Klishkivtsi Articles.

AVOTAYNU Volume XXVI, Number 2, Summer 2010 37

Exploring Cemeteries and Byways in Ukraine

by Harriet Kasow

From May 17 to June 1, 2010, I traveled in Ukraine; spending 15 days visiting 18 cities, towns, and villages looking for traces of Jewish life and records of my family’s residence there. My parents and grandparents all immigrated to the United States between 1907 and 1923 and had  told me many tales of their former lives and residences. Based on the stories my father and mother and aunts and uncles related, I wanted to see for myself where they were born, lived, and married—and to understand their reasons for leaving. The first six days were based in and around Kiev and Vinnitsya where we visited the towns of Bar, Brailov, Borshchiv, Kanonytske, Khmelnytsky, Kamyanets-Podilskyy, and Ternopil.

The second part of my trip I was accompanied by Aizic Oked Sechter, a cousin from my father’s side of the family. We were based in Chernivtsi from where we made day trips to Kalenkovtsi, Khotyn, Klishkivtsi, Memayevtsi, Nedobovtsi, Novoseltsy, Sadagora, and Shyrivtsi. Our focus was archives,cemeteries, and synagogues; in every place we took extensive photographs. In preparation for the trip, I studied Russian to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of the language. As a retired librarian from Hebrew University, I assumed that my language and research skills would help. Also in preparation,we wrote to the archives in Kiev and Chernivtsi saying when we planned to visit and the names, birth places, and birth dates of the family we hoped to document. While in the Chernivtsi region we visited town halls and spoke to mayors and members of educational staff. They in turn led us to non-Jewish older citizens who still remembered  Jews living among them. My guide in the Vinnitsya area was recommended to me, and the guide in Chernivtsi was obtained through Aizic’s contacts. Following is a report of what we learned. In the sidebar is contact information for the individuals who helped us.

Kiev

Without an advance appointment, we visited the director of the State Archives of Ukraine in Kiev who explained the workings of the archive. One regulatory body covers all the archives in Ukraine. To request information, the genealogist should submit the following information: family name, date of birth, death, marriage and birthplace. Indicate your relationship to the person being searched andwrite in English. The director explained that this was the procedure for all requests for all the archives and he gave us a guide based on the work of Miriam Weiner. Only a passport is required for entry, but because of extensive renovations now underway, the hours open to the public may be curtailed.The National Library requires a letter from an institution stating your research needs. We went there without a previous appointment and a librarian generously downloaded a list of items related to the town of Bar onto a flash drive provided by the author.

Vinnitsya

The archives in Vinnitsya, housed in a 400-year-old building, holds some old documents from Bar (birth registers in Hebrew and Russian, but only for scattered years). I looked up the year my mother was born (1910) but could not find her listed. The pages of these old registers are fragile and crumbling. The archive will conduct searches, but a request must be submitted in advance of a visit. The archivist who was quite helpful and friendly thought we might find more information in Khmelnytsky. We visited the formerly Jewish area of Vinnitsya and spoke with Victor Nisin, a Jewish friend of my guide, who had been born there and told us about the Jewish streets. The synagogue hosts a project relating to the Holocaust. The town has approximately 1,500 Jewish residents today, compared to 28,000 before the Holocaust. Victor taught Hebrew at the synagogue for a few years in the 1990s, although he was not formally trained.

F

Gravesite of Rachmiel Belfer in the well-kept Jewish cemetery in Bar. He died in 1963.

38 AVOTAYNU Volume XXVI, Number 2, Summer 2010

The cemetery is on Privozanaya Street. The older cemetery, consisting of a few gravestones (non-Jewish as well as Jewish), is located under dense foliage next to an apartment complex. The gravestones were discovered when the apartment complex was being built and were removed to the central cemetery. The text of most of the gravestones I photographed was in Russian only without a single Hebrew symbol. We visited the three streets where Jews once lived. One named Jerusalimika is where Jews lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Another street is Shalom Aleichem. Currently there is a cinema archives and other commercial entities on these streets. Nearby on the bank of the river where a Jewish community center once was located there is now a park.

Bar

While exploring the cemetery at Bar, we came across a gravestone with the name of Belfer, my mother’s maiden name. Rachmiel Belfer was born in 1895 and died in 1968. The gravestone has a Magen David with the text written in Russian, common during the Soviet era. I know my grandfather once lived and was perhaps born in Bar, so I thought it must be a relative. Having combed the archives in Vinnitsya without locating any documentation for Belfers, we were overjoyed to find this gravestone. By coincidence, while we were filming some gravestones in this relatively small cemetery, a couple passing through asked for whom we were searching for. They tend the gravesite of family members who perished in the Holocaust whose survivors, living in Israel, send them money to maintain the gravesite. The man, Victor Kolodiy, a non-Jew knew Rachmiel Belfer who, he said, had been a teacher, and his son Victor with whom he had gone to school. He claimed that Rachmiel had been born in Mitkye about four kilometers from Bar. He said that Victor and his wife Tatiana had immigrated to the United States in 2000. I gave the couple $100 to tend Rachmiel’s plot for one year and they have already sent me photographs of their work. Although he said that the cemetery does not have an official caretaker, it did not appear as overgrown as most of the others I have seen.

