Fwd: [GesherGalicia] Lviv: epitaphs database doubled for headstones recovered from Lontsky prison #galicia #WesternUkraine-EasternGalicia
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Tony Hausner
Jul 4, 2025, 9:18:00 AM7/4/25
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From: Jay Osborn via groups.jewishgen.org <jay.osborn=gmai...@groups.jewishgen.org>
Date: Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Subject: [GesherGalicia] Lviv: epitaphs database doubled for headstones recovered from Lontsky prison #galicia #WesternUkraine-EasternGalicia
To: <Gesher...@groups.jewishgen.org>
From: Jay Osborn via groups.jewishgen.org <jay.osborn=gmai...@groups.jewishgen.org>
Date: Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Subject: [GesherGalicia] Lviv: epitaphs database doubled for headstones recovered from Lontsky prison #galicia #WesternUkraine-EasternGalicia
To: <Gesher...@groups.jewishgen.org>
🇺🇦🇺🇸✡ This week we have an important update to our announcement last February about a new database of Jewish headstones recovered in the city of Lviv in western Ukraine:
https://jewishstonesua.org/lviv/
The database has now more than doubled in size to nearly 600 headstones and fragments documented during and after recovery work. The original collection primarily covered stones excavated from under Barvinok Street in Lviv in 2018, photographed during the weeks of recovery work and afterward in a two-day recording session in 2024 at the new Jewish cemetery, today called "Yanivske". The new additions are from a larger group of headstones which were stolen from the cemetery during the German occupation of WWII and used to pave an enclosed yard at the notorious Lontsky Street prison, a site of detention and killing of political prisoners under successive occupation regimes. Today the former prison site houses a museum memorializing the victims and serves as an office of Ukraine's security services.
It had long been rumored that there were Jewish headstones and the bodies of victims under the yard surface. Ten years ago, archaeological excavations uncovered the remains of 23 victims. Five years ago, further excavations revealed an extensive layer of Jewish headstones which had been used as paving. The stones were extracted and laid or piled in the yard, then photographed by Jewish heritage activists during two brief access periods, but recovery and return to the cemetery was not possible then; the stones remained in the yard until very recently.
Last month, with the cooperation of the site's authorities, the headstones were stacked on wooden pallets to enable removal. This week, under the direction of Sasha Nazar of the Lviv Volunteer Center (an arm of Hesed-Arieh Lviv) and the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv, and with the support of the security services, the headstones were transported back to the new Jewish cemetery for safekeeping. In addition to further documentation, it is still hoped that as a final step all of the recovered headstones now at the Lviv cemetery can be moved to an idle part of the site, and a lapidarium-style memorial can be constructed there for their long-term preservation. Funding and physical resources are needed to initiate that work.
Some 275 of the more than 350 headstones recovered from the former Lontsky Street prison site have already been transcribed and translated by the same volunteers who worked on the original set from Barvinok Street; roughly 75 photographed stones from Lontsky remain to be interpreted in the coming weeks or months. You can read more about the Lviv headstone project here:
https://jewishstonesua.org/lviv/about/
No membership or login is needed to access the data – it is open and free to all. The database is searchable using simple character matching in English, Ukrainian, or Hebrew. 🇺🇸🇺🇦✡ There is no soundex so researchers will need to try their usual name variants, but the search results come immediately and there is no minimum search string. A guide is available to explain the search process; it also details the data field names and conventions across the database:
https://jewishstonesua.org/guide/
Once this data has been online long enough to identify and correct residual errors and omissions, we will extract the names and dates in English for submission to the JewishGen JOWBR database, as was done previously from the Dobromyl section of the website.
The overall project has been guided by Sasha Nazar of the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv, including the arduous headstone recovery work, the headstone documentation, and the database effort. For brevity we are not naming here any of the scores of kind volunteers (most of whom are Ukrainian) who contributed to one or all aspects of the effort, including during more than three years of ongoing war, and for most of them, while they helped with other regional Jewish heritage preservation projects at the same time. Some of the key contributors are named in the 'About' page linked above, and the photos on that page give a sense of the scale of the effort. Clearly there is more work to be done.
