- October 2, 2026
- 12:56 pm
- Ukraine, World News
From the old synagogue and overgrown cemetery to the house already destroyed by war: in Ukraine, the ‘Jewish Heritage’ — a special nomination of Wiki Loves Monuments — has begun. For Israelis, this may be significantly closer than it seems. The huge list includes places associated with cities, towns, and families from which a large part of Israeli society once grew.
Author: R.Verter
On October 1, 2026, the national stage of the international photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments — ‘Вікі любить пам’ятки‘ began in Ukraine. For the ninth consecutive year, a separate nomination ‘Jewish Heritage’ (original Ukrainian – “Єврейська спадщина“) is held within its framework.
The title is a bit misleading. This is not a contest just for beautiful photographs of famous synagogues. And it’s not entirely a story about photography.
The contest list already includes more than 1400 objects of immovable Jewish cultural heritage in Ukraine. More than 800 of them do not have official protection status. That is, the state register of monuments does not yet protect more than half of the places that organizers already consider part of the country’s Jewish heritage. Meanwhile, the list is not yet complete.
These can be functioning synagogues. They can be semi-collapsed buildings where a synagogue was a hundred years ago, and today a warehouse, workshop, or just empty walls. Old Jewish cemeteries, mass graves of Nazi victims, public buildings, houses associated with the life of communities. The special nomination also includes monuments of the Karaites — a small ethnoconfessional community historically living, in particular, in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine.
For Israel, the number 1400 is not even the important part here.
What matters is that behind each such number in the catalog may stand a specific place from where someone’s family once left.
Grandfather’s synagogue may today be an ordinary house
In Israel, Ukrainian origin is usually perceived through big names: Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Dnipro, Kharkiv. But the Jewish map of Ukraine is much denser.
It also consists of Medzhybizh, Sharhorod, Sataniv, Sadgora, Mukachevo, small towns of Volhynia, Podolia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia. From former shtetls — as small towns with significant Jewish populations and established Jewish community life were called in Eastern Europe.
Part of this world disappeared during the Holocaust. Soviet policy finished off something: synagogues were closed and adapted for other functions, cemeteries were destroyed, the memory of specifically Jewish victims dissolved in the impersonal formula of ‘Soviet citizens’.
But the buildings remained.
And sometimes the matzevot remained — Jewish tombstones, usually with inscriptions in Hebrew. In Ukraine, they are still being found literally under roads and near houses today. NAnews recently reported, for example, how a discovered matzevah in Lviv was returned to the territory of the Jewish cemetery, and also about how old Jewish necropolises in Ukraine are turning into a kind of archive of names and families.
Therefore, the contest decided in principle not to limit itself to objects that the state has already managed to assign monument status.
Otherwise, a huge piece of this history will simply fall out.
800 objects exist without state protection
The scale here is perhaps best shown by one figure: out of more than 1400 objects of Jewish and Karaite real estate in the contest list, more than 800 do not have official protection status.
What does this mean practically?
That an old building may be known to a local historian as a former synagogue, appear in historical publications, have photographs and coordinates — but legally not be a monument.
With cemeteries, the situation is even more complicated. Sometimes only individual tombstones, part of a fence, a few dozen matzevot among the grass remain from a necropolis. Sometimes an old cemetery is generally difficult to see for a person who does not know what to look for.
NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency has already reported on the Sataniv Jewish necropolis, where tombstones from the 17th–19th centuries have been preserved, and on an unusual find in Uzhgorod, where researchers restored the names of people buried in the Jewish cemetery during World War I.
In this sense, Wiki Loves Monuments works a little differently than the state register.
First, an object can be seen. Recorded. Linked to coordinates. Described. A photograph placed in an open archive.
And only then argue about statuses.
The war sharply changed the meaning of these photographs
Until 2022, all this could be perceived as quite calm local history work.
Now — no longer.
On the official page of the nomination, among the examples is shown the estate of merchant Abram Tregubov in Mariupol. The photograph is dated March 2021. Next to it is already an explanation: the building was partially destroyed in 2022.
One photograph suddenly became evidence of the state of the building before the war.
Such cases are becoming more frequent.
The United Jewish Community of Ukraine in 2026 compiled a separate chronology of Jewish objects damaged or destroyed after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. It included synagogues, cemeteries, schools, community buildings, social institutions, and memorial places. NAnews detailed this list of damaged and destroyed objects.
That’s why the current contest is no longer just about ‘taking a picture of a beautiful old synagogue’.
Sometimes the camera captures what may not exist in such a form in a few years.
Photographs cannot just be taken now
And here is an important limitation, especially if after reading you want to help.
Due to martial law and security requirements, the contest organizers in 2026 accept ordinary external photographs taken no later than August 31, 2026, inclusive.
That is, going now to a military object, bridge, strategic infrastructure, or specifically searching for an angle of an old building for the contest is definitely not required — and in most cases, a fresh outdoor shot will still not be accepted.
Exceptions are provided for photographs of interiors of Jewish heritage objects, as well as shots taken in temporarily occupied territories: a different regime applies to them.
Works can be uploaded from October 1 to October 31, 2026.
Moreover, the photograph does not have to be taken specifically for the contest. It can be an old shot from a trip several years ago.
And here a separate door opens for Israelis.
Perhaps the needed photograph is already with you
Many families in Israel have archives of trips to Ukraine.
