A Cyber-Memorial to the pre-WWII
Jewish Communities of my Ancestors
May the memories of our
ancestors live forever.
May their lives never be
forgotten.
My Ancestral Trip
by Susannah Juni
I visited Ukraine in September,
1997 to see the places where my
ancestors and all of our family
members had once lived, worked,
dreamed, and created. The trip was
the culmination of my genealogical
research hobby of eleven years. My
brother and I grew up in Michigan,
never knowing any cousins, or any
relatives at all other than our
immediate family. When we asked,
we were told that the entire
family had died in the Holocaust.
Stanislau
Great Synagogue pre-WWI
We have since discovered a number
of living relatives of all ages
and together with our American
born parents, we're learning about
our ancestors' personal history.
The purpose of these Web pages is
not to publicize our family
details, but rather to share
certain information that we've
gleaned along the way which may be
of interest to others,
particularly others who have
ancestors from the same
communities and who may share our
interest in our mutual heritage.
The geographical area is
currently in Southwestern Ukraine,
just North of the Carpathian
Mountains, and near the Eastern
tip of Slovakia, and the Northern
border of Rumania. The closest
major city is Lviv (formerly,
Lvov, Lwow or Lemberg). All of our
towns were in Galicia, a now
defunct region of the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire, which
dissolved in WWI. Between the two
World Wars, our towns were annexed
to Poland. In 1941, the area
became part of the Ukrainian
region of the Soviet Union. Fifty
years later, Ukraine became the
first Soviet state to achieve
independance.
Click here for maps and more
geographical information. The
towns I visited are listed at the
left. Please visit each site for a
tour of some remnants of old
Jewish Galicia. Of all of these
towns, Stanislawow
(Ivano-Frankivsk) was the largest,
and Nizhnev the smallest.
May the fruits of our labor ensure
that the Nazis' goal of
eliminating our people be forever
incomplete.
The trip was enriching and
provided me with many images to
share with my family and with
others. To facilitate the trip, I
engaged the services of a private
researcher, guide, translator,
driver. For details of the
research materials that I used and
discovered on this trip, see my
article in Volume XIII, Number 4
issue of Avotaynu (shown
below). I hope that this
information and these photographic
images are useful to others. I
welcome any additional data from
fellow researchers and travellers
out there who may visit my Web
pages. Should you have any related
information in a computer readable
format, I would be happy to
consider linking it into these
pages. My email link is below.
The cobblestone images in the
background are taken from
photographs of streets in our
ancestral towns in Ukraine,
September 1997. Take a walk...
May the fruits of our labor
ensure that the Nazis' goal of
eliminating our people be forever
incomplete. We seek signs of the
existence of our ancestral
communities to highlight for all
to see. Our people lived there,
and our hearts are with them.
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Ukrainian Research and Ancestral
Travels
by Susannah R. Juni
This article originally appeared
in the Winter, 1997 issue of Avotaynu,
and is reprinted here with
permission. The material was
adapted from a Postscript
presentation to the New York
Genealogical Society in New York
City, November, 1997.
The focal town in planning my
ancestral tour of Southwestern
Ukraine was not a small shtetl;
rather it was a city of 150-200
thousand people. When my
grandparents lived there, before
World War I, it was officially
known by its German name,
Stanislau, and it was located in
the region of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire called Galicia of
Austria-Hungary. Because of the
large ethnic Polish population,
the Polish town name, Stanislawow,
was colloquially used by many
people, in its shortened version
of Stanislaw (pronounced
Stanislav). The Austro-Hungarian
Empire (and the province caled
Galicia) ceased to exist after the
end of World War I, and the city
found itself within the borders of
newly formed Poland, with the
official name of Stanislawow. In
1941, Poland ceded this territory
to the Ukrainian region of the
Soviet Union, and the town name
was changed to Ivano-Frankowsk. In
1991, after glastnost, Ukraine
became the first state to separate
from the USSR, and the town
adopted its current name,
Ivano-Frankivsk.
