Yesterday, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage was one of three presenters on the final day of an international EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) research seminar organized by NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich), and our friends at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe here…
Olga Verbiana, a friend and journalist living in Rohatyn, alerted us through Facebook last week that another significant batch of Jewish headstone fragments were uncovered on vul. Drahomanovа across the road from the Hnyla Lypa River. The two dozen stones, mostly large fragments and each making up a third or quarter of an original stone, were discovered when a local…
It was our great pleasure yesterday to bring to Rohatyn our friends Steven Reece and Bruce Mussey of The Matzevah Foundation, Inc. (TMF), a qualified Christian charity organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, with more than a decade of experience working in Jewish cemeteries in Poland. The visit gave Steven and Bruce a first opportunity to walk Rohatyn’s old Jewish cemetery…
Last week, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage signed a memorandum of cooperation with the City of Rohatyn, agreeing to work together to preserve and promote Jewish heritage in and around the city for the benefit of all. We are very pleased to participate in this important public acknowledgement of our common interest in protecting and popularizing Rohatyn’s tangible and intangible Jewish heritage…
Yesterday Jay and I were very pleased and proud to serve as a “local” resource for approximately 35 Polish educators, guides, and activists enrolled in an educational summer tour organized by Lublin-based Rootka – Following Heritage Traces. Rohatyn was the group’s first stop in this summer’s program “In Search of a Lost World”. We had met the Rootka team in…
Jay and I returned to Rohatyn yesterday with Batya and David Kidron of Israel. Batya’s mother, Sarah Rokeach, was born in Rohatyn in 1923 and hid during the War along with a dozen other Jews in the basement of the Nazi administration building, located today at vul. Halytska 40. Jewish survivors visited the building during the 1998 memorial visit, and…
With the field work for the mass grave survey behind us, we returned to Rohatyn for a short visit today to get a tour of the Opillya Museum, the regional cultural history museum which will open later this summer. We met with the museum’s director Olha Blaha-Maletska and deputy director Vasyl Serdyuk at City Hall, and then walked to the…
Over nine days at the end of May and into June, the long-anticipated non-invasive survey of the Jewish mass graves in Rohatyn was completed by a team of four scientists from the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University in the UK, led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls, an award-winning archaeologist with extensive research experience at Holocaust sites in Europe and…
At the invitation of Rohatyn English teachers Nataliya Olvach and Ruslana Okrepka, Thursday morning this past week I met with students participating in a three-week intensive English language summer camp at Gymnasium #1 located at the corner of vul. Halytska and vul. Shevchenko, across from Roksolana Square. Nataliya had seen on Facebook a few days earlier that Rohatyn Jewish Heritage…
Yesterday we joined a dozen activists from the Lviv Volunteer Center, including our friends Sasha Nazar and Ukrainian independent filmmakers Dasha and Sashko Balabai, to clear vegetation at Rohatyn’s new Jewish cemetery. The work was part of the preparation for professional non-invasive ground surveys that will be conducted beginning next week by a team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls…