From Jerusalem – following the traces of Jewish Podolia: scientists surveyed more than 30 synagogues in Ukraine

September 2, 2026 The United Jewish Community of Ukraine reported on the results of the expedition “Synagogues of Podolia — 2026”, conducted in the second half of August together with the Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Researchers traveled through dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns and surveyed more than 30 historical synagogues: photographing facades, recording the current state of buildings, studying preserved architectural details, and where possible, entering inside.

Author: Elena Gunko

For the Israeli reader, a map is immediately needed here. Podolia is not Kyiv’s Podil and not a modern administrative region of Ukraine, but a large historical region in the southwest of the country. Today, its core is primarily in the Vinnytsia and Khmelnytsky regions, and the western part covers the Ternopil region and neighboring territories. Looking from Israel at the map of Ukraine, it is a belt southwest of Kyiv, stretching towards the Dniester and the Moldovan border.

It was here that one of the densest networks of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe existed for several centuries. From here came religious ideas, surnames, and Hasidic courts, whose names are now more familiar to hear in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak than in a Ukrainian village or small town where it all once began.

This is not a tour of old buildings

The expedition is called “Synagogues of Podolia — 2026”, but its task is broader than a usual inventory. The collected materials should become part of a separate study “Synagogues of Ukraine: Podolia”, which is being prepared by the Israeli Center for Jewish Art — the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Simply put, researchers are now trying to preserve as much information as possible about buildings that may look different tomorrow. For a historical synagogue, not only beautiful walls are important: the layout of the prayer hall, the shape of the windows, the place of the Aron ha-Kodesh — the cabinet where Torah scrolls were kept, remnants of paintings, Soviet-era reconstructions. Sometimes a single bricked-up arch tells a specialist more than a modern plaque on the facade.

The expedition route passed through Mogilev-Podolsky, Chechelnik, Kodyma, Balta, Kryve Ozero, Brailov, Bershad, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Dunaivtsi, Khmelnytskyi, Sataniv, Medzhybizh, Letychiv, Khmilnyk, Vinnytsia, Zhmerinka and a number of smaller settlements. These are all different points of what was once a vast Jewish space.

Most of these names mean nothing to the average Israeli. And this is part of the problem: modern Jewish life has long moved to Israel, the USA, and Western Europe, while the places where families and communities were formed have gradually fallen out of living memory.

Medzhybizh: a small Ukrainian town without which it is difficult to imagine Bnei Brak

One of the main points of the route is Medzhybizh, a small settlement in the current Khmelnytsky region in western Ukraine. Today, very few people live there, but in Jewish history, its scale is incomparable to the size of the town.

It was here, approximately from 1740 until his death in 1760, that Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer — Baal Shem Tov, or Besht, lived, a figure around whom early Hasidism formed. His grave is located in Medzhybizh and remains a place of Jewish pilgrimage.

For a reader far from the religious environment, it is worth explaining the word itself. Hasidism emerged in Eastern Europe in the 18th century as a religious movement within Judaism, placing special emphasis on emotional prayer, spiritual joy, mystical tradition, and the role of a charismatic spiritual mentor — the Rebbe. Through Besht’s disciples, the movement quickly spread across the Jewish communities of the region.

Today, the consequences of that 18th-century process are literally visible on the streets of Israel. NANovosti has already detailed the Ukrainian roots of the largest Hasidic dynasties: Chernobyl, Skvira, Rachmastrivka, Machnovka, Boyan, Sadigura, Vizhnitz, and other historical lines now have major centers in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, the USA, and other countries.

That’s why a photograph of an old synagogue in Ukrainian Medzhybizh is not quite a photograph of “foreign antiquity” for Israel. Historically, the road from there leads directly to modern Israeli neighborhoods, yeshivas, synagogues, and Hasidic courts.

What is a shtetl and why were there so many of these towns

In the history of Eastern European Jews, the word “shtetl” often appears. It comes from Yiddish and literally means a small town or settlement, but in Jewish history, it acquired a more specific meaning: a town with a large, sometimes predominant Jewish population, its own communal life, synagogues, houses of study, schools, craftsmen, and merchants.

Podolia was covered with such settlements. Therefore, researchers today find synagogues not only in large cities like Vinnytsia or Kamianets-Podilskyi but also in settlements whose names even Ukrainians from other regions do not always recognize at first glance.

Before the Catastrophe of European Jewry — the Shoah — such a map looked completely different. In the same Medzhybizh, according to the 1897 census of the Russian Empire, 6,040 Jews lived, making up about 70% of the town’s population. It was not a “Jewish monument among a Ukrainian town,” but to a large extent, a Jewish town itself.

