YIZKOR list from 1954. An Introduction.

According to "Where Once We Walked," there were 1, 715 Jews in Lubaczow before the Holocaust.

I once translated a one-page Yizkor list for Lubaczow. The list, containing close to 860 persons, was finished in 1954, a project of the Israeli Lubaczower Landsmanschaft and its chairman, the late Uri Roth. The scribe who wrote the one-page list was the late Samuel S. Lieberman from Tel Aviv, originally from Cieszanow.

The list gives no indication of age or of internal family relationships ( parents, children, siblings, spouses ) of the victims. The words "and family" in the list seem to indicate there were additional family members whose names were forgotten or not known.

Because the names have been translated from Hebrew and the print in our copy was tiny, the spelling must be taken with much caution. Please send any corrections you can find to me: efloersheim (at) gmail.com


My initial impression was that these names were the names of persons murdered in the Holocaust. Later I have understood that this is not always the case. 

1. Some of the religious leaders had died long before the Holocaust.

2. Some had died in the late thirties, even in the 1920's.

3. WWII broke out in September 1939. Some had died  between September 1939 and  December 1940, during the Soviet occupation.

Relatives who had managed to escape to Eretz Israel before the Holocaust and those Holocaust survivors who managed to get to Israel after the war, knew they had no possibility to go to Lubaczow to their family graves. There were of course no graves for those relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust.

These members of the Israeli Lubaczower Landsmanschaft would get together and needed a way to commemorate their relatives without visiting the Lubaczow Jewish cemetery and without any graves for those murdered during the Holocaust.

I also believe they wanted to honor those religious leaders who had led and influenced their lives back in Lubaczow.

My theory today is that the Yizkor list composed in 1954 in Tel Aviv had three purposes,:
1. to give at least some of the relatives in Israel a symbolic way of commemorating their deceased family members buried in Lubaczow.
2. to honor the religious leaders  they had back in Lubaczow
3. to commemorate their murdered relatives and friends. This may have been the main purpose.