Tag: Austro-Hungarian Empire

From Galicia to Brooklyn: Seven Generations of My Family

This is a photograph of the Jewish cemetery in Rymanów, a town in southeastern Poland about two hours from Krakow. To the east is Ukraine, to the south, Slovakia. The entire area was part of the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which so many Eastern European Jews came to the US and elsewhere. Rymanów’s Jewish population dates back to the fifteenth century; the town had a distinguished line of Hasidic rabbis. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they set up a POW camp near Rymanów, where after 1941 they killed about ten thousand Soviet soldiers. They then used the camp as a transit camp for the area’s Jews, who were sent to various extermination camps to be […]