Then this world was broken several times. Pogroms and wars, the Catastrophe, Soviet struggle against religion, emigration — and many buildings were left without the communities for which they were built.

Sataniv: why a synagogue needed walls like a fortress

Another stop of the expedition is Sataniv, a small settlement in the Khmelnytsky region. It is located in the western part of Podolia, far from the major centers of modern Jewish life, but here is preserved one of the most famous examples of the so-called fortress synagogue.

The name is not artistic. In the 16th–17th centuries, this part of Eastern Europe often experienced wars and raids, so the massive stone synagogue sometimes also served the community as a refuge. Hence the thick walls, high windows, and the architecture itself, more reminiscent of a defensive structure than a city synagogue familiar to today’s Israeli.

There is also a scientific debate here that well illustrates the meaning of the current expedition. In tourist publications, the Sataniv synagogue is often dated to 1514 or 1532, but researchers do not consider such an early dating indisputable and associate the current stone building with a later period.

For history, this difference is fundamental. It’s one thing to write next to a photograph “16th-century synagogue,” another to take measurements, compare the architecture with analogs, check materials, and understand when exactly the preserved structure appeared.

Kamianets-Podilskyi: not just a fortress from tourist postcards

Kamianets-Podilskyi is a more well-known Ukrainian city, located in the southwest of the current Khmelnytsky region, near the Dniester. Tourists know it primarily for its huge medieval fortress and the Smotrych River canyon, but the city has a long and very complex Jewish history.

Here in 1757, the famous dispute involving Frankists took place. For the non-specialist, this word requires explanation: Frankists were followers of Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish religious leader who created a radical messianic movement and came into conflict with traditional rabbinic Judaism.

By rabbinic Judaism here is meant the main historical tradition of Judaism, based on the Torah, Talmud, and Halakha — Jewish religious law. After the Kamianets dispute, the local Catholic bishop Nicholas Dembowski ordered the confiscation and burning of copies of the Talmud.

So the old Podolian synagogues do not tell just one cozy story about a peaceful shtetl. Behind these walls were religious disputes, struggles of different currents, attacks, wars, economic prosperity, poverty, migration — the normal, complex life of several centuries.

Jerusalem collects what remains

The Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem itself appeared in 1979. It was created by Professor Bezalel Narkiss, and over the decades, the Center has turned into an international system for documenting Jewish material culture.

Today, the Center is headed by Vladimir Levin, who also participated in the current Ukrainian expedition. His specialists work not only with synagogues: manuscripts, ritual objects, cemeteries, paintings, works of art, and other things that can restore the physical world of vanished communities are included in the archive.

For the Israeli reader, it is easier to imagine the scale on the previous Ukrainian project of the Center. In 2017, Vladimir Levin and researcher Sergey Kravtsov released a two-volume study “Synagogues in Ukraine: Volhynia”. Volhynia is another historical region of present-day Ukraine, located north of Podolia; today it is primarily the territory of the Volyn, Rivne, and neighboring regions.

In these two volumes, there were 848 pages and 1,220 photographs, and the researchers described 39 preserved and 302 already lost synagogues in 23 cities and towns. The ratio of numbers itself — 39 against 302 — quite well explains why it is necessary to document Podolia now.

What does “lost synagogue” mean

This does not always mean a pile of stones. Under Soviet rule, religious institutions were closed, and buildings were adapted for warehouses, clubs, production facilities, sports halls, or administrative institutions.

Somewhere the walls remained, but the interior disappeared. Somewhere a floor was added, windows were bricked up, and after several reconstructions, the old synagogue is already difficult to recognize. Other structures were destroyed during the Shoah or disappeared later due to neglect and construction.

And today, old threats are joined by the Russian war against Ukraine. NANovosti published a list compiled by the United Jewish Community of Ukraine of damaged and destroyed Jewish objects — synagogues, cemeteries, schools, community buildings, and memorial sites. It includes about 40 objects affected after the start of the full-scale war.

Here, a careful boundary is important. The fact of a synagogue being damaged by a Russian strike does not yet prove that it was chosen as a target precisely because it is Jewish. But the result for the heritage does not become easier from this: an old object can disappear due to an explosion nearby just as definitively as from a direct hit.

Uman is familiar to Israelis. But Uman is just one point

Most Israelis, even those not connected to the Hasidic world, have at least heard of Uman — a city in central Ukraine, where tens of thousands of followers of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov come annually for Rosh Hashanah. This is the most noticeable point of contact between Israel and Jewish Ukraine today.

