80 Years Since the Liquidation of the Lvov Ghetto

Iyar 17, 5783 (May 18, 2023)

By: Yaakov Rosenfeld, Ganzach Kiddush Hashem

Few of the 110,000 Lvov Jews survived the war. Lemberg, as it was known during WWII (and now is Lviv, Ukraine), was the largest and most famous city in Galicia, formerly the capital of Western Galicia. Lvov was the third largest Jewish community in Poland after Warsaw and Lodz, and the great leaders of the generation, who were famous and considered as giants, served as rabbis there. It is enough to mention a small number of them, well-known names such as the “Maharam of Lublin,” the “Sama,” the “Maginei Shlomo,” the “Taz,” the “Chacham Zvi,” the “Penei Yehoshua,” the “Merkevet HaMishna,” the “Yeshuat Ya’akov,” the “Sho’el U’Meishiv” and many more.

Much has already been written about Lvov, but certainly not too much, because it was a magnificent “Jewish world”, full of Torah, kindness, and chassidism, full of political activity and full of a rooted Jewish which is sweeter than honey.

In Lvov there were around 400 synagogues and shtieblach (small synagogues), Torah and charity institutions, rabbinical courts, and everything that a community of this size could contain.

In the summer of 5701 (1941) the Nazis conquered Lvov and they were greeted with cheers by the bloodthirsty Ukrainians who staged two pogroms against the Jews as a sign of joy and gratitude, in which 6,000 of the city’s Jews were killed. At the end of the summer, the first Jews were sent to the infamous Janowska camp, which has already been written about here before. Later the Jews were forced to wear a yellow ribbon on their arm, and after the “Aktion (roundup) under the bridge”, in which about 5,000 elderly and sick people were selected and shot to death, close to one hundred and twenty thousand Jews were transferred to the Lvov Ghetto which was established around Hanukkah in the year 5702 (late fall 1942), and then the slow but consistent dying of the huge Jewish community of Lemberg began.

After the murder of tens of thousands of Jews during the Nazi occupation, many of them around Janowska, the Nazis decided to liquidate the remainder of the ghetto on the Iyar 27, 5703 (June 1, 1943). In various murders, the thousands of unfortunate Jews ascended to Heaven, and of all this glorious Judaism, almost nothing remains.

To mark the eightieth anniversary of the liquidation of the Lvov Ghetto, Ganzach Kiddush Hashem presents a series of photos, all from our photo archive. In a silent voice, the pictures tell the glorious history and the twilight of Lvov Jewry, and its sad and tragic sunset.