At least three of my grandparents
were from Stanislau, and with
varying degrees of certainty, I
know of a dozen surrounding small
villages that might have been home
to other ancestors. I spent ten
full days in Ivano-Frankivsk, and
divided three days into short
visits to Berezhany, Bogorodchany,
Bolekhov, Delyatin, Kalush,
Kolomyya, Nadvornaya (Nadworna),
Nizhnev, and Tysmenitsa.
Planning for my trip meant
searching eleven years' files of
notes and research documents. In
the past, I had focused research
on names and relationships, but
now I was searching for specific
addresses and/or any clues to the
exact locations of real estate
that had played essential roles in
my family’s lives. I had a
precious pile of inter-War letters
that had come from Europe to my
grandparents in America; only two
had surviving envelopes with
return addresses.
I had a collection of transcripts
of birth records from old
Stanislawow records now housed at
the Urzad Stanu Cywilnego (civil
registration) archives in Warsaw
and collected for me by Miriam
Weiner a few years ago. Some
transcripts included street
addresses, a detail I had
overlooked previously. I had
engaged a Jewish genealogical
researcher based in Lviv, by the
name of Alexander Dunai(1). I had
met him via a letter of
introduction that was published in
The Galitzianer, the newsletter of
Gesher Galicia, an organization of
people researching Jewish Galician
ancestry (2).
Dunai found a birth record in the
Lviv archives that supplied the
name of a great grandmother from .
Determined to avoid overloading
myself with more data than I could
reasonably process before the
trip, I decided to cease any
further research and to devote my
time to organizing my data and
traveling details. Hah!
I was so excited that I could
barely sleep more than 3-4 hours a
night for the two months before
the scheduled departure time.
Obviously, this made me pretty
exhausted. One such sleepless
night, I curled up with a recent
issue of AVOTAYNUand reread
Jeffrey Cymbler’s article in the
Spring 1997 issue about Polish
Business Directories, refining my
circles and arrows based on my new
focus - street addresses. I read
that the 1931 Polish Business
Directory included an alphabetical
listing of every street in
Stanislawow, describing the
location of each street in
relation to its adjacent streets.
I thought that might be really
helpful on the trip. So I decided
to break my self imposed restraint
and go to the New York Public
Library, where the NYC JGS had
donated a microfilm copy, to print
out "just those few pages." Well,
after finding those pages, I
couldn’t resist "just taking a
peek" at the next section, the
body of the business directory for
Stanislawow. Right away, I saw a
family name. I turned the page and
there was another family name, and
yet another! It became obvious
that I had to print out the entire
directory. I spent the rest of the
weekend translating occupations
with a Polish-English dictionary
and marking family names where
ever I found them. I had to return
to my hectic work schedule Monday,
and the clock was ticking. I
panicked. How would I manage to
tabulate all of this data into a
workable format in time for the
trip? The Business Directory was
sorted by occupation, and I needed
to sort it by street address to
facilitate finding the buildings.
It would be nice to be able to
also sort the same data by surname
so that I could better analyze the
information within the context of
my family. Clearly, this all
needed to be typed into a
computer. But how?
My mother, Rachel Juni, had
expressed sincere regret that she
was unable to accompany me on the
trip, and had spoken words that
were now ringing in my ears, "Let
me know if there’s something I can
do to be part of this trip." She
had just gotten a PC four months
earlier and was already proficient
with email. We designed a plan. I
shipped the printout of the Polish
Business Directory to her, 750
miles away in Michigan. She typed
up all the relevant family
business addresses, including
those on a 1923-1925 Polish
Directory excerpt that my friend
and possible relative, Joyce
Field, had obtained from a
collector in Bialystock
(tomek.wisniewski@telbank.pl). We
found the location of my great
great grandfather’s paint store,
my great uncle’s haberdashery, a
previously unknown relative’s
horse trading business and many
more. We used a delineated
database format which she sent to
me via daily email. A "delineated
database format" means that you
identify, for the computer’s sake,
each type of data with a special
symbol. We used a semicolon. My
mother consistently typed a
semicolon between every field in
this format:
ADDRESS; BUSINESS; NAME; PHONE #
ADDRESS; BUSINESS; NAME; PHONE #
ADDRESS; BUSINESS; NAME; PHONE #
Since every address was typed in
the same sequence, I could tell a
computer program to read
everything before the first
semicolon as a street address,
everything after the first
semicolon as the type of business,
etc. for sorting purposes. She
pasted the results of her typing
into the body of email messages to
send to me. Then, it was a simple
matter to import the data into a
spreadsheet program. I used
Microsoft Excel. A database
program, such as Microsoft Access
might have been even better, but I
was pressed for time and I felt
that I had more familiarity with
Excel. Needless to say, it was a
great opportunity for my mother
and I to work together on this
project, a factor that made the
project even more enriching. (See
Fig. II for an example of the
sorted chart we created.)