Tzadik in this context is a revered righteous person and spiritual leader. Rabbi Nachman, the great-grandson of Baal Shem Tov, died in Uman in 1810, and his grave became the main pilgrimage site for Breslov Hasidim.

In 2025, Ukraine increased the protection status of this place: Rabbi Nachman’s grave received the category of a national monument. NANovosti explained in detail what this status means and why it is important for pilgrims from Israel.

But if you look only at Uman, the scale of the connection is lost. Uman is one living and very famous point, and the expedition from Jerusalem actually shows dozens of other addresses of the same history.

From a Ukrainian shtetl to today’s Israel

For the author of this article, Elena Gunko, this seems to be the main thing in the current expedition. You can list thirty names of Ukrainian towns — and the Israeli reader will scroll through them because they have never been there and probably never intended to.

But if you translate these names onto a familiar Israeli map, the picture changes. Medzhybizh is Besht and the beginning of Hasidism. Breslov is Rabbi Nachman and today’s Uman. Vizhnitz is one of the large Hasidic courts of modern Israel. Machnovka today has a center in Bnei Brak. Rachmastrivka is a living court in Jerusalem. Boyan and Sadigura have also long been part of the Israeli Haredi world. Some of these names have been preserved in Israel much better than in their places of origin.

It turns out to be almost a paradox. In a Ukrainian town, sometimes only a cemetery and one building remain from the old community, while in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak, the name of the same town is borne by thousands of living people, their synagogues, and religious institutions.

Therefore, the work of Israeli researchers in Podolia is not an attempt to study the distant past of another state. They document part of the prehistory of modern Jewish society in Israel.

Memory has a quite physical size

Sometimes the word “memory” sounds too abstract. In the expedition, everything is much more concrete: the width of a wall, a photograph of a ceiling, a window, old masonry, a remnant of a painting, an archival plan, the coordinates of a building.

If this is not done, in a generation there may only be the phrase “there was once a synagogue here.” And proving its structure, age, and significance will already be impossible.

In Medzhybizh, such fixation returns us to the very beginning of Hasidism. In Sataniv, it shows why a Jewish community needed practically a fortress. In Kamianets-Podilskyi, it leads to the religious conflicts of the 18th century. In dozens of smaller places, it does no less important thing — it returns existence to people whose names no one remembers anymore.

After all, before the war, the Catastrophe, and emigration, these were not “monuments of Jewish heritage.” There, people simply prayed, argued, married, taught children, traded, celebrated Passover and Rosh Hashanah. Lived.

Why this expedition is taking place right now

Ukraine continues the war, and researchers from Jerusalem, meanwhile, travel through its southwestern regions and measure old synagogues. At first glance, activities from completely different worlds.

In fact, the connection is quite direct. The war has once again shown how quickly physical history can turn into an archival photograph. A well-known house today may be damaged tomorrow, burn down, or simply end up in a zone where a researcher can no longer visit.

But the threat is not only from missiles. Old Jewish cemeteries face illegal construction work, historical buildings collapse without repair, and the sites of former communities sometimes simply disappear under new development. Preservation requires not general words about heritage, but documents, protection status, and precise fixation.

Israeli specialists are essentially taking the first step of this chain: establishing what exactly still exists and what exactly should be preserved.

Not a museum of Ukraine, but a family archive of Israel

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the significance of the expedition is precisely this way. For Ukraine, these synagogues are part of the history of its cities and citizens. For world Jewry, they are the remnants of a vast Eastern European civilization. For Israel, there is a third layer: it is to a large extent the family history of a society that later built its life here.

Surnames have changed, Hebrew has become the language, children and grandchildren were born in Haifa, Ashdod, Jerusalem, or Bnei Brak. But if you go back along family and religious lines, the road very often unexpectedly leads to a small town in present-day Ukraine.

And then the old synagogue ceases to be just a beautiful ruin somewhere “there.” Sometimes it is the last physical address of a world from which people came out, whose descendants live next to us today.

The study “Synagogues of Ukraine: Podolia” is still being prepared, its final volume and publication date have not yet been announced. But the August expedition has already done an important thing: more than thirty such addresses have been rediscovered, inspected, and documented by specialists from Jerusalem.

In ten or twenty years, some of these buildings, hopefully, will be restored. Some will change, some may not be preserved at all. But their current state will remain in the archive.

And in this, perhaps, lies the most Israeli meaning of the whole story. Jerusalem today is collecting traces from Ukrainian shtetls of a world from which a significant part of Jewish Israel once grew.