JEWISH GALICIA & BUKOVINA

Promoting the study and commemoration of the cultural heritage

In cooperation with:

Vizhnitz hold a unique position in the history of Eastern European Jewry: at the end of the nineteenth century, Jews made up more than 90% of the population of this small town. Mayors and council members, government officials and professionals, merchants and craftsmen – the vast majority were Jews, a very unusual phenomenon even in those parts of Eastern Europe where there was a visible Jewish presence. Morover, one of the great admors of the Hassidic movement – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager, the son of the Admor of Kosov – settled in Vizhnitz in 1854. From that time until the Holocaust, Vizhnitsa was an important center of Hassidism and a focal point of mass religious pilgrimage.

Our expedition team managed to document the oldest part of the cemetery, more than 2,000 gravestones from the period between 1863 - 1940. Photographs and transcribed epitaphs of all this graves, and also a detailed topographic sketch of the cemetery are available on the JGB Organization’s website: see here