For Jewish activist Meilakh Sheikhet, who has lived in Lviv for a long time, Sadovyi's sincerity seems questionable.
Andrey Sadovy
Following a series of KV publications about the mayor of Lviv's antics, Israeli journalists from Jerusalem.POST conducted their own investigation. We offer you a translation of their report, detailing how the leader of the capital's most popular "Samopomich" party is addressing issues in his hometown.
LVIV, Ukraine – Last Saturday afternoon, shopkeepers at Krakivskyi Rynok, Lviv's largest market, were selling everything from fish to army uniforms, as usual. At one of the entrances to the shopping mall, a puppy shelter booth caught the eye of shoppers.
Nothing here on the ground physically testifies to the physical destruction of the ancient Jewish cemetery beneath the feet of passersby. The ancient Jewish cemetery, dating back to approximately 1348, was devastated during the Holocaust and later, under Stalin's regime, covered over with asphalt.
Since then, construction has been sporadically undertaken here, but restoration efforts have consistently failed due to a lack of political and financial resources, characteristic of Ukraine's post-Soviet bureaucracy.
The cemetery in Lviv is a particularly well-known example of a problem common to all Jewish cultural monuments in the country: the quantity and scale of the cultural heritage far exceeds the ability of the country's ever-shrinking Jewish population to protect it.
A 2005 study found that for the country's 65000 Jews, many of whom are not affiliated with any formal community, there are 731 Jewish cemeteries and 365 cultural monuments, 30 of which are currently used as warehouses or workshops, 16 as housing, and three as churches.
Other cultural monuments have been converted into gyms, administrative buildings, factories, schools, some are privately owned or have become commercial establishments.
In most cases, Jewish cultural monuments are under the jurisdiction of local authorities and, accordingly, are entirely dependent on the decisions they make.
"In some cases, they are treated with apathy, sometimes worse, sometimes better," noted Yaakov Dov Bleich, Chief Rabbi of Ukraine. "You must understand that there is no national orientation in this area."
In Lviv, Meilakh Sheikhet, a Jewish activist and director of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, has been actively fighting for the restoration of the cemetery and the protection of other Jewish cultural monuments since 1989.
LIMMUD FSU founder Chaim Chesler (left) stands with Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi (center) and Ukrainian Ambassador Eliav Belotserkovsky at the organization's conference in Lviv, Ukraine (photo credit: YOSSI ALONI)
In the lobby of a local hotel, where more than 600 participants of Limmud FSU, an annual festival of Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe, had gathered, he spoke of the "incredible impudence" of the city's official authorities in this matter.
"They do not respect the right of Jews to own burial sites and historical heritage," he said.
"They said they wanted Jews to pay for people to leave (the market). This is simply a blatant humiliation for the Jewish people."
During the three-day Limmud FSU conference, the Lviv Jewish community attracted the attention of city officials. A city official spoke on a panel alongside Eli Belotserkovsky, the ambassador to Ukraine, and Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi spoke at the opening ceremony.
"I would like all your conferences to always be held in Lviv," he said. "We love (the Jewish community), and we wish you only positive things and all the best."
During the conference, city officials inspected the site where a group of Jews who lived in the city before the war were found hiding in Lviv's sewer system for 14 months. City officials promised to erect a memorial at the site.
But for Sheikhet, who has lived in Lviv for a long time, Sadovyi’s sincerity seems questionable.
"I was shocked that the city's mayor came to speak to the Jews he personally humiliates—the Jewish citizens of Lviv who were exterminated simply because they were born Jews," he said. "And he does nothing to uphold their memory."
To perpetuate the memory, in 2011, city authorities announced a competition to design memorial structures at sites commemorating the Jewish presence in the city – a project Sheikhet successfully opposed in court on the grounds that it would further degrade Jewish sites.
Currently, the municipality maintains a deathly silence on the Jewish issue. Earlier this year, a city official told the Ukrainian news agency KyivVlast that "no one in the mayor's office is discussing or raising this issue officially right now."
The city administration's inertia regarding the cemetery's restoration has thwarted all attempts to relocate the marketplace at the local, national, and international levels. Most recently, in 2010, the Ukrainian government added the cemetery beneath Krakow Market to its list of national cultural heritage sites, setting in motion a legal battle over the marketplace's relocation.
