Meshbisher Burial Registryמעזשביזש

The town between the rivers

Medzhybizh sits where the Southern Buh meets the little Buzhok, in the old province of Podolia, now Ukraine's Khmelnytskyi region. Its name says as much: mezhbuzhye, "between the Bugs." Jews called it Mezhbizh. It is first written down in 1146, and from 1511 its lords raised a stone fortress on the point of land where the two rivers join. The castle still stands over the water.

Jews are recorded in the town from 1518. They built a life there as traders, craftsmen, butchers, tailors and teachers, and they rebuilt it more than once: the Cossack uprising of 1648 nearly destroyed the community, yet by 1765 more than two thousand Jews lived there again.

Around 1740 Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, came to Medzhybizh and stayed until his death in 1760. From a small town on a river bend he taught that God could be served with joy, in prayer and song and in plain daily work, not only through learning. His followers carried that teaching across Eastern Europe, and Hasidism grew from it. His grandson Rabbi Baruch held court in the town, and the Apter Rav, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, spent his last years there. Both lie near the Besht in the old cemetery.

By 1897 the town had 6,040 Jews, nearly three of every four people in it. Then many began to leave. Poverty, conscription and pogroms pushed them out, and letters from relatives drew them to America. In New York they found one another again, prayed together, and formed societies so that no one from home would be buried among strangers.

Those who stayed lived through revolution, civil war and famine. By 1939 about 2,350 Jews remained. Almost all of them were murdered in 1942. Today Medzhybizh is a quiet place of about twelve hundred people. Pilgrims come from all over the world to the Baal Shem Tov's grave. The stones in this registry are the other half of the story: the people who left, and the families they began.

The burial societies in New York

Immigrants from the town formed landsmanshaftn, mutual aid societies that looked after members in sickness and bought land so they could be buried together. Two Medzhybizh societies are recorded here. The Meshbisher Untershtutzung Verein (Medzhybizh Support Society), founded in 1894 and dissolved in 1951, holds an old section between paths 18 and 20 and a new section in plot C-3 at Mount Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. When it dissolved, its remaining graves were divided among the surviving members. The Medgibosh Progressive Solidarity Society holds a section at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, entered through a gate whose two pillars list its officers, members, and those remembered "In memory of." Some families also lie in neighboring society plots, such as the Latitchever society of nearby Letichev at Mount Zion.

The memorial at Beth David

Inside the Beth David section the society raised a black granite memorial "to the thousands of our beloved sisters and brothers who were so viciously destroyed by Hitler Nazis in Medgibosh on Yom Kippur night." German forces occupied the town on 8 July 1941 and confined its Jews to a ghetto. On 22 September 1942, around Yom Kippur, about a thousand people, mostly women, children and the elderly, were shot in a ravine near Rusanovtsy. The killings went on until 31 October 1942. A Soviet commission counted about 2,580 dead. The 59 names carved on the memorial are included in this registry. Read more and see the names.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Medzibezh" · Yahad-In Unum, Medzhybizh · Wikipedia, Medzhybizh · Yad Vashem, Untold Stories · JewishGen JOWBR, Meshbisher U.V. at Mount Zion · JewishGen Cemetery Project, Medzhybizh

In loving memory

Marcia Glick Auerhan&Robert M. Auerhan

This registry is dedicated to their memory.