After we completed extracting the
family names, she went back and
gleaned all the remaining business
addresses from the five streets
that contained most of our
family’s businesses. We wanted to
put these additional records into
the sort so that we could go down
a busy street and recount the
history of exactly what activity
was housed in each building. Who
and what were the stores and shops
across the street from my great
great grandfather’s paint store?
Who on the block had the only
telephone; so guess where they may
have congregated? We added in all
the businesses for a light
industrial street that had
contained the birthplace of one of
my grandparents. I now know the
exact location of their closest
pre-war neighborhood grocery
store. One final pass through the
directory and we added in the
Yiddish theater, Jewish schools,
the emigration office, and other
locations where our family might
have walked. Fruit for juicy
thoughts, intimate details
imagined of a world otherwise
vanished. We were painting a
richly detailed picture of our
family’s world.
Meanwhile, I received an email
from Alex Dunai in Lviv. He had
just returned from a research trip
to Ivano-Frankivsk where he was
doing research for another client.
He was also researching hotel
options for me, a personalized
service he rendered at no extra
charge. Alex reported that he had
discovered some records at the
local town archive that he thought
might be of interest to me. He had
found records that the archivists
themselves hadn’t even realized
they had, or perhaps the
archivists had simply never
realized that anyone might be
interested in them. They were
August 1939 census records of
Stanislawow. (See Fig. I. for
details, and Fig. III for an
example.) The light slowly dawned
on me. I could spend the money I’d
saved by getting a free plane
ticket via a premium points
program on some extra last minute
research to get a nice batch of
specific residential street
addresses, not just for my
immediate family, but for my
extended family, too. We have a
few common surnames in our family,
but most are very uncommon names.
Alex tells me that Jews in Galicia
were not allowed to relocate
between towns before 1863,
increasing the likelihood that
persons with like surnames in a
town were related. I figured that
even if I didn’t know how all
these people were related, I could
perhaps find out one day. Besides,
the family members who’d lived
there surely knew who their
relatives were, and probably
visited in each other’s homes. If
I could capture these addresses to
add to the others, I could truly
walk in the footsteps of my
family’s lost lives, recapturing a
glimpse of memory in a uniquely
personal and immediate sense. I
emailed off a list of surnames to
Alex, asking him to search for
only specific people if they had
common surnames, but all records
for uncommon surnames. Imagine my
shock and delight when I got the
email saying he’d found 152
records! He sent me the
translations on email, and a
printed version with the document
copies by express postal mail. I
promptly shipped everything off to
Michigan where my mother tabulated
all of these along with the
business addresses.
For years, I’d been collecting
maps of the area and of the town,
whenever I could find them. There
is a tantalizing overview of the
town plan incorporated in a 19th
century German map series which is
available at the Map Divisions of
both the Library of Congress in
Washington DC and at the New York
Public Library, main branch. A
nice overview showing the shape of
the main streets is in another
19th century map series (Genealogy
Unlimited, Inc. carries nice color
reproductions in their ME200
series,
http://www.itsnet.com/~genun/).
