Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

The History of the Lyakhovichi Shtetl Website

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Gary Palgon, a long-time amateur genealogist, has been researching his Lyakhovichi family for more than a decade. Neville Lamdan, a respected historian, former Israeli Ambassador, and since January 2006, Director of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy, at Jewish National and Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem, has been pursuing his family ties to this town for at least that long. Gary coordinated research for a diverse group of people with a common interest in Lyakhovichi, arranging the locating and translating of documents related to the Jews of Lyakhovichi, and Dr. Lamdan contributed scholarly articles that analyzed the specific materials available. Both men journeyed to Belarus to uncover more. It has been a common effort with very positive results for Jewish and area studies in Belarus. As webmaster, I, Deborah Glassman, have added articles and indexes to this website and posed new questions for research that I hope have complemented their work and will continue to contribute to a deeper realization of the great resources for history in this area. You may reach us by clicking any of the Contact buttons on any page and putting Lyakhovichi in the subject area. Contact

The Efforts of a Research Community The images and data of the 1850 Revision List, elsewhere on this website, is the kind of material that has been uncovered by the research efforts of Gary Palgon and Neville Lamdan and the Lyakhovichi Research Group. The tally to their credit of nineteenth-century documents posted in May 2008 includes: sixteen separate documents with over four thousand names. The type of material covered: Military Discharges; Military Draft Lists; Jewish voters for town officials; Jews in the Deputy and Electors Tax Lists; a list of Jewish townsmen; a list of Jewish property owners; a petition signed by 56 members of the Jewish community asking to rebuild a synagogue in 1875; Revision Lists of 1816, 1819, 1834, and 1850. Dr. Lamdan and Mr. Palgon have also spearheaded ongoing efforts to bring you the results of early and late nineteenth century Revision Lists and the last Grand Duchy of Lithuania Census in which Lyakhovichi was enumerated, in 1784. Since the website began, we have also organized an ongoing effort to find all published materials from which we can extract data on the families of our communities and we have added thousands of names from different generations.

There are few shtetls that have had that kind of effort put into making publicly available, the documentation of every Jewish family in the community. As remarkable as are the joint efforts of the informally organized research group (also called the Lyakhovichi Special Interest Group, and the Lachowitzer Group), individual members have contributed further. Brought together solely by an interest in the residence in Lyakhovichi of their ancestors, individual members of the Lyakhovichi research Community have generously been sharing historical documents that have been found for them in their own research in the Belarus archives. We have been sent extracts from Revision Lists for many years for particular family names as well as records from other Russian communities where Lyakhovichi's Jews were recorded. I am impressed by the generosity of those studying their family history who share their hard-won findings, and I continue to be awestruck by the amount of effort and committment evidenced by the leaders of this community, Dr. Lamdan and Mr. Palgon. In the two year hiatus (2005-2007) forced on this website by my health and personal issues, they have continued to work at bringing major new resources to light. This website is a salute to their work and, to all those who have generously offered time and resources.