Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków is planning a new exhibition on the Jews of Lwów. They are looking to make contact with Jewish survivors and their families from the Lwów area who may be able to provide useful input into the development of the exhibition and/or be willing to be featured in it.

Known as Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German, and today in Ukrainian as L’viv (Львів), for centuries this was one of the most vibrant, multicultural and multinational cities of Eastern Europe. Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Armenians and Jews all called the city home and for generations lived and worked, studied and prayed, side-by-side.  

Jewish settlement in the city began as early as the thirteenth century and increased throughout the medieval period and the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, when Lwów became the capital of the newly founded Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia.  The city’s return to Poland following the end of the First World War and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire did little to slow the development of Jewish life, and by the 1930s, Lwów was home to over 100,000 Jews, almost 30% of the city’s total population. There were over forty synagogues and prayer-houses, numerous Jewish schools and institutions of higher learning, a popular theatre and a large number of other cultural institutions. Alongside the religious members of the community were many highly assimilated Jews. 60% of the city’s doctors and 70% of its lawyers were Jewish.  

Lwów itself, as the third-largest Polish city (smaller only than Warsaw and Lodz), had become a modern city and a centre of Polish science and culture. Political, economic, social and cultural life in the city flourished and the city’s Jewish population played an essential role in this.  

 The outbreak of the Second World War, and the occupation of the city, was to destroy this world forever. In the early years of the war, life for Jews under Soviet control remained relatively calm despite the huge influx of Jewish refugees fleeing east from the Nazis. This all changed following the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany on June 22,1941. Just eight days later, on June 30, the Nazis entered the city.  

Anti-Jewish regulations and pogroms began almost immediately, with the Nazis often willingly aided by local Ukrainian residents. On November 8,1941, the Nazis established a ghetto in the city into which they forced 120,000 Jews. Conditions in the ghetto were horrendous and the struggle to survive became a daily battle. Deportations began in March, 1942 with almost all transports being sent directly to the Bełżec death camp. During the 20-day period of the so-called “Great Action” of August, 1942, some 50,000 Lwów Jews were rounded-up and sent to their deaths at Bełżec with thousands more murdered on the ghetto streets. The ghetto was officially closed in September, 1942.

200,000 more Jews from Lwów and the surrounding region were imprisoned in the Janowska Concentration Camp, established by the Nazis on the outskirts of the city, where the majority died of starvation, disease or shootings in the camp. 

 By the time the Red Army liberated in the city in June, 1944, only a fraction of the city’s Jews were still alive.  

This story has rarely been told despite the thousands around the world–survivors and their descendents–who now trace their roots to Lwów. Galicia Jewish Museum is the only museum in the world dedicated to the Jewish history of the Galicia region and is thus uniquely equipped and located to tell this story.  

In March. 2010 the Museum will open one of the first ever exhibitions dedicated to Lwów’s Jewish history. Using photographic, textual, and audio-visual materials the visitor will walk the streets of Lwów in the footsteps of the families that once lived there, from the start of the twentieth century up until the present day, tracing some of the most glorious, and tragic, times of European Jewish history. 

If you are able to help, please contact Museum Director Kate Craddy (kate@galiciajewishmuseum.org) or the exhibition’s research curator, Jakub Nowakowski (jakub@galiciajewishmuseum.org).