Also, I’d found a beautifully
detailed hand drawn town plan in a
book at YIVO, "Endure, Defy, and
Remember" by Jaochim Bachbar,
1970. Still, I worried that my
maps might lack sufficient detail
or area. So, one of my research
requests to Alex Dunai was to try
to find detailed town maps
covering the various time periods
and related sovereignties and
languages. I was thrilled when he
wrote that he had found old maps
and made copies for me. Well,
there was a small problem about
finding a new, current map.
Although he had found maps
covering the Austro-Hungarian rule
of the area, of the inter-war
period, and even of the Soviet
period, there were no maps
published yet with the new,
current Ukrainian street names.
Also, the old Russian town maps
were no longer in print and were
actually hard to find. He had
nonetheless tracked one down for
me and had painstakingly written
in by hand the old Polish street
names for every single street on
the Russian map. Obviously, he had
to first search out a cross
reference between the street names
for the different time periods.
When the map arrived, a week
before my trip, I could see at a
glance that almost all the old
streets were intact; we would soon
find out how many of the old
houses were still standing.
Everything escalated at once. I
had made a few email penpals in
the past year or two of relatives
and possible relatives who I met
via the Jewish Genealogical Family
Finder database
(http://www1.jewishgen.org/jgff/).
We were sharing research costs and
results for our common surnames
and towns. We were pooling our
resources to hire Alex for a
variety of research projects. We
received another batch of
documents that we’d ordered. These
were passport application records
from Stanislawow including
photographs. I quickly scanned the
photographs into my computer
before passing on the document
copies to my cohorts. I typed in
the addresses from these records
into the research log. We got some
1890 and 1900 census records and I
added in those addresses too.
My brother, Dr. Jack Juni, got
involved with the project. A few
years ago, my mother had
transcribed my fifty or so taped
family interviews onto an old Mac.
We couldn’t read the files on our
IBM PC’s. My brother converted all
the files, sent me a disc, and I
was able to take a nice binder
full of family stories with me to
read on the long plane flight.
Yes, there were more clues about
street addresses in those stories,
too.
By the time we pulled all these
addresses together from different
sources, we had a research log
notebook of hundreds of pages,
including one section sorted by
street address and another sorted
by surname. Just before leaving, I
had a few copies made of the log
and sent a box to my parents, my
brother, and to just a few close
relatives and fellow researcher
friends along with copies of the
town maps, so they could
vicariously follow along with me
on the trip. It felt good to be
able to include them in this way.
At the last possible minute,
Joyce reminded me I could get
information about Jewish cemetery
conditions, town by town, via the
AJGS Cemetery Project
(http://www1.jewishgen.org/cemetary).
I downloaded a dozen recent
reports describing the location
and condition of each Jewish
cemetery that I hoped to visit. I
stuffed them in my satchel to
bring with me, along with some
additional last minute arrivals
from Dunai; e.g., an excerpt from
a 1930’s list of electors to the
board of the Jewish Community in
Lwow, an excerpt from a list of
Jewish taxpayers with street
addresses, birth dates,
occupations, and amounts of zlotys
paid by each in taxes. The people
in these records are possible
candidates to try to link into my
family eventually, subject to more
research. I decided that even if
these people were never found to
be my relatives, it would still
make the trip more interesting for
me to know which houses were
Jewish homes, exactly which
streets were walked by the Jews of
our ancestral communities.
I flew to Lviv from Warsaw and
Alex met me at the airport. Per my
request, we drove straight to
Ivano-Frankivsk where we were
booked at the Roxolana Hotel.
Every morning, we left the hotel
about 8am, returning only after
dark when I could no longer take
pictures. We walked street by
street, with our maps and the
research log. Note that our
research log (Fig. II) included
boxes to write in the roll number
and shot numbers for my still
film, as well as a place to jot
down the videocassette number for
the camcorder I’d brought along.
It was a slow and thoughtful
process, documenting every
photograph and trying to read some
of a person or family’s personal
details from the research log into
the camcorder as we documented
each address. We found ourselves
in every single neighborhood in
town. I have no desire to leave my
comfortable life in America, so I
was surprised by the strong
feeling that this town was home.