We invite you again to explore the database, and we thank you for your interest in Lviv's Jewish history.
Jay Osborn and Marla Raucher Osborn
for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage
https://rohatynjewishheritage.org/en/
https://jewishstonesua.org/lviv/
The database has now more than doubled in size to nearly 600 headstones and fragments documented during and after recovery work. The original collection primarily covered stones excavated from under Barvinok Street in Lviv in 2018, photographed during the weeks of recovery work and afterward in a two-day recording session in 2024 at the new Jewish cemetery, today called "Yanivske". The new additions are from a larger group of headstones which were stolen from the cemetery during the German occupation of WWII and used to pave an enclosed yard at the notorious Lontsky Street prison, a site of detention and killing of political prisoners under successive occupation regimes. Today the former prison site houses a museum memorializing the victims and serves as an office of Ukraine's security services.
It had long been rumored that there were Jewish headstones and the bodies of victims under the yard surface. Ten years ago, archaeological excavations uncovered the remains of 23 victims. Five years ago, further excavations revealed an extensive layer of Jewish headstones which had been used as paving. The stones were extracted and laid or piled in the yard, then photographed by Jewish heritage activists during two brief access periods, but recovery and return to the cemetery was not possible then; the stones remained in the yard until very recently.
Last month, with the cooperation of the site's authorities, the headstones were stacked on wooden pallets to enable removal. This week, under the direction of Sasha Nazar of the Lviv Volunteer Center (an arm of Hesed-Arieh Lviv) and the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv, and with the support of the security services, the headstones were transported back to the new Jewish cemetery for safekeeping. In addition to further documentation, it is still hoped that as a final step all of the recovered headstones now at the Lviv cemetery can be moved to an idle part of the site, and a lapidarium-style memorial can be constructed there for their long-term preservation. Funding and physical resources are needed to initiate that work.
Some 275 of the more than 350 headstones recovered from the former Lontsky Street prison site have already been transcribed and translated by the same volunteers who worked on the original set from Barvinok Street; roughly 75 photographed stones from Lontsky remain to be interpreted in the coming weeks or months. You can read more about the Lviv headstone project here:
https://jewishstonesua.org/lviv/about/
No membership or login is needed to access the data – it is open and free to all. The database is searchable using simple character matching in English, Ukrainian, or Hebrew. 🇺🇸🇺🇦✡ There is no soundex so researchers will need to try their usual name variants, but the search results come immediately and there is no minimum search string. A guide is available to explain the search process; it also details the data field names and conventions across the database:
https://jewishstonesua.org/guide/
Once this data has been online long enough to identify and correct residual errors and omissions, we will extract the names and dates in English for submission to the JewishGen JOWBR database, as was done previously from the Dobromyl section of the website.
The overall project has been guided by Sasha Nazar of the Sholom Aleichem Society of Jewish Culture in Lviv, including the arduous headstone recovery work, the headstone documentation, and the database effort. For brevity we are not naming here any of the scores of kind volunteers (most of whom are Ukrainian) who contributed to one or all aspects of the effort, including during more than three years of ongoing war, and for most of them, while they helped with other regional Jewish heritage preservation projects at the same time. Some of the key contributors are named in the 'About' page linked above, and the photos on that page give a sense of the scale of the effort. Clearly there is more work to be done.
We invite you again to explore the database, and we thank you for your interest in Lviv's Jewish history.
Jay Osborn and Marla Raucher Osborn
for Rohatyn Jewish Heritage
https://rohatynjewishheritage.org/en/
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Tony Hausner, Ph.D.
Independent Health Policy Consultant
Former Senior Analyst, US CMS
Cell: 301-641-0497
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