Volunteers have been working this week — with hand tools and and with heavy machinery — to recover some 100 or so matzevot from the destroyed Jewish cemetery in Sokal, near L’viv, and bring them for safekeeping to the town’s monumental ruined synagogue.
The Jewish cemetery in Sokal was demolished decades ago and built over with private houses and other structures.
Over the past three decades, scores of headstones have been found in the area and either brought to the local Christian cemetery or to a vacant area outside the city.
The current recovery effort is a cooperative project of the L’viv Volunteer Center (LVC) of the Hesed Arieh All-Ukrainian Jewish Charitable Foundation, local activists including Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and Oksana Savchuk, and local Sokal officials. Activists met last May with Mayor Serhii Kasian, Deputy Mayor Volodymyr Ohinskyi, and Ihor Datsyuk, the mayor’s office representative responsible for heritage preservation, to discuss plans for the project.
“Jewish tombstones were found about 30 years ago while repairing the city’s streets [were] dumped in an old Roman Catholic cemetery,” LVC director Sasha Nazar said in a Facebook post September 1. “From time to time there were talks about [what to do], but in practice, no one dared to interfere with them. Thanks to the coordinated actions of all participants it was possible to successfully launch the project, which is the result of long and fruitful preparatory work of the initiative group.”
In 2019, the LVC organized an International Volunteer Heritage Camp, at which more than 70 volunteers from five countries cleaned up on the ruins of the Sokal synagogue, removing trash and vegetation.
Click here to see photo documentation of the rescue project on Facebook