I have been to Sniatyn last year with friends to find the old and new Jewish cemetery of this Galician town. We believed to have found the new Jewish cemetery. According to old maps the old cemetery should be located directly next to the new one. Today I returned – but again I couldn’t find more traces. Who knows more?
Sniatyn is a typical Galician town with traces from the Austrian and Polish era – an imposing town hall next to a square with the characteristic former Jewish homes and shops. Ukrainians, Poles and Jews used to live next to each other. All of them left their traces. Part of the Jewish heritage are two cemeteries north of an Christian cemetery. The terrain is densely overgrown, literally a forest.
What we found today were tombstones mainly from the inter-war period. I still believe they are part of the new cemetery. But if this is true, the old cemetery was either destroyed or is so densely overgrown that it became fully invisible. All I found were some Christian tombstones with Cyrillic inscriptions.
So the riddle remains of what we found last and this year. Is it a part of the old or the new cemetery? If it is the new one, what happened to the old one? And if it is the old one, what happened to the very old tombstones published in the book on historical Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine by David Goberman? Of them I could find no traces.
If you have any information, please feel free to comment and share!
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Searching for information about my grandfather’s family from Sniatyn. Surname is Gruen. I wanted to find out if any family members survived the Holocaust. My grandfather was born in 1881 and came to U.S. in 1905. I have no records as to the rest of his family. I want to visit Sniatyn. Would like to know where are the birth, marriage, and death records are kept for sniatyn
Contact the Workmens Circle in New York City. They had a group of people from Sniatyn that met regularly about 10 yrs ago. The president of the group was a Jewish dentist who had visited Sniatyn and whose family came from there. I had visited Sniatyn in 1991. I flew from NY to Warsaw to LLov, Ukraine. I had made arrangements with a Jewish organization in Chernovitsi, largest city near Sniatyn, to pick me up in Llov. We drove, in a van, from Llov to Chernivitsi, about 6 hrs, and stayed in a hotel there. They took me to Sniatyn and nearby shetls where my parents came from. In Sniatyn, I only saw the town and the nearby Jewish Cemetery that was overgrown with trees. Another way to go there is from Kiev. I didn’t go that way. Good luck.