A significant portion of the political will for the protection of Jewish cultural heritage sites in Ukraine comes from the United States, which in 1994 signed an Agreement with Ukraine, establishing key milestones in the protection of Jewish cultural monuments (literally, according to the text of the Agreement: in the “protection of all cultural heritage sites damaged by totalitarian regimes” – translator’s note).
In 1997, the United States Agency for International Development prepared and published a report recommending the relocation of the Krakow Market and proposing three alternative options for achieving this goal.
The cost of the proposals ranged from 4 to 12 million US dollars (which are recouped by trade revenues – translator’s note).
The report noted that "Lviv's city budget cannot provide the capital investment necessary to implement even the most low-budget proposal."
Therefore, none of the options was chosen by the city authorities.
Instead, Sheikhet said, city officials asked the Jewish community to pay $12 million to relocate the market.
Only a narrow strip between the market and the former Jewish hospital on the southern side remains untouched by burials. The rest of the burials are located beneath the outlying buildings of the market, extending to the central building of the Krakow Market.
Among the burials are those of famous figures in Jewish culture, including David HaLevi Segal, a renowned 17th-century educator who commented on the Shulchan Arukh, the Jewish code of laws for everyday life, and the most famous head of Lviv's ruined historic synagogue, Turei Zahav.
The burial sites of rabbis and sages are spiritual sanctuaries for both Hasidim and ordinary Jewish believers. For example, the grave of Rabbi Nachman, the founder of the Breslov Hasidim, is the site of an annual pilgrimage to his burial site in Uman, in central Ukraine.
Segal and other prominent Jewish figures buried in Lviv are accorded much less respect.
Many tombstones belonging to Lviv's Jews became part of the market's foundations; some of them can still be found today, strengthening the hill market.
Alex Nazar is the chairman of the Jewish Society of Lviv, which operates out of one of the two remaining ancient synagogues in the city.
He said the tombstones were discarded like trash when builders began laying the market's foundations in the early 2000s.
"When the market started to develop, they started tearing down the old foundation, and in the foundation were many distinctive bricks, some of which were gravestones," he said. "They threw them out like trash."
In defense, one could say the workers "didn't understand what they were doing," he noted. The tombstones were later found in a pile of rubble destined for recycling and use as building materials.
"When we found them, we started moving them back to the area of the Jewish cemetery," Nazar said.
The Soviet administration believed that flat, heavy headstones were an acceptable building material; many headstones were likely removed from the cemetery and used in construction projects in various parts of the city.
"This happened everywhere, not just in Lviv," as a result of World War II, noted Shimon Redlich, a renowned history professor at Ben-Gurion University. "The problem is that no one is properly guarding these places, and because they are Jewish, they are accessible to anyone and everyone."
A native of Berezhany, about 90 km from Lviv, Redlich speculates that he was born in the old Jewish hospital near Krakow Market, although he is not certain.
Redlich said that he and other former residents of Berezhany tried to preserve the crumbling remains of the synagogue he attended as a child. He said all their efforts were thwarted when local authorities demanded an "exorbitant sum" for the preservation of this cultural monument.
Earlier this month, speaking at a small Holocaust memorial near Lviv, Tel Aviv University history professor David Assaf called the phenomenon hon vezikaron, or capital and memorial.
"Typically in Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine, monument protection issues are not organized by national administrations; they are open to private initiatives. Those with the money and energy take the initiative and build private memorials," he said on Thursday.
Hopes for relocating the Krakivskyi Market in Lviv remain slim. Responding to a question from a Ukrainian newspaper, a representative of the market administration said, "The market will not be relocated, and all the other dreams you speak of will not come true. The market is open and will continue to operate," she added, and hung up.
Undaunted, Sheikhet says he intends to file a lawsuit in the coming months to relocate the market.
At the same time, the scale and number of Jewish cultural monuments in Ukraine clearly exceeds the efforts of isolated enthusiasts like Sheikhet.
Even if some monuments of Jewish culture are returned to the Jewish community, and Bleich believes that this is essentially “a drop in the ocean,” significant funds will be required to preserve them.
At the same time, periodically renewed construction inevitably makes developers unwitting archaeologists.
While digging for the basement of a hotel planned next to the Turei Zahav (Golden Lines – translator’s note) synagogue, wells dating back to the 15th century were discovered. It turned out that these springs were used for Jewish mikvahs – ritual ablutions (cleansing the body of a believer before prayer – translator’s note).
Construction is currently frozen. Thanks to Sheikhet's court case victory, the project's implementation has been halted—for now…
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, VC — Only new faces from the section CRYPT!