We contacted the local Rabbi,
born in Ivano-Frankivsk after
W.W.II. He was kind, gracious, and
helpful. I asked if he knew where
there were any records of the
Jewish Community of Stanislawow
and surrounding towns. He asked us
to follow him in Alex’s car to his
home. Over good strong coffee, he
pulled out folders of various
records to show us. (See Fig. I.)
The Kalush birth records knocked
me off my seat. I’d been searching
for those very records for years,
as they include the record of a
great great grandfather’s birth.
We’d all thought they were lost.
He said "someone" had found this
book and given it to him. There is
such validity in the Ukrainian
people’s mistrust of government,
based on the long period of Soviet
rule, that I did not even ask why
he had not submitted the book to
any official archive. I just asked
Alex to be sure to get permission
to return to research and to make
copies for people.
The Rabbi has been working for
years to restore whatever Jewish
tombstones are remaining to the
Jewish cemetery. He is cataloguing
them in his own hand, carefully
noting the exact sector and area
number of each. He allowed me to
peruse the list and I found ten
family surnames. He spend an
entire afternoon with us, helping
us find each of these tombstones.
See Fig I for a general list of
the other records he has. Alex
agreed to prepare a detailed
inventory list in the future. I
had too many family addresses to
search for to take the time to do
what could be done later by
someone else. I had decided in
advance that I was not going to
try to do any research myself
while on location. I could always
hire a researcher to do that, but
no one else can experience the
feeling of walking down the block
where, say, my grandmother lived
in 1920 during her last five
months in Europe, before marrying
my grandfather and emigrating to
America.
We accomplished a lot. We visited
most, but not all, of the
addresses on our research log
before we ran out of time. Most,
but not all, of the addresses we
found contained the old original
buildings from the time of my
family’s lives there. One
afternoon, on one of my last days
in Ivano-Frankivsk, I asked Alex
to pull over to the side of the
road so I could scan the research
log to be sure we weren’t
inadvertently missing some of the
most important addresses. It would
be a shame to spend the last few
hours searching for houses of
unknown possible relatives when we
could have found, say, the house
of my grandfather’s first cousin.
I circled the remaining priority
addresses and called them out to
Alex so he could pinpoint the
streets on the map, plotting out
our route through the city
streets. Remember that for each
Polish street name that I called
out, he had to look first at a
handwritten cross-reference table
to get the Russian Street name.
Then, we had to find the street on
the Russian map and look for the
Ukrainian street name, which would
match the current street signs, on
another chart. My eyes stopped
when I got to Smolki Street,
number 2 in the log. This was the
home of a close family branch. I
had a picture back home of the
entire family, including every
person who was listed on the 1939
census record from which we’d
gotten this address. (See Fig.
III.) I’d often stayed up late at
night, gazing at this picture,
imagining the voices of these
people. Here was their address and
I was anxious to find it. Alex
turned his charts over and over in
his hands, against the steering
wheel. "I’m very sorry," he said,
"but I cannot find Smolki Street
anywhere on these lists. It is
possible that maybe this street no
longer exists. You remember that
we have found a few small streets
that no longer exist?" Yes, I
remembered all right, but I wasn’t
ready to give up. Suddenly, I
remembered that excerpt from the
1931 Polish Business Directory
that lists all the street names
and their locations in
alphabetical order. I pulled out
my copy and found Smolki Street. I
read that it intersected with
Sobieskiego Street, a large, easy
to find street. Then, I pulled out
the map from the book I’d found
years ago at YIVO. I scanned the
length of Sobieskiego, and sure
enough there was a tiny street
called Smolki. We almost tore the
Russian map because we both pulled
it out so quickly to see if that
tiny street was marked, and so it
was. The street was still there!
Alex turned on the motor and off
we went. We found the building. It
was still standing. We went inside
and even went into two apartments.
It was a grand old building, just
off a central square. Oddly, there
was a Ukrainian rap music group
performing on the square.
It was an experience I’ll never
forget; one that made the phrase
"following along the paper trail"
really come alive.
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