Ukrainian city remembers Jews on Holocaust anniversary

Matsevko said consciousness is growing in Ukrainian society of the need to remember the Jews who were annihilated by Nazi forces, in some cases with the participation of local people.

Initiatives have included introducing Jewish history courses at universities, new research by young Ukrainian scholars and grassroots efforts by volunteers, such as the recovering Jewish gravestones that were used to pave roads and returning them to cemeteries.

“This is part of the process of reviving the memory of the Jewish heritage. Of course, this process is slow. I want it to be quicker, but for the last 10 years we have seen how the Jewish heritage is returning to people’s consciousness and a lot of activities are taking place,” Matsevko said. “It is very important that people are being acknowledged for their work in Jewish heritage.”

Before World War II, Lviv and the surrounding area belonged to Poland. Then called Lwow, it was the third largest Jewish community in prewar Poland after Warsaw and Lodz, with most working as merchants, manufacturers or artisans. Before World War I, Lviv and the surrounding area were part of the eastern Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the city was called by its German name, Lemberg.

In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally. When the German forces entered the city, they and their Ukrainian collaborators massacred Jews in the city and countryside. While occupying the area, Germans murdered Jews in the ghetto, the Belzec death camp and a forced labour camp, Janowska, with the final annihilation completed by June 1943.

Of a population of about 150,000 Jews, only an estimated 1 per cent survived.

In the postwar years, with Ukraine part of the Soviet Union, the memories of the murdered Jews began to vanish. Historian Omer Bartov has called the area a “land of memory and oblivion, coexistence and erasure, high hopes and dashed illusions.”

The remembrance work is taking place as Ukraine finds itself mired in crisis and conflict following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and a continuing Russia-backed insurgency in the east. Nationalism has been on the rise, and some Ukrainians laud the Nazi-affiliated irregulars who fought against the Soviet Army in World War II.

To what extent this has led to greater anti-Semitism is a matter of dispute. Some of the people trying to sustain the history of Jewish life in western Ukraine think the amount of anti-Semitism is exaggerated as part of a Russian propaganda effort.

Among those honoured was Marla Raucher Osborn, an American who heads Rohatyn Jewish Heritage . The group’s projects include restoring a Jewish cemetery in nearby Rohatyn.

Osborn said she was honoured to be acknowledged along with local activists “working quietly in local communities, recovering Jewish memory with little or no knowledge of their projects outside of those communities, especially among the distant Jewish diaspora.”

The glass keys were the work of New Mexico-based artist Rachel Stevens, who found the rusted synagogue key on which they were based in February while seeking remnants of Jewish culture in eastern Galicia as part of a research project.

Stevens used glass for the replicas because in Jewish tradition the material “represents the fragility of life.” Creating them “became a tangible way for me to express my grief about the past and my hope for the future,” she said.

“The idea for this artwork seems almost mystically delivered to me,” Stevens said.

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Vanessa Gera reported from Warsaw, and Randy Herschaft from New York.

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Follow Gera at twitter.com/VanessaGera and Herschaft at twitter.com/HerschaftAP

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An earlier version of this story was corrected to show that the transliteration of the mayor’s surname is Sadovyi, not Sadoviy.

Vanessa Gera, Randy Herschaft And Yevheniy Kravs, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Ukrainian city remembers Jews on Holocaust anniversary

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