“Ukrainian Shtetl” in Dnipro: Yevhen Kotlyar spent twenty years photographing the disappearing Jewish world — and in 2022, he himself sought refuge in it

On August 30, 2026, an exhibition by Kharkiv artist and researcher Yevhen Kotlyar, “Ukrainian Shtetl. Return to Places of Strength. Photographic Journeys through Former Jewish Towns,” opened at the Dnipro Museum “Memory of the Jewish People and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” According to the Jewish Community of Dnipro, the exhibition is created from materials of expeditions conducted by Kotlyar from 2002 to 2024, and it will be on display in Dnipro until October 14.

Author: Alexander Khmelnitsky

It turned out to be a story longer than a usual museum announcement. For over twenty years, Kotlyar photographed old synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, streets, houses, people, and those empty spaces of Ukrainian towns where Jewish life was once part of the urban fabric itself. Then came 2022, and the artist had to leave the shelled Kharkiv himself, and the places he used to visit with a camera as a researcher suddenly became part of his own evacuation route.

Shtetl is not just a “Jewish quarter”

For the Israeli reader, it’s worth understanding the word first. Shtetl comes from Yiddish and literally means a small town, but in the history of Eastern European Jewry, the meaning is broader. It refers to a town or small settlement where there was a large, sometimes predominant Jewish community with its synagogues, houses of study, craftsmen, trade, charitable structures, schools, and everyday life in Yiddish.

So, a shtetl is not a district where Jews were settled within a foreign city. Very often, it was the city itself, where Jews lived for generations alongside Ukrainians, Poles, Armenians, and other communities. Such towns covered Volhynia, Podolia, Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia, and other territories of present-day Ukraine.

Recently, NANews reported on how researchers surveyed more than 30 preserved synagogues of historical Podolia. This is roughly the same geography of memory: small towns where today sometimes only a few buildings, a cemetery, an inscription on a wall, or just archival information remain from a large Jewish community.

Kuty, Dubno, Medzhybizh, Chernivtsi, Skalat

Kotlyar traveled to these places since 2002. He first shot on film, then switched to digital photography, later using a quality smartphone camera. At the same time, he consciously did not leave the photographs as ordinary documentary shots: he worked with contrast and darkening, made photomontages, sometimes imitated the texture of old prints from glass photo plates.

In the photographs, you can see the old Jewish cemetery in Kuty, the Great Synagogue of Dubno, the ruins of the synagogue in Skalat, the Jewish space of Chernivtsi, a long-time resident of Burshtyn who survived the Nazi occupation. There is also Medzhybizh, which appears in the project as one of the centers of Hasidic history.

And here the geography of the exhibition unexpectedly converges with today’s Israel. Medzhybizh is associated with the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and dozens of names of Ukrainian towns and villages today continue to live in the names of Hasidic courts in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. NANews detailed this line in a material about the largest Hasidic dynasties and their Ukrainian roots.

Therefore, an old house or synagogue in Kotlyar’s photograph is not at all foreign Eastern European exoticism for some Israelis. Sometimes there are only a few generations from this building to a modern Israeli family, synagogue, or Hasidic community.

Six different ways to look at a vanished world

The Dnipro exhibition is divided into six cycles: “Contours of the Shtetl,” “Silence. Panoramas of Yiddishland,” “Aesthetics of Desolation,” “Asymmetry of Time,” “Faces of the Towns,” and “Shtetl. Transgression.” Each of them looks at the former Jewish town a little differently — through architecture, landscape, emptiness, human faces, old cemeteries, or the collision of the past with how these places look now.

Another word that may be unfamiliar is Yiddishland. It is not a state or a territory defined by borders. It refers to the vast cultural world of Eastern European Jews, united by the Yiddish language, literature, religious tradition, trade, and family ties. Ukraine was one of its main spaces.

Before the Holocaust, this world was populated by people. After it, in many places, only geography remained without the former communities. This feeling — as if the city stands, the street is in place, the house hasn’t gone anywhere, but the person who once filled it all with meaning is no longer there — constantly returns in Kotlyar’s works.

The goat with which it all began

There is a completely non-academic episode in this large academic story. Kotlyar recalls how during one of the first trips in 2002, a goat unexpectedly approached him — and at that moment, for some reason, it seemed to him a living messenger from the vanished world of the shtetl.

