Remembering the Jews of Lubaczow

Lubaczow, Poland
50° 10' / 23° 08'

Other names: Libatchov, Libechuyv, Liubachev, Lubachov, Lubatchov, Lubichuv

A Visit to the Jewish Cemetery in Lubaczow, May 2002

Eva Floersheim, Shadmot Dvorah, Israel
July 14th 2002

Candelabrum

Before the shabat starts on Friday night, Jewish women and girls light the shabat candles and say the special blessing. The shabat candles can be just two candles, but also three or even five candles arranged in a candelabrum. The candelabrum became a symbol for graves of women and girls - often with the addition of two doves.

Row 9, Grave 2: The grave of Feige Rifka, daughter of Dov, who died on Oct 30th or 31st 1899 (See also Footnote #6)

The Grave of Reisel Weinrath?

My own involvement with the history of the Jews of Lubaczow is not through my own family history, but through that of my friend Erela Goldschmidt. Erela was born during Holocaust and survived with the help of two Polish families in Zakopane (Footnote # 7). In 1948 she was brought to Israel. Her whole life was an endless search for her own original name and the names of her parents and other relatives. I became part of this research back in 1993 and was fortunate to see how Erela found out through the broadcast of The Wanda Lists (Footnote # 8) on Polish TV in 1994 that her mother was Necha Nella Weinrath, daughter of Samuel and Reisel Weinrath from Lubaczow. Later, in April 1999, through Internet, I was able to confirm that Erela's father was Joseph Norbert Hilferding from Lwow and that Erela had been born as Marysia Hilferding in Lwow at some time in 1942.
During the time I knew Erela, she was suffering from bonemarrow cancer and was undergoing many difficult treatments. Even so, we kept our research going - both into her roots and into the history of the Jews of Lubaczow. Through the website I started with the help of my son Barak, we hoped both to commemorate this Jewish community and perhaps find more information about Erela's Weinrath family. From the information we gathered over the years was that Erela's grandmother Reisel Weinrath probably died around 1935. We hoped to locate Reisel's grave in the Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow and then perhaps learn more about Reisel's family (maiden name, name of her parents). Erela was so ill that it would be my task to look for this grave.
On November 19th 2001 Erela died of cancer and she was buried here in Shadmot Dvorah in Israel. On her gravestone are inscribed the names of her recovered relatives - her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins (Footnote # 9). Nearly all of them were murdered in Holocaust and this is therefore also their symbolic gravestone.
"In memory of her grandparents Samuel and Reisel Weinrath from Lubaczow" is listed on the top of the names on the flat part of the grave.

Erela's grave in Shadmot Dvorah, Israel.

Erela was born as Marysia Hilferding in Lwow in 1942.
Her father was Joseph Norbert Hilferding from Lwow and Necha Nella Weinrath from Lubaczow. Erela's maternal grandparents, Samuel and Reisel Weinrath are mentioned separately on the list of relatives. We know for sure that Reisel died before the war. There even is a possibility that Samuel Weinrath died before the Holocaust (Footnote # 10). In any case, when I visited Lubaczow, one of my hopes was to find the graves of Erela's grandparents.
There are few family names noted on gravestones in Lubaczow, so imagine my surprise when on Row 16, Grave 15 I found the family name Weinrath clearly written on the base of a red gravestone. Could this be it? Looking upwards I saw that it was a grave of a woman and that she had died in 1935. This information might fit what we knew about Reisel. Unfortunately we do not know the name of Reisel's father, so when the gravestone says the father's name was Jehuda Abraham, this does not help us so far.
Well, what is the problem of knowing if this is Reisel's gravestone? The problem is that the red gravestone has broken and it happened just where the first name should have been. It seems that this kind of red stone absorbs more water, and our theory is that when the frost came, the water trapped in the stone froze and made the stone "explode" from within.
I still don't know for sure if this is Reisel's grave, but I have adopted it as such till and if a definite answer can be given.

Row 16, Grave 15:
NN Weinrath, daughter of Jehuda Abraham, died on January 19th or 20th 1935

The Cut Tree

The texts on these gravestones give only one date - the date of death. Sometimes though, there are hints to the age of the buried person in the Hebrew text - " an old woman", "died young in years". Another way to symbolize that a person had died young, was to use the decoration of a cut tree. This symbol was used on both male and female graves.

Row 6, Grave 21:
The grave of Liber Shabtai, son of Chaim Zvi. He probably died in 1897.

Father and Son

If you stand under the little roof built at the original entrance to the cemetery, you will see two graves under the eastern arch. These two graves have similar design and are the graves of a father and son who died within two days. One can only wonder what were the tragic circumstances of these two deaths.

Row 17, Grave 1:
Jakob Jehuda Steinbruch, son of Shmuel, died July 25th or 26th 1926
Row 17, Grave 2:
Josef Steinbruch, son of Jakob Jehuda, died July 23rd or 24th 1936

"An Only Son to His Father and Mother"

So far I have shown you gravestones where the graphic decorations have told you something about the person buried. The following grave has a decoration of a lion (now hard to see), but the short text in Hebrew gives additional information:
Died in the year 1861/1862 (?)
An only son to his father and mother
A nice boy was Moshe , son of …..

Row 10, Grave 25:
Moshe Jehuda died in 1861 or 1862

Moshe/Moses the Medical Doctor

The texts on the gravestones in this cemetery are all in Hebrew. The Belz Chassidic movement was strong in Lubaczow, and Orthodox Judaism seemed to have played an important part in everyday life. F.ex., most of those buried do not have their family names on their graves, only the names the Jews had used since the beginning of their history - like Isaac son of Abraham, Dina daughter of Jakob.
In Lubaczow, only texts in Hebrew were tolerated at the Jewish cemetery, as can be seen from what happened to one family back in 1885.
When you stand at the road separating the Catholic and Jewish cemetery and you look in the direction of the Jewish cemetery, you first see only the blank backsides of the gravestones till your eyes catch a glimpse of an oval shape with some Latin letters on one of the gravestones.
The name of the person buried was once inscribed in this oval in Latin letters, though now you can only read what is left - "died (in German) on March 16th 1885". The name itself has been erased; most probably by members of the Jewish community back in 1885. They probably felt that this was not tolerable in their Jewish cemetery.

So who was this man whose family wanted to do what was acceptable in many other Jewish cemeteries at the time? When you look at the front side, you first see the symbol - the same symbol used by medical doctors - a snake and a stick. The background for this symbol comes again from a person we have mentioned earlier - Moses made a stick into a snake and then back into a stick to show Faraoh in Egypt that God was with him and the Jewish people, and that Faraoh must let the Jews go back to their homeland.
On this gravestone the text in Hebrew starts: "Moses was a medical doctor"

In this case both the name (Moses) and the profession (medical doctor) fitted the decoration on the stone.

Row 6, Grave 7:
Moshe Dov, son of Zvi Arie, died on March 16th 1885

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