LVIV, Ukraine – Dr. Leszek Allerhand, from Zakopane in southern Poland, stands on a wooden walkway constructed over the ruins of Lviv’s Golden Rose Synagogue, destroyed during World War II. His gaze turns to a four-story house nearby – his parents’ house, where he was born and from where he watched the synagogue being destroyed.
The Golden Rose Synagogue, built in the 16th century, had been the oldest synagogue in Ukraine. It was destroyed along with other Jewish buildings next to it – the Beth Hamidrash (House of Learning) building, and the Great City Synagogue. In the next few years, most of Lviv’s Jewish inhabitants were wiped out as well.
Until 2008, the sites of the former synagogues were virtually abandoned – one was overgrown with trees, and the other used as a restaurant’s terrace. However, the city center sites have now been cleaned, renovated, and as of August transformed into a memorial space for remembrance and contemplation about the fates of the Golden Rose and Great City Synagogues, and the city’s Jewish community.
The sites of the former synagogues were virtually abandoned until 2008 – one was overgrown with trees, and the other used as a restaurant’s terrace. However, the city center sites have now been cleaned, renovated, and as of August 2016 transformed into a memorial space for remembrance and contemplation about the fates of the Golden Rose and Great City Synagogues, and the city’s Jewish community.
Community destroyed
Born in 1931 in Lviv into a family of Polish Jews, Allerhand was 11 years old when the Golden Rose Synagogue was burned to the ground in 1942. German soldiers knocked on the door of his family’s home on Brativ Rohatyntsiv Street, in Lviv’s Jewish quarter, and ordered Allerhand and his family to remain quiet and stay inside. The entrance to the building was blocked.
The family watched through the windows as the synagogue burned. The flames spread quickly, Allerhand remembers.
He and his family tried to escape through a different exit but were stopped by the German soldiers. On the first floor, they found the synagogue’s rabbi, lying on the floor, sobbing.
Soon after the destruction of the synagogue, Allerhand and his family were driven into the Lviv Ghetto, set up in 1941 after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The ghetto operated until 1943, after which its inhabitants were loaded into cattle trucks and sent to the Nazi death camps.
Of 30 people in Allerhand’s immediate family, only three survived the Holocaust – Allerhand and his mother and father. They survived only because they escaped the ghetto and hid in the city, repeatedly changing their hiding places until Lviv was liberated from German occupation by the Red Army in July 1944.
Before the war, there were around 100,000 Jews living in Lviv – about a third of the city’s population. With some 200 synagogues, the city was an important center of Jewish life.
But by 1944, only a few hundred Jews were left in Lviv.
After the war, the ruins of the synagogue near Allerhand’s home were neglected and blocked from view with a corrugated metal fence. In 2000s, a restaurant named “At the Golden Rose” opened in the next building, with outdoor seating on the ruins of the synagogue.
Common heritage
It was not until 2008 that Lviv City Council, together with the Center for Urban History and the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), called an international competition to design a memorial at the site of the destroyed Golden Rose Synagogue.
“People from all over the world come here looking for traces of their families and the histories of their ancestors,” Mayor of Lviv Andriy Sadovyi wrote in a booklet about the project. “It is therefore incumbent upon us, the current citizens of Lviv, to preserve and cherish the memory of Lviv’s Jewish community and its contributions to our common heritage.”
The Space of Synagogues memorial opened on Sept. 4. Designed by a Berlin-based architect Franz Reschke, it includes part of one of the walls of the Golden Rose Synagogue, a wooden walkway on the site, and a “Perpetuation” memorial installation, consisting of 39 stone slabs, inscribed with quotations of Holocaust survivors from Lviv and their descendants, with a lot of space left for the future inscriptions.
“I return in my imagination to Lwów… I return, knowing that my Lwów is everywhere; it speaks to everyone who has been forced from their village or town, everyone who has lost their family in violent circumstances,” reads one of the quotes. It belongs to Janina Hescheles, a famous Israeli chemist and a Lviv-born Holocaust survivor.
The first visitors to the memorial put stones on these slabs, a tradition that honors one’s ancestors. Next to the memorial, there are stone slabs indicating the original outline of the learning house Beth Hamidrash, and the empty land lot where Great City Synagogue used to be.
A map of the space illustrates the three main areas of the memorial – the Golden Rose Synagogue, the Beth Hamidrash or House of Learning, and Great City Synagogue (Courtesy)
Reconciliation
The opening ceremony for the memorial was attended by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, the German ambassador to Ukraine and representatives of GIZ.
Historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, speaking to the Kyiv Post by phone, said the opening of the memorial would help improve relations between Jews and Ukrainians. He said that a radical change in these relations had started with the EuroMaidan Revolution, in which Ukrainian Jews had participated alongside people from the rest of Ukrainian society. Also important, Hrytsak said, was the visit to Israel in December 2015 of President Petro Poroshenko, during which he apologized for the crimes committed by Ukrainians during the Holocaust.
And the commemoration at the end of September of the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust massacres at Babyn Yar in Kyiv by the Nazis will be another step towards the improvement of relations, Hrytsak said.
“The history of the Jews is a part of Ukrainian history,” Hrytsak said. “We cannot understand and write Ukrainian history correctly if we exclude the Jews. That is what the Soviet Union did.”
Video “Space of Synagogues: Jewish History, Common Heritage, and Responsibility” tells the stories of those involved in the design of the memorial, and shows what the site of the ruins of the Golden Rose Synagogue before the memorial opened.