He kept returning there again and again. He brought students, friends, then his own children, met with the last local Jews, searched for buildings, cemeteries, traces of old buildings. Over two decades, it ceased to be just a set of scientific expeditions and gradually became part of his own biography.

Kotlyar himself has been professionally engaged in Jewish heritage for many years. He is a professor and head of the Department of Monumental Art at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, chairs the Academic Council of the Ukrainian Association of Judaic Studies. His PhD dissertation was devoted to the synagogues of Ukraine from the 16th to the early 20th century; in 2001 and 2003, he interned in Jerusalem.

For NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency, this biographical detail well explains the very nature of the project. We are not looking at a person who once decided to make a beautiful series about old houses, but a researcher for whom Ukrainian Jewish heritage has been both scientific work, art, and personal history for decades.

In 2022, the route turned in the opposite direction

After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, this story gained another layer. In March 2022, Kotlyar and his family left Kharkiv for western Ukraine, fleeing Russian shelling. And the road once again led him through those places he had studied for so many years.

The difference was unpleasantly simple. Previously, he went there himself, chose the route, and looked for traces of previous generations. Now he was traveling through them as a refugee from his own city. Places of memory suddenly became places where a person tries to feel at least some stability.

Hence the “places of strength” in the exhibition’s title. For Kotlyar, it ceased to be a beautiful metaphor from a museum catalog. Former shtetls turned out to be connected not only with people who lived there a hundred or two hundred years ago but also with his own war.

The war added another problem — the Jewish historical monuments in Ukraine are once again under threat. NANews has already published a list of synagogues, cemeteries, community buildings, and other Jewish objects damaged by Russian aggression. It turns out to be quite a bitter thing: Kotlyar has been photographing heritage that was gradually disappearing due to time and neglect for many years, and now some of these objects also exist within a large war zone.

From Ukraine to New York, then back

The project has already gone far beyond Ukraine. In the summer of 2024, the Fordham University Center for Jewish Studies presented “The Ukrainian Shtetl: Homecoming to Places of Strength” at the Walsh Family Library in New York. The university calendar indicates the exhibition period from June 21 to August 23, 2024, and a separate 120-page catalog was published for the exhibition.

After New York, the works were shown in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Uzhhorod, and now the exhibition has reached Dnipro. The Dnipro display is held with the assistance of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine; the project itself was created with financial support from the Kharkiv Jewish Cultural Center “Beit Dan” and with the participation of Fordham University, the Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts, the Ukrainian Association of Judaic Studies, and other partners.

At the opening in Dnipro, violinist Adele Kontorovich played. The music was fitting here: the museum generally tries to show the shtetl not as a set of archaeological remains, but as a world with its own sounds, language, people, disputes, holidays, and ordinary daily life.

Why this exhibition concerns Israel

From Israel, the Ukrainian shtetl can easily be perceived as a very distant story of Ashkenazim somewhere “in Europe.” But once you start reading the names of places, the distance quickly shortens: Medzhybizh, Berdychiv, Chernobyl, Skvira, Bratslav, Sadigura, Vizhnitsa, Belz.

These names did not remain on old Austro-Hungarian and Russian maps. They moved with the people. Today, they can be found on synagogue signs, in the names of Hasidic communities, in religious press, in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. And every autumn, tens of thousands of people fly from Israel to Uman — not for the sake of abstract “Eastern Europe,” but to a specific place of Jewish memory.

Kotlyar’s exhibition shows the other side of the same road. It’s not Israel going to these places, but the places themselves coming to the modern viewer through photographs and reminding: a huge part of Eastern European Jewish history took place precisely in the towns and villages of present-day Ukraine.

How to see the exhibition

“Ukrainian Shtetl. Return to Places of Strength” will be on display at the Museum “Memory of the Jewish People and the Holocaust in Ukraine” until October 14, 2026. The museum is located in Dnipro, in the Menorah Center, at Sholom Aleichem Street, 4/26; the exhibition can be visited on Wednesdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 19:00, with museum entry closing at 18:00.

In a few weeks, the exhibition will be dismantled, the photographs will travel further or return to the archive. But the places themselves will remain — some restored, some abandoned, some still slowly disappearing. And it seems that this is precisely why Kotlyar has been photographing them for more than twenty years: not to preserve the past with a beautiful black-and-white picture, but to at least keep an address.