Brailov, Kanonytske and Mytky

We traveled to Mytky and discovered only one gravestone plus broken stones and other detritus. On the way to Kanonytske, which was nearby, we found a relatively large Jewish cemetery that had been moderately restored. I searched unsuccessfully for Belfer gravestones. We also visited the cemetery in Brailov which has a memorial to the martyrs killed in the Holocaust. In addition, we found an old, but well-tended, small cemetery. We asked directions to the cemetery from older residents who knew the exact locations. Brailov is a prototypical village with dirt roads, beautiful scenery, and a lake.

Khmelnytsky

We went to the archives in Khmelnytsky for two reasons. The archivists at Vinnitsya said that information about Bar might be found there and that any remnants of the archives that survived a recent, devastating fire in the Kamyanets-Podilskyy archives might be there as well. The archivists do not search by name alone because the data is not computerized and without knowing the dates of births, deaths, and marriages, a search would be almost impossible. Khmelnytsky is a lovely city and more modern than many others in Ukraine.

Borshchiv and Ternopil

We went to Borshchiv to visit the cemetery because my paternal great-grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshua Cron, reportedly was born there. We discovered a truncated cemetery with one memorial for all those buried there. Apparently the cemetery had been destroyed in the war. We arrived in Ternopil on a Sunday, so we could not go to the archives, but instead visited the tiny, neglected, unlocked, and graffiti ridden cemetery. Interestingly, text on the gravestones is written only in Hebrew and German with none in Russian. This dated the cemetery to the time when the town was part of Galicia.

Chernivtsi

For nine days we based ourselves in Chernivtsi from which we made day trips and where we also visited the State Archives after having made an appointment in advance and sending in our requests for locating information on Aizic’s and my families. The director welcomed us in his office where he presented us with a book of the Archives’ holdings as a gift; then he turned us over to staff members located in a different building. This very helpful staff found us the documents listed below. We also paid a small fee for photocopies. Three visits to the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi produced photographs for the Czernowitz Jewish Cemetery Restoration Organization (CJCRO) project and many random photographs of interesting and beautiful gravestones that caught my eye. The most important gravestone we found was that of a third cousin of ours, Shlomie Sadovnick, which I discovered through a chance conversation at the archives. On hearing that we were researching the Sadovnick family, an archivist revealed that she had been a student of Shlomie Pessie Sadovnick who had been a professor of Romanian Literature at the University of Czernowitz and was buried in Chernivtsi. A kind fellow from the archives took me to his gravestone.

Documents acquired at the Chernivtsi archives:
List of Sadovnick family members who had Romanian citizenship from Klishkivtsi from 1941-44.
Selected family names from Klishkivtsi who applied for Romanian citizenship in 1936.

Khotyn

In Khotyn, Aizic arranged in advance for someone to show us the cemetery and the synagogue. He wanted to find AVOTAYNU Volume XXVI, Number 2, Summer 2010 39 the gravestone of the grandfather after whom he was named and had a photograph of a portion of the gravestone taken in the 1950s. Unfortunately, the cemetery is enormous and overgrown. Aizic was unable to locate his grandfather’s gravestone but I took many photographs of gravestones trying to locate a possible relative. The synagogue in town serves only 20 Jewish families and is in poor condition. We returned again later to Khotyn and explored the municipality and some archives, but were repeatedly told that it held no family record documentation. On my grandmother passenger manifest when she arrived at Ellis Island was an address in Khotyn where her mother had lived with her second husband.  Unfortunately, I did not have this address on hand to look for the street.

Klishkivtsi

Next we went to Klishkivtsi where no Jews live now. We were guided by Dr. Alexander Parsionovish Kyriak, a non-Jew who was born in and has lived in this town his entire 70 years. He showed us the streets where the Jews once lived, and the site of one of the two synagogues which is now a private house. The second synagogue had been torn down, and a huge warehouse stands in its place. We saw one of the last standing Jewish homes just as it was more than 100 years ago and the remnants of a factory for the production of povidel (plum jam), where my grandfather reportedly once worked. Dr. Kyriak introduced us to a 90-year-old resident, a Seventh Day Adventist, who greeted us in Yiddish which he had learned from his Jewish neighbors and who related to us stories of the Jewish families who had lived there before World War II. He went on to tell us clearly how the Jews were expelled from Klishkivtsi by Romanian soldiers and how the non-Jewish Ukrainians stole all the Jews belongings when the Romanians took them away. The few Jews who returned after the war were left with nothing. I have this conversation on a tape in Ukrainian with a Hebrew translation.

