In the last episode of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, we spoke with Marla Raucher Osborn, who discovered her Jewish roots a few years ago in the western Ukrainian city of Rohatyn. Shortly thereafter, she and her husband left their home in California and relocated to Lviv, in western Ukraine, where they now run an NGO called […]
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Ukrainian Jewish Heritage: Marla Raucher Osborn talks about her Rohatyn restoration project. Part 1
A few years ago, Marla Raucher Osborn discovered her Jewish roots in the western Ukrainian city of Rohatyn. She and her husband have since left their home in California and relocated to Lviv, in western Ukraine, where they run an NGO called Rohatyn Jewish Heritage. This NGO, or non-government organization, is dedicated to […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Proposed Jewish Museum in Ukraine drawing inspiration from Poland
Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. How do you tell a story? Museums are essential places where stories about nations and cultures are told. But they are also places where the story may not fully told. Or the story may need to be retold. There has been a global boom in new museums. There are […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: New initiative will help Ukraine preserve its Jewish cemeteries and heritage for future generations
New initiative will help Ukraine preserve its Jewish cemeteries and heritage for future generations “As if they are trees falling in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night.” This haunting remark was made by Phil Carmel, the CEO of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative. The Initiative was launched to physically […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Russian Jewish author chronicles wartime horrors in Austrian-ruled Galicia
-Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. “I saw that that the windows of these ruined houses were stuffed with rags or boarded up. In these unheated kennels were human beings, whole families, starving, usually sick because all kinds of epidemics were raging….” One hundred years a bitter war was raging throughout Europe. One of the […]
Continue readingVictor’s Vignettes: The Music Of My Childhood — 1966-1975
Victor’s Vignettes … Stories about Life in soviet and post-soviet Ukraine. -by Victor Sergeyev Mikolayev, Ukraine The Music Of My Childhood — 1966-1975 When it came to music listening in soviet Ukraine, we always had choices. We could tune in on radio receivers to hear soundtracks of the two available TV channels, the state-controlled Moscow […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: The Dark Side of Jewish Heritage Travel
– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Let’s take a moment to consider “dark tourism.” The concept is elastic, and quite multi-faceted. And it has a distinguished historic pedigree. Evidently there are assertions that Thomas Cook, yes the Thomas Cook that founded the famous international travel agency, took people to see public hangings in England […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Austrian Author Martin Pollack devotes life to deconstructing “Galician myths”
“How are we to explain the fact that today many people all but yearn for a world destroyed by their fathers and grandfathers?” The Austrian writer Martin Pollack poses uncomfortable questions in his work. But then he hails from a less than comfortable background. Pollack’s powerful book, The Dead Man in the Bunker, carries the […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Historian speaks at Lviv Media Forum on morality, meaning, and the miracle of metaphysics on the Maidan
-Written & Narrated by Peter Bejger Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal. In today’s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined—and more importantly, who has the power to define them—shapes the political climate. And the resulting […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Planting trees at Holocaust killing sites to commemorate victims of genocide
Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. The revelation came in California. “We went to one of the redwood parks. I was looking at redwood trees, sequoia trees, and I saw them and I remember just thinking about how much those trees have seen. If only they could talk. I started to think a thousand years […]
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