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…
Rohatyn Jewish Heritage met again yesterday at the Rohatyn Public Library with about twenty Rohatyn educators, including teachers plus museum and library personnel, most of whom had also been present at our last get-together on 06 September 2016. The purpose of the meeting was to follow up on questions raised in September which we had been unable to sufficiently answer…
Rohatyn Jewish Heritage began its public activities in the new year by participating in a roundtable discussion yesterday in Lviv on preserving Jewish cultural heritage in western Ukraine and adjacent areas. The stated purposes of the roundtable were to: create a forum to draw attention to the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of the region; discuss existing and planned…
Rohatyn Jewish Heritage met yesterday with Rabbi Moshe Leib Kolesnik at his office in the synagogue of Ivano-Frankivsk, together with our friends and interpreters Alex Denysenko and Ihor Klishch. Among the many topics we discussed was the upcoming spring 2017 mass grave survey work to be conducted by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her team from Staffordshire University. As expected,…
Rohatyn Jewish Heritage is proud to announce that we are now a registered public organization and nonprofit NGO in Ukraine. We hope this will help us partner with other organizations in Ukraine and abroad to further our goals. Special thanks to Vitaliy Nadashkevych, Executive Director of Law Craft Legal Services & Consulting here in Lviv for understanding our long-term goals…
This morning Marla and I met with Mayor Serhii Nasalyk and Deputy Mayor Mykola Shynkar of Rohatyn to outline the non-invasive archaeological survey work we have commissioned for spring 2017 to determine the geographic boundaries of the WWII Jewish mass graves in the city. Accompanied by our friend and translator Ihor Klishch, and our long-time colleague and local activist Mikhailo…
This afternoon we met with Rohatyn educators to open discussions about how Rohatyn Jewish Heritage can develop and share educational resources with Rohatyn students about their city’s Jewish past and present. As part of this envisioned long-term project of two-way educational collaboration and mutual benefit, we are very motivated to hear from Rohatyn’s teachers, students, and others so we can…