Klishkivtzi has two cemeteries. One, about 400 years old, is totally abandoned and is located near a gas station on the busy highway between Chernivtsi and Khotyn next to a private house whose owner clears the foliage yearly and would like to buy the property. She also told us that she has been living on this property for more than 15 years and that we were the first people ever to visit the cemetery. This cemetery is very extensive but most of the gravestones are undecipherable.

The second cemetery, opened in about 1880, is located outside of town in a bucolic area that is nearly impossible to traverse by automobile or on foot. Money was given by former Jewish residents to fix the access road, but apparently it went into someone’s pocket. I almost could not manage the walk, but I was on an important mission and was rewarded by finding the gravestone of my grandfather Hirsch Zvi’s sister, Haya, who was born in 1869 and died in 1933. Most of this large cemetery is a jungle. Though some restoration had been done, it is hardly noticeable. At Aizic’s instigation and indefatigable persistence, we went again another day and visited the mayor’s office as well as the local high school. Despite several telephone calls made by our guide, we were unable to see the mayor, but managed to talk to the deputy mayor. We wanted to encourage the preservation of the Jewish sites and display our interest in our ancestral town, but as elections were in the offing, our meeting was less than  satisfactory. Apparently he wasn’t interested in taking any initiatives such as promoting tourism and correcting the undue notice of the town. The principal of the high school and his staff welcomed us with open arms, however, even though we barged in without an appointment. We had heard about a handwritten book on the history of the town and wanted to know where we could see it. To our delight, the principal offered to make us each a CD which we could pick up in a few days. A Ukrainian speaker who looked at it for us found certain parts of the book that would interest family researchers such as mentions of Jewish life and a description of the town in 1907 and 1910. I am working on having this translated into English and Hebrew. In return, we promised to help him with a project on Judaism for their next year’s curriculum. The teachers also presented us with a gift of a history of Chernivtsi.

Entranceway to the abandoned synagogue in Klikvitzki. It is next to a private house.

40 AVOTAYNU Volume XXVI, Number 2, Summer 2010

 

Novoseltsy

Novoseltsy was the third city in which we spent considerable time. Here, through the local owner of a small supermarket, the son of Roman Vovk from Klishkivtsi, we were introduced to an old-timer and one of the last remaining Jews in Novoseltsy. He was a possible relative of my first cousin’s husband who allowed me to film photographs and documents. He directed us to the synagogue where restoration is underway, though much remains to be done. He also directed us to the cemetery and war memorial. The cemetery is huge and well preserved, thanks to descendants of the town now living in Israel and other places who contribute to its maintenance by paying a groundskeeper and a woman caretaker who lives on the grounds. At the war memorial, we discovered some Sadovnick names and once again were rewarded with family names to investigate. This bolstered our impression that cemeteries and memorials were the documents of our ancestors. We visited several other towns connected with Aizic’s mother’s family—Kalinkovtsi, Mamayevtsi, Nedobovtsi, Sadgora, and Shyrivtsi.

Conclusions

One conclusion is that documentation for my families’ existence does not exist in the Ukrainian archives. Possibly I should have gone to the archives in Mogilov-Podolski and Ternopil or waited for a response from archives before making the trip. But from many points of view—finding family gravestones, discovering Jewish cemeteries, seeing the extent of Jewish existence in towns, and developing leads to other family members made the trip worthwhile. Sometimes being on the spot where your ancestors lived produces inspiration for further research. In addition, we plan to create a website for Klishkivtsi and actively promote cemetery restoration in the two cemeteries in

Klishkivtsi.

Bibliography

Archives of Ukraine; Guidebook. Kyiv. Archives State Committee of Ukrainian Research Institute of Archiving and Study of Documents, 2008.

Berezina, S.I. From the History of Chernivtsi Jews.

Chernivtsi. Technodruk. 2007. Ukrainian and English.

Guide: State Archives of the Chernowitz Archives. Vol. 1.

(Ukrainian) Kiev. Chernivtsi. 2006 ISBN: 966 8285-14-7.

Karvatsky, D.S. Journal of the History of Klishkivtsi.

(Ukrainian). Klishkivtsi. Handwritten. CD copy. 1975. Given to us by the Director of the High School in Klishkivtsi.

Prestupenko, Yuri. Chernivet’s’ki nekropoli. Chernivtsi.

The Chernivtsi Centre of Culture Heritage. Micto. 2000.

