THURSDAY, JULY 16TH-OUT OF ORDER BUT INTERESTING

If its Thursday, this must be Mogilev-Podolski, Ukraine.  We arrived yesterday after a very bumpy drive on pretty horrible two lane roads from Lviv.  The Lviv post will be later....The roads in Ukraine are noticeably worse than in Poland, the economy is a lot worse, and the cars are a lot more beat up.  You can still see Mercedes and BMW and nice Japanese cars, but I believe that one out of three cars here are Ladas.  Lada is a Russian made poor copy of a Fiat (model 128, I think).  They're ugly and everywhere, and have a reputation of being easy to fix and break often.  Just looking at these cars is a depressing experience.

  Our hotel would have been really fancy if you were a Russian official staying there in 1960.  It was clean and had wifi, but very spartan, no elevator and the TV had about 40 channels, none in English, the beds were less than comfortable, but the good news is that for three rooms (Phyllis' room was a suite with a living room) the cost was 1200 Grivines (I cant pronounce it but Alex said this was close enough) which converts to $50 US for all three rooms for one night.  Breakfast at the hotel was so-so, some ham, cheese, tomato, cucumber, and two fried eggs.  Everyone gets the same breakfast which cost $9 for all of us with tea and tip.  

We got going early to meet with a 75 year old man, Mr. Brechmann who is the head of the Jewish Community in Mogilev-Podolski.  Our Maternal Grandmother was born here and was here until she immigrated to the US in her late teens.  We were shown the local synagogue which you can see is pretty small.  The only one I've seen smaller was at King David's Tomb in Jerusalem.  The Jewish community here is only 223 people.  Most are elderly and the Synagogue feeds about 22 who are either very poor or homebound.  

After showing us around the Synagogue he took us to a Museum of the Jewish community with a lot of information from the Second World War.  The Jewish Ghetto held 19,000 Jews from here and some which the Nazis brought here.  The survivors numbered only about 600 who are pictured in the individual small pictures shown in one of the photos.

Our next stop with Mr. Brechmann was the Jewish Cemetary which covers approximately 50 acres.  We were looking for any headstones with our Grandmother's surname with a date of death around 1910.  Fortunately, it was not the gigantic challenge it appeared.  Volunteers and donors from all over had assisted in numbering and cataloging the names and numbers for the, relatively speaking, more recent deaths.  By numbering, I mean they painted 3 inch high numbers on all four sides of each headstone, which was a huge help.  We found two headstones which should give my Sister and her Genealogy group something to work with.  The very old heads stones were not marked and some were worn away by the elements such that the writing in Hebrew or Russian could not be read.  Worse still, the area of the oldest graves were very overgrown and not tended like the newer ones.  It may sound like we spent a depressing afternoon in a Cemetary, but it didn't feel like that at all.  It actually felt like we were doing something good that may lead to someone being recognized and remembered.  

In late afternoon we walked through the street market.  Lots of fruit and vegetables and everything else. The poster with Che Guevara was announcing a 50% off sale at a local store.  I was pleased to see that this is part of Che's legacy.

This evening we walked aroung the town and saw some city parks and of note was a memorial on a bank wall to local men who died recently fighting against the Russian Army in the Eastern part of Ukraine.  The last photo is the front of our very modest hotel.

Tomorrow we're leaving Ukraine for a day trip to Moldova just across the river where we'll be doing more of my Sister's genealogy research.