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…
Yesterday we met with the City of Rohatyn to plan ground preparation work ahead of the non-invasive GPR survey of the Jewish mass grave sites on city land. Marla and I traveled from Lviv with our friends Alexander Nazar (head of the Lviv Volunteer Center, or LVC), Vitaliy Nadashkevych (CEO of Law Craft LLC and a board member of the…
Some wonderful contacts were made with teachers in Ternopil, Ukraine (about 90km east of Rohatyn) when Rohatyn Jewish Heritage attended a cross-border education seminar in Lviv on March 31 and April 1, 2017. The teachers, Kateryna Tsybulska and Nataliya Porokhnyak, have been working to bring Jewish memory and Galician multi-ethnic history to their high school and college students. Their latest…
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the largest and deadliest of the Nazi aktions in Rohatyn. On March 20, 1942, nearly the entire Jewish community of Rohatyn was murdered beside large open pits in a field south of town center, and then buried there in the first of Rohatyn’s mass graves; more than three thousand people, including more than a…
Here is a brief status update on the several Jewish heritage projects active in Rohatyn, from the town visit Marla and I made yesterday with friends and colleagues from Lviv. Joining us on this visit were our longtime supporter and adviser Alex Denysenko, who also served as interpreter for several of the meetings; Alexander (Sasha) Nazar, head of the Lviv…