plan to be in Rohatyn on June 6, 2026 at the “vodokanal” site of the north Jewish mass grave, to mark the 83rd anniversary of the final liquidation of the wartime Jewish ghetto.
Baruch Dayan HaEmet.
Вічна пам’ять.