Ukrainian and a German summary. Description of the graves both Jewish and non-Jewish in the Chernivtsi Cemetery

Segal, Joshua L. A Field Guide to Visiting a Jewish Cemetery; a Spiritual Journey to the Past, Present and Future.
Nashua, NH, Jewish Cemetery Publishing, LLC. 2005.

Shea, Jonathan D. & William F. Hoffman. In Their Words:
A Genealogist’s Translation Guide to Polish, German, Latin,and Russian Documents. Volume II: Russian. New Britain,Connecticut. Language & Lineage Press, 2002.

Suedliches Blatt vom Europ. Russland. Albany NY.
Reproduced by Jonathan Sheppard Books. English title: Russia in Europe-1845 (Southern Sheet).
A Tour of Chernivtsi and Bukovyna; Guide. Baltia-Druk. 2008.

Harriet Kasow is a retired Media Librarian from HebrewUniversity in Jerusalem. She was the volunteer librarian for the Israel Genealogy Society and wrote a column and articles for its journal Sharsheret Hadorot. Kasov currently volunteers at Yad Vashem and interviews survivors. She was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Miami, and made aliyah in 1971.

Guides and Contacts in Ukraine

Kiev Archives contact: Alex Khamray, mail@cdiak.archives.gov.ua.

Vinnitsya Archives: vinn_archive@mail.ru

Alex Saksonov, driver and guide on the first six days of the trip is based in Vinnitsya. He is non-Jewish but has business arrangements in Israel for translation services. His English is perfect. He can translate Russian and Ukrainian documents;
Telephone: 38 0432 432175; Mobile phone: 38 067 7923112;
E-mail: Alex@saksonov.com or sakdsonov@bk.ru;
Webpage: www.sakdsonov.com.

Alex Masenkis was our driver and guide the 9 days we were in Chernivtsi. A native of Chernivtsi, he speaksUkrainian, Russian, and Hebrew and is able to drive to Romania as well.
Mobile phone: 318 952 522 326;
Skype PER41k21;
E-mail: peri_91@mail.ru.
He arranged the contacts in the Chernivtsi region and helped photograph the gravestones.

Correction.

In the article "Exploring Cemeteries and Byways in Ukraine" in the summer issue (Vol.27/5) I gave the wrong contact information for my guide in Vinnitsa. The correct information is as follows:

E-mail 1: Alex@saksonov.com
E-mail 2: saksonov@bk.ru
Website www.saksonov.com

Sidebar on Kliskvitzi

 By Aizic Oked Sechter

Klishkovitz is an amazing fairy book "Shteitel"; a small village where Jews used to live together with their gentile neighbors. Klishkovitz, one of thousands of similar villages in Eastern Europe where the Jewish presence ceased to exist due to the Holocaust.

Why is Klishkovitz different from the thousands of other similar villages in Eastern Europe? It is due mainly to its history, being one of the oldest towns in this area of South-West Ukraine today, once Bessarabia, and Russian Empire. Its history goes even further back having been established during the Turkish Ottoman Empire rule as a penal colony. The convicts' job was to prepare the fertile land for agricultural production.

Once established Jewish traders traveling on the "silk road," between Poland and the Persian Gulf discovered and used the town as a station to stay over the Sabbath. In the old Jewish cemetery in the central part of thevillage, there existed gravestones about 500 Years old.

The Jews made a living from agriculture. The whole area was rich in Agricultural produce and in Klishkovitz there was a weekly fair where Agricultural produce and livestock was traded.

The Jews also ran stores in the town and would sub-let land belonging to the Church. Towards the turn of the 20th century about 300 Jewish families lived in Klishkovitz. Due to anti-Jewish laws, the Jewish residents found it harder and harder to make a living and some of the young people started to emigrate to America and South America. This trend in emigration increased after WWI due to the fact that during WWI all of the Jews of Klishkovitz were expelled by force and most of their homes were looted and burnt. After WWI only part of the Jews returned. At the start of WWII the Jews were again Expelled and many of them died in death marches and in death camps in Transniester.

Some of the few survivors that returned to Klishkovitz after WWII found their homes either burnt to the ground or gentiles living in their homes and were given to understand that they were no longer wanted there. One by one these Holocaust survivors left Klishkovitz, most of them to Israel, some to America and to the rest of the world. By the 1970s the Jewish presence in Klishkovitz ceased to exist.

The two Jewish cemeteries are in a sorry rundown state. Of the two Synagogues only one is still standing having been turned into a residential house of a non-Jewish family. Most of the Jewish homes have been torn down and new modern homes built instead. Many of the young residents of Klishkovitz do not even know that there was a Jewish presence here.  

Event though the clock is ticking, and things are not as easy as they look but if we live up to a famous quote of mine, "Be persistent, keep trying and never give up," we can still turn part of Klishkovitz into a showcase and memorial for all those Yidishe shteitels that have been erased from the face of the earth.