Once the small Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia and later a crown land of Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which straddled the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine, Jewish Galicia was a cultural incubator that produced Hasidic dynasties, the writer Shai Agnon and modern Yiddish music. After centuries of thriving Galicia’s vibrant Jewish atmosphere quickly vanished during the Holocaust. Around one million Jews lived in Ukraine and 700,000 in Galicia at the beginning of the Holocaust. At the Holocaust’s conclusion, the figures plummeted as the Nazis doused the region in Jewish blood. Galicia’s once-majestic synagogues and sprawling Jewish cemeteries are now decaying shacks and unkempt meadows.

We make our first stop at the town of Drohobych, home to the legendary Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz.We visit Former King Władysław Jagiełło State Gymnasium where Schulz worked as a teacher of drawing and manual arts from 1924 to 1939 and where one-room Bruno Schulz Museum was opened in 2003 in one of his former professorial offices. Then you get inside recently renovated the Great Synagogue in Drohobych that in the 19th century was known as the largest synagogue in Eastern Europe. We pay our respect to those who perished in the Holocaust at a memorial site built in the nearby forest where the town’s Jewish population was murdered. Of the thousands of Jews who once walked the city of Drohobych, a mere 150 call it their home today. They do need our support and many of them gladly meet our groups to tell their story…
We head to Bolekhiv (Bolechow) now, but on the way we stop in Stryi (Stryj), a small, faded town where Jews lived from the 17th century until the community was destroyed in the Holocaust. Some 12,000 Jews lived here on the eve of World War II, about 40 percent of the local population. Most were deported to the Nazi death camp in Belzec (Poland), but hundreds were rounded up and held in the main synagogue; many died there and many were shot dead in the Jewish cemetery or a nearby forest, where a small memorial stone now commemorates the victims. Today, the only remnant of the Jewish past in Stryi is the hulking ruin of the Great Synagogue. Only the walls are left standing, enclosing empty space. The arched central portal is now closed by a new gate that features a menorah and stars of David, and a plaque denotes the ruin as a former synagogue.
Bolekhiv is less than 20 km due south of Stryj, and upon arrival we take a look at the surviving synagogue, a rather tall, narrow building set off the long main square across from a newly renovated church. Jews settled in Bolechow in the 16th century and by 1900 made up about three-quarters of the population. Nearly 3,000 Jews lived there in 1938; as in Stryj and so many other towns in western Ukraine, they were deported to their deaths at Belzec or massacred locally by German units and local collaborators.
The Jewish cemetery on a little hill across a stream just outside of town was founded in the 17th century, and the earliest legible stone dates from 1648. About 1,500 tombstones are spread out here, shaded by trees that have grown up over time.