Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

Records of Emigrant Associations of Lyakhovichi
and
Records of Lechovicher Settlements around the World

This is a page in our Documents section. Click the button labeled "Documents" in the left-hand column to reach all of the other resources of the Document area.

To view all of the pages in our Records of Emigrant Associations - See the top of Column Three on this Page!
To view all of the pages in our Records of Lechovicher Settlements - See the top of Column Three on this Page!

At each update, the webmaster’s wish list bumps into the realities of trying to get a huge amount of new material added in a short timeframe while making previously posted material more accessible. We have at our Thanksgiving 2008 update added twenty new webpages in this section alone. The page you are on, is a key page to all Emigrant Association pages appearing on the Lyakhovichi Website and to all pages about Lechovicher settlements around the world.

Emigrant Association Pages
We have been gathering photos of synagogues in Detroit, Philadelphia, Louisville Kentucky, and Sioux City Iowa; burial plot info from new cemeteries, and newspaper finds related to Lyakhovichi. Even the "old material" that we have is being augmented. We have images of newspapers showing Bnai Yitzhak Anshe Lechowitz as a contributor in 1905 to the anti-Pogrom collections, we have images of newspapers describing events at Lechowitzer social organizations. Readers have written in with their memories of some of the people and events described on this page and we will be posting their comments on the page. Most importantly, we have volunteers offering to take photos of cemetery stones that the webmaster will then index to create a database with all of the names as written in their original languages and English. We have volunteers offering to sit in NYC archives and search for the specific death certificates for Lyakhovichi people who we have listed chronologically by their date of death from 1893-1933. If you would like to help, we just need your family ephemera and photographs, and your willingness to donate your time at your computer or in cemeteries or in archives. Then come back and see what additional material the efforts of caring people will add to the next update!

We now have more than twelve hundred photographs of Lechovicher cemetery stones in New York City alone! We have also added photos of Lechovichers in other landsmanschaften plots and in cemeteries around the world. Please go to page Cemetery Stones, page 1 to see the first page of a database which, so far, is on a dozen separate pages divided by cemetery. Among those pages you will also find the cemetery registers previously posted on this page - that is the list of burials in the group plots, maintained in the relevant cemetery offices. We hope to add registers from additional cemeteries, pages of memorial plaques, and other relevant materials on those born in Lyakhovichi in future updates.

Begin your exploration of other US Lechovicher associations on this page More Emigrant Congregations and Associations related to Lyakhovichi to see where we are and help us grow. It includes first looks at a synagogue in rural Sullivan County New York, a former synagogue in Detroit, and Congregation Shaarey Zedek of Windsor Canada. It also shares new information on New York City organization Arbeiter Ring Branch 260 - the Lechovicher, Baranovicher, Mir group whose 1923 Anniversary Dinner in NYC photo may include your grandparents!

It had seemed likely that one extra page on New York landsmanschaften would be sufficient for this update in November 2008, but in September 2008, I made a remarkable discovery. Two NYC Lechovicher organizations looked at the repeated calls for assistance arriving in the mail after World War I and decided that something had to be done. Many of the people writing for help from their relatives in America were telling the Americans that letters sent with money had never arrived or missing those funds. And the folks at home were desperate. They were starving, they couldn't afford winter fuel, their houses were barely standing after five years of being on the front lines. In April 1920, the organizations sent an emissary to personally appraise the situation, to personally deliver funds, and to gather the details that would allow the families in the US to best assure the well-being of those who remained in Lyakhovichi. So go to this brand new page to see the moving letters that the Relief Organizations Representative attached to his passport application, the records of the mission that we have so far, and to see how you can assist us in finding other material from this period. Lechovicher Relief Associations after WWI

We have moved our Israeli materials including those of the "Association of Former residents of Lachowicze" and joined them to new information available on Lechovicher settlement in South America at Records of Emigrant Associations of Lyakhovichi around the World

And we continue to seek identification of the hundreds of people from our community who attended a dinner in New York City in 1923 and whose individual and table photographs can be seen at Workman's Circle - Lechovicher, Baranovicher Branch 260.

Lechovicher Settlement Pages
Lyakhovichi's Jews settled in nearby Russian towns (Baranovichi, Kletsk, and Nesvizh, for example). They formed little communities of landsleit in bigger Czarist communities and cities like Minsk, Slutsk, Bialystok, Grodno, and Vilna. They moved on and settled in New York City's Lower East Side, Buenos Aire's Parque Chas, and in rural "Litvak" communities around South Africa. They probably didn't live in separate "neighborhoods" but we will likely find that townsmen directed other townsmen to the apartments and hostels close to where other members of the home-community already lived. We will add pages on these different settlements as new material is uncovered and we need your help to document the places your family lived. Our pages so far include details on:
Lechovichers in Baranovichi, Nesvizh, and Kletsk , Lechovichers in Slutsk and Minsk, and Lechovichers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan NYC. You will also see coming soon
Lechovichers in Slonim, and Pinsk; Lechovichers in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno, Vilna, and Bialystok; and Lechovichers in St Petersburg, and Moscow.