Someone went to the grave of a great-grandfather. Someone photographed the synagogue of their parents’ hometown. Someone was in Uman, Medzhybizh, Berdychiv, Chernivtsi, Mukachevo, or a small village whose name is known only within the family.
Such a photograph may be more useful than a new professional shoot.
Especially if the object is poorly documented.
In 2026, the organizers specifically changed the rules for determining the most active participants: additional weight was given to monuments that are not yet represented in Wikimedia Commons — the open media repository of Wikipedia projects — objects whose photographs have not been updated for a long time, interiors, and monuments from regions, a significant part of which is occupied by Russian troops.
The logic is clear: the thousandth shot of one famous building is less useful than the first normal photograph of a forgotten Jewish cemetery.
If the object is not on the list at all — they ask to report it
The list of 1400 objects is not closed.
The organizers explicitly write: it is ‘far from complete’ and will be supplemented even during the contest.
If a known object of Jewish immovable heritage is not in the database, information can be sent to the organizing committee at wlm@wikimedia.org.ua.
The settlement, coordinates, and, if available, additional information or publications confirming the history of the place are needed.
This is perhaps one of the most interesting moments of the entire project.
Because a person in Haifa, Ashdod, or Be’er Sheva sometimes knows more about an old synagogue in a Ukrainian town than the modern residents of the street on which it stands.
Family memory is also a source. Of course, it still needs to be verified with documents. But it is often with it that the search begins.
What happened last year
The scale of the special nomination is already quite serious.
In the 2025 contest, 55 authors submitted almost 900 photographs of 148 Jewish heritage objects. After preliminary selection, the jury received 851 works, 130 made it to the second round. In the final, 19 winning photographs were determined, and one more work received an honorable mention.
The objects were located in Kyiv, Crimea, Vinnytsia, Volyn, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, and Chernivtsi regions.
The categories themselves explain a lot: cemeteries, places of mass shootings and burials, synagogues, other buildings, and Karaite kenesas.
The jury included a representative from Israel — Amir E. Aharoni, listed by the organizers as Israel/USA. Together with him, the works were evaluated by Jewish heritage researchers Marla Raucher Osborn and Jay Osborn from Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and American Wikipedian Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight.
In 2026, the jury of the special nomination is to determine the authors of the three best photographs, and the most active participants will be separately noted.
Ukraine has already collected 450 thousand photographs of monuments
The Ukrainian part of Wiki Loves Monuments has been held since 2012, and the current contest is the fifteenth.
During this time, participants from Ukraine have uploaded more than 450 thousand photographs of monuments — by this indicator, the country ranks first in the world. The contest lists have turned into an open database containing more than 115 thousand objects of cultural heritage in Ukraine.
The international Wiki Loves Monuments appeared in the Netherlands in 2010. Over 17 years, the project has collected more than 3.6 million photographs of monuments from different countries. The ten best Ukrainian shots of the current general contest will then go to the international stage.
The special nomination ‘Jewish Heritage’ in Ukraine is supported by Ukrainian Jewish Encounter — ‘Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter’. This is an international initiative created in 2008 that works with researchers, community leaders, and cultural projects to study Ukrainian-Jewish history and dialogue between the two societies. Among the participants in its projects are representatives of Ukraine, Israel, and the diaspora.
From Babi Yar to an unknown cemetery near a small village
An Israeli can easily understand Babi Yar.
This is one of the central places of Holocaust memory on the territory of the former USSR. NAnews recently detailed the first unofficial memory rallies in Babi Yar in 1966, when the Soviet authorities perceived independent Jewish and Ukrainian memory almost as a political challenge.
On September 29, 2026, a ceremony was held in Jerusalem, at Yad Vashem, to mark the 85th anniversary of the mass killings in Babi Yar. There they also spoke about Ukrainians — Righteous Among the Nations, who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation. NAnews wrote about this ceremony separately.
But the problem is that the history of Ukrainian Jews does not fit into one Babi Yar.
There are thousands of places without world-famous names.
An empty plot behind the village.
A half-ruined wall.
A few matzevot in the bushes.
A house with large windows bricked up, about which the old people still remember: ‘Jews used to pray there’.
It is such places that disappear the quietest.
Sometimes to preserve means at least to manage to record
Of course, a photograph will not replace restoration.
A Wikipedia entry will not create a fence around a cemetery, will not repair the roof of an old synagogue, and will not provide legal protection for the object.
But there is a stage even earlier.
First, you need to know that this place even exists.
Know the coordinates. See the condition. Find an old photograph. Connect the building with the name of a vanished community. Read the inscription on the matzevah. Save the image so that it does not remain only in the family phone.
And then one photograph can suddenly become a historical document.
Like the 2021 photograph of Abram Tregubov’s house in Mariupol.
When it was taken — it was just a photograph of an old building.
After 2022 — already evidence of what it was like before the destruction.
That is why the current contest concerns Israel much more directly than it seems from the name. A huge part of Ukrainian Jewish heritage is simultaneously the family history of today’s Israelis.
Perhaps somewhere among these 1400 points is the place of your family.
And perhaps it is not yet on the list at all.
Page – https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2810696
You can participate in the special nomination and check the list of objects. Photographs are accepted until October 31, 2026. Information about unknown Jewish heritage objects to the organizers can be sent to wlm@wikimedia.org.ua.
