09/15/2026
After a long journey, I spent April 21, 2026, in Lviv, Ukraine. Its large center is mostly pre-WWII. Just looking at the old doors is fascinating. I walked to the Lykachiv Cemetery. A sea of flags marks the graves of the soldiers killed in the ongoing war with Russia.
A 12-hour train trip took me 472 miles east to Poltava. At 6 a.m. my friend Alex picked me up at the train station with his gasoline car fitted with an LPG conversion.
The next day we visited Hesed Nefesh, a charitable organization that supports the Jewish community. I gave a talk about Jewish genealogy. My initial interest in my own family history helped reunite another family separated by both the Holocaust and Stalin. This soon led to helping other families.
With Alex, I revisited Horodyshche, Cherkassy Oblast, the birthplace of my grandfather Jacob Pokross. He came to Fall River, Mass., as a child in 1892 with his siblings and parents, Pinkas and Jenny Pokross.
My visit had another motive. In nearby Mliiv, a Holocaust monument does not mention that the victims were Jewish. Since Soviet-era commemoration policies rejected the idea of targeted genocide, I needed a way to amend this. Vira, a teacher interested in local history who showed us around, added me to a Facebook group of people using old photographs to learn about Horodyshche’s history. They immediately started to help me research my family history.
After I returned home, Vira told me that her friend Kateryna possessed a contract to sell a house in 1906. Aaron Pokras went to the Russian consulate in New York to authorize his wife to sell his share of a house to his two brothers, Moshko and Pinkas. Pinkas Pokross was my great grandfather’s name! I already had Aaron on my family tree! Kateryna is related to the wife of one of his brothers.
We visited two Jewish communities, Myhorod and Zvenyhorodka, meeting the leaders of both. They held religious services until COVID-19. Their synagogues were community centers and included spaces for worship, meetings, meals and museum sections. In Myhorod we were warmly welcomed by Mikhail Ruthizer.
Mikhail’s community provides headstones if a family can’t afford one. He brought us to a Holocaust site where remains were reinterred so a factory could be built. A small Holocaust monument erected in the last 20 years stands in front of a massive Soviet one. Crumbling headstones in the Jewish cemetery don't have Jewish symbols in keeping with Soviet policy, but many post-Soviet monuments have menorahs, although no Hebrew.
Driving through Shpola, on our way to Zvenyhorodka, a crowd lined both sides of a busy street holding flags and banners demonstrating about those missing in action. Cars honked their approval. A nearby monument displayed 150 pictures of soldiers killed in the war with flowers at its base from their loved ones. The war was everywhere.
In Zvenyhorodka, we met Leonid Braslavsky. The Jewish community had a synagogue built in 1891. During the Soviet era, it became part of a hospital. Leonid showed us a moving photo of people at a Holocaust memorial ceremony. It takes place annually on or close to Victory Day in a forest with at least five WWII massacre sites. The monument says in Ukrainian, “Here lie the sons of our people, murdered by the fascists in 1943.” Other monuments refer to them as Soviet citizens.
By their presence at the memorial ceremony and by the monument’s words, the survivors speak directly to us, to the victims and to G-d.
Leonid asked, “Why did my American relatives, the Lubarskys from Lysianka, stop writing in the 1960s?” Lysianka is 23 miles NNW of Zvenyhorodka. I heard a different question, “I am the child of Holocaust survivors and don’t have a lot of relatives. What happened to my American family?”
On jewishgen.org I found an 1893 Russian document for a Lubarsky family in Lysianka who subsequently emigrated to the United States. A second Lysianka Lubarsky family also came to the US. Due to the passage of time and assimilation, they can be hard to find.
From Lviv, I took a day trip with guide Diana Borysenko. We drove to Holohirky (Bare Hills), about an hour east of Lviv. The only evidence of the Jewish community is a cemetery. A friendly woman at the village office took us there. On a hilltop was an empty field with a few standing headstones and a heap of fragments overlooking the valley below.
On the outskirts of Ternopil, a city with about 225,000 residents, a lot of people stood by the roadside. Diana opened the window. It was a drone attack! Thousands had stopped their cars and exited them following official advice. Their eyes were trained on the skies. The attack was miles away in the city center. A quarter of the city lost electricity, a fire burned for 24 four hours and thirteen people were injured, some severely.
AARON GINSBURG, a Newport native, lives in Stoughton, Mass., and blogs at jewishnewport.blogspot.com.
