(Courtesy of JewishGen) JewishGen, the world’s leading website for Jewish genealogy, announced a new partnership with the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv and its director, Olesya Stefanyk, to aid in the effort to preserve historical records at risk of loss and destruction amid Russia’s violent invasion of the country.
The Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv is one of the largest and oldest archives in the country and especially notable for its collections documenting the historical region of Galicia and the different ethnic and religious groups that lived there, with more than 1.1. million files dating as far back as the 12th century.
JewishGen is a wholly owned affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York, and as part of its own mission to preserve Jewish history. With an understanding of how war threatens the history of peoples and regions, the Museum has donated to the Archives a planetary scanner to support the heroic efforts of archivists on the ground in Ukraine and to increase their digitization capacity.
The Museum is also funding the digitization of documents about Jewish communities in the region formerly known as Galicia (which is today western Ukraine and southeastern Poland). These documents describe the real estate transactions, contracts, wills, promissory notes and various activities of the people living in Galicia during the late-18th through late-19th centuries—and at times include large amounts of genealogical detail.
“We are prioritizing this work for towns and villages in which few or no Jewish birth, marriage or death records are known to have survived, making these documents especially valuable,” said JewishGen Executive Director Avraham Groll. “Jews were once a large percentage of the population in these areas, which are relevant to many Jewish genealogists’ research, as indicated in our JewishGen Family Finder. Digitizing these documents on a large scale is important not only to ensure their preservation but to organize them in such a fashion as to make them more easily and freely accessible to all.”
Jack Kliger, President and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, said, “Core to our Museum’s mission is remembrance, and as JewishGen’s response to the crisis in Ukraine affirms, remembrance is not a passive act. It is even, at times, a form of resistance.”
“We are extremely grateful to JewishGen for the scanner we received, which will be used for the information resource of Ukraine’s historical heritage stored at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv,” said Olesya Stefanyk, director of the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv. “Ukrainian archivists are doing everything they can to preserve the historical heritage, cultural assets and documentary memory of our nation. Some of our employees are currently defending Ukraine in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine; others are making every effort at their workplaces.”
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