After two years of development, Rohatyn’s new regional history and ethnographic museum “Opillya” opened to the public yesterday, and Jay and I attended the ceremony on behalf of descendants of Rohatyn Jewish families. The opening coincided with the first snowfall of the season, but that did not dampen the strong turnout led by Rohatyn’s Mayor, Deputy Mayor, numerous city staff,…
Over five days last week, Marla and I worked alongside many of our old and new friends in an organized clearing of wild vegetation at Rohatyn’s old Jewish cemetery. Using new tools paid for by generous donors as well as a lot of sweat and energy, we managed to clear roughly 80% of the large site of grasses, weeds, shrubs,…
Today in Lviv, as part of the European Days of Jewish Culture, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage was honored among other friends and colleagues in a ceremony at the office of the Lviv City Council. The event was timed with the closing of an art and memory installation entitled “A Key To The City” created last May by professor, artist, and Fulbright…
Two meetings in the past ten days have helped us make a formal start on our effort to better preserve and protect the Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass graves in Rohatyn. At present, none of the cemeteries or mass grave sites in Rohatyn are recognized as objects of regional or Ukrainian national heritage, and thus the four sites lack formal…
A crew of four volunteers from Sasha Nazar’s Lviv Volunteer Center joined us in Rohatyn yesterday at the new Jewish cemetery to do some much-needed clearing and cutting of waist-high wild vegetation. The work at the site began a little after 10:00 am and lasted seven hours. In addition to cutting back new growth, and clearing a corner of the…
Jay and I were in Rohatyn with friends yesterday to mark the 75th anniversary of the final Nazi aktion which liquidated the wartime Jewish ghetto. Once at the “vodokanal” north mass grave site, gathered around the memorial marker erected in 1998 by Jewish survivors and descendants of Rohatyn, our long-time friend and supporter Rabbi Kolesnik of Ivano-Frankivsk recited a prayer…
This week we participated in a conference on “Civil Society, Digital Storytelling and 20th Century Jewish History in Ukraine“, and led a tour of heritage sites in Rohatyn for about 25 educators from Ukraine, Moldova, Germany and Poland. The three-day conference was hosted and managed by Vienna-based Centropa though their Trans.History education program for teachers and civil society activists in…
The Jewish genealogy research organization focused on the former Austrian crownland of Galicia, Gesher Galicia, has dedicated the entire March 2018 edition of their quarterly journal The Galitzianer to the people and places of Rohatyn. And, very fortunately for us and anyone with an interest in Rohatyn, Gesher Galicia has generously allowed us to present the complete edition of the…
Thanks to an introduction by Mykhailo Vorobets, last week Marla and I were able to interview a former manager of the “vodokanal” site in Rohatyn where the Jewish mass graves from the June 1943 aktion are located. The discussion took place at the site, where we were shown the specific places where human remains were discovered more than thirty years…
This is an informal annual report for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage (RJH) for the calendar year 2017, in essence a year-in-review summary of our project progress and events, with an outline of our finances as well. The summary seems long, but (for us, at least) it helps to organize the sometimes chaotic mix of activities we had this past year. It’s…