25/03/2026
✡ 🇺🇦 Rohatyn Jewish Heritage is excited to announce a significant expansion of headstone entries for Rohatyn in the online database project begun in 2023 with Ukrainian partners. We cannot overstate how substantial the additional new material is to this long-term beloved project. For decades and especially since 2011, hundreds of Jewish headstones and headstone fragments ravaged and repurposed during and after WWII from Rohatyn's two Jewish cemeteries have been recovered by us and others in Rohatyn and photographed but rarely published. Now they are being cataloged, geolocated, and transcribed/translated from the original Hebrew and/or Polish/German and made available online as an open, searchable, free resource for heritage study, genealogy research, and recovery of Jewish memory. Perhaps most importantly, this enormous project demonstrates the power of partnerships to support heritage documentation and recovery of Jewish memory.
Some facts specific to Rohatyn's headstones:
👉 Only a very small fraction of the thousands of headstones which once stood over graves in Rohatyn's two Jewish cemeteries have been found/recovered to date; the labor to transcribe and translate the fragmented epitaph record into this database still continues; when complete, there will be 500+ stones/fragments for Rohatyn online.
👉 There are only a total of 54 headstones still anchored in the ground in the two cemeteries, and of those most are stumps broken off near the ground with no legible inscriptions, but 9 have partial or full names and/or dates.
👉 Roughly 80% of the entries in the database are loose, most or all recovered from around Rohatyn and returned to the Jewish cemeteries since the 1990s, of which about 400 are fragmented stones and recovered since 2011. In nearly every case, it is not known where in the cemeteries these stones originally stood, though for most almost certainly somewhere in the old Jewish cemetery. We have fully processed only 26 as of today, and of those we can read partial or complete names and/or dates on about 16. That work continues...
👉 11 historical, pre-WWII photographs have been worked into the database adding 58 headstones - attempts by us to recover images and epitaphs from Rohatyn Jewish headstones which no longer exist or have not yet been recovered. These photos may turn out to be the only record of the epitaphs they depict; of the 58, about 30 have partial or complete names and/or dates on them.
👉 Where possible, we have correlated information from the headstones to historic vital records to help identify specific Rohatyn Jewish individuals and families.
✡ 🇺🇦 Still very much a work in progress, here is the link to the Rohatyn part of the database:
https://jewishstonesua.org/rohatyn/
✡ 🇺🇦 We have also recently updated the "About Rohatyn" page on the website to better describe the ongoing documentation effort and to highlight illustrative examples:
https://jewishstonesua.org/rohatyn/about/
✡ 🇺🇦 This monumental undertaking could not have been possible without indispensable, gifted Ukrainian colleagues who worked with us throughout winter despite some of the most difficult conditions since the beginning of the full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine; specifically, the amazing researcher Tania Fedoriv (Тетяна Федорів) of Zbarazh - Hebrew transcriptions and Ukrainian translations from old and new headstone photos; and Vasyl Yuzyshyn - database development, webwork, and editing.
✡ 🇺🇦 The newest headstone database additions for Rohatyn join 100s of other entries already online for the historic Galician cities of Lviv, Dobromyl, Zbarazh, and Sokal:
ENG 🇺🇸 - https://jewishstonesua.org/
UKR 🇺🇦 - https://jewishstonesua.org/uk
