Lviv & Western Ukraine - Ukraine - page 206

( www.rafinad-club.com ; vul Rudanskoho 1; from 10pm) If you can get past the face control
(no sports shoes, please), this is possibly Lviv's classiest mainstream club with
something happening every night of the week.
JEWISH LVIV
Jewish sites in Lviv may be more about what's been destroyed than what remains,
but a tour through the city's rich Jewish past can still elicit a range of emotions.
There were more than 100,000 Jews in Lviv before WWII, not including the several
thousand Jewish refugees who arrived from Germany and western Poland before
the war. The Nazis murdered nearly all of them at Lviv's Janowska concentration
and forced labour camp, and at Belzec, another hideous extermination camp in
present-day Poland, where, it is believed, some 600,000 people were killed and
only two survived. Today Lviv's Jewish community numbers only about 2000.
Before the tragic events of WWII there were two Jewish districts in Lviv: a wealthy
inner district around vuls Staroyevreyska (Old Jewish St), Fedorova and Ruska in
the Old Town; and a larger outer district covering a vast area north and west of the
Solomiya Krushelnytska Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet.
The late-16th-century Golden Rose Synagogue OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP
(vul Staroyevreyska) stood at the heart of the inner district before the Nazis blew it up
in 1941. Today there's not much to see at the fenced-off site, and the local Jewish
community's plans to rebuild a replica of the synagogue have stalled. Another syn-
agogue once stood in the open lot directly across vul Staroyevreyska.
In the outer district, you'll find the Jewish Hospital OFFLINE MAP
GOOGLE MAP ( vul Rappoporta) , one of Lviv's architectural highlights. From afar this
Moorish, dome-topped building looks like a mosque, but up close Jewish motifs
are evident in the striking, eclectic facade. Krakivsky Market , right behind the
hospital, was a Jewish cemetery in medieval times. Writer Sholem Aleichem lived
not far away, at Kotlyarska 1, in 1906. There's a plaque OFFLINE MAP
GOOGLE MAP to Aleichem on the side of the building. South of here, on vul
Nalyvayka, a few old Yiddish shop signs remain. About 500m north of the Solom-
iya Krushelnytska Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet on pr Chornovola is the Holo-
caust memorial OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP , a vaguely cubist statue of a tor-
mented figure looking skyward. The Lviv ghetto began here after most of the city's
Jews were killed or deported to Belzec in the 'Great Action' of August 1942. Nazi
hunter Simon Wiesenthal was the most famous resident of the ghetto, which was
liquidated in June 1943.