Jewish Cemetery of Khotyn

The surviving Jewish cemetery

The cemetery preserves graves from the nineteenth century through the Soviet and Ukrainian periods. ESJF’s survey records stones dating from the 1820s onward. Inscriptions and burial photographs help descendants recover names and family relationships.

2,693 burials photographed and indexed in 2010

JewishGen’s July 2010 project indexed 2,693 burials with photographs. A separate ESJF survey estimates approximately 3,000 surviving gravestones. The figures describe different projects and should not be treated as a count of missing records.

Search JOWBR burial records or read about the Khotyn cemetery project.

The old and surviving cemeteries

The memorial book remembers an older cemetery, dating to about 1800, that had ceased to be used for burials. Families still visited ancestors’ graves there before the High Holidays. A newer cemetery, three kilometers from the synagogue according to the memoir, was administered by the Jewish community. Its burial society cared for the grounds, gravestones, and inscriptions and made allowances for families who could not afford a burial plot.

In 1932, the community purchased land to expand the cemetery. A contemporary account also records a new fence and the numbering of historically significant older gravestones. These accounts describe distinct phases of local burial history; the location and surviving fabric of the older cemetery merit further documentation.

A Khotyn gravestone in communal memory

The memorial book recalls that Avrom Derzhi’s family had a wine barrel carved on his stone to mark his trade as a wine merchant. The community objected and ordered the carving removed. This recollection records a local discussion about how a person should be remembered in the cemetery, rather than a general rule about Jewish gravestone symbols.

For guidance on inscriptions, Hebrew dates, and common symbols, see JewishGen’s How to Read a Hebrew Tombstone.

Wartime damage and remembrance

The community memorial book reports damage to Khotyn’s cemeteries during the Second World War and the reuse of gravestones for a monument. Its account needs to be read alongside the surviving stones documented in later cemetery surveys. Photographs of memorial markers in the gallery show how the town remembers Holocaust victims. For many people murdered in Khotyn or during deportation to Transnistria, surviving burial records cannot provide an individual grave; names may instead be found in testimony and victim databases.

The surveyed cemetery today

ESJF locates the cemetery adjacent to 3 Tychyny Street, at approximately 48.52322, 26.46852. Its survey records a stone fence, an ohel (a structure over a grave), and an administration building. The photographs on this page were taken by Anna Royzner in 2013.

View the ESJF survey and Center for Jewish Art documentation. Consult those projects and local contacts for updated conditions and access.