Jewish cemetery of Uzhgorod: World War I burials found and 32 names published

In Uzhgorod, a section of the Jewish cemetery was identified where people associated with the Austro-Hungarian army of World War I were buried. The published list contains 32 names, but archives already suggest: the history is significantly larger than one section and a few surviving matzevot.

On August 20, 2026, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine reported the result of an unusual search in Uzhgorod. For the Israeli reader, it is important to immediately clarify: Uzhgorod is the administrative center of Transcarpathia in the far west of Ukraine, near the border with Slovakia and not far from Hungary. During World War I, the city was part of Austria-Hungary and was called Ungvar, which is why the burials of people who served in its army are found here. The city’s rabbi, Menachem Mendel Wilhelm, and the head of the Center for Military-Historical Research Memento bellum, Yuri Fatula, came to the Jewish cemetery to find the burial place of Jews who served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I.

The section was identified. Along with the announcement, a list of 32 names appeared.

But this does not mean that researchers discovered 32 intact graves with readable tombstones. The Federation explicitly states: only individual monuments have survived, some have disappeared. It is possible that some burials did not have a durable tombstone at all — the family could have lived far away or simply did not have money for a stone.

And one more detail changes the whole story. Among these 32 were not only soldiers. The list includes officers, doctors, a pharmacist, medical staff, and a woman who worked in a hospital.

Thus, a small section of the cemetery leads to a much larger story of Uzhgorod, which more than a hundred years ago was called Ungvar and received trains with wounded from the entire Carpathian front.

What was found at the Jewish cemetery in Uzhgorod

So far, less is known than one would like.

Menachem Mendel Wilhelm and Yuri Fatula identified the location of the military burials and are comparing it with existing historical data. How many tombstones have physically survived and which names can be read directly on the stones today, the Federation does not specify.

The exact section of the cemetery is also not named.

For Uzhgorod, this is a significant detail. The city had several Jewish cemeteries and separate burial sectors. The old cemetery on today’s Kotlyarevsky Street has been known since the late 18th century: the earliest surviving matzeva there dates back to 1798, and today more than a thousand tombstones remain.

There were other burial places, including the Radvan cemetery. Separately, historical studies of World War I describe the Jewish military sector next to the large military cemetery.

Therefore, it cannot yet be automatically asserted that the section discovered now by Wilhelm and Fatula and the military necropolis described in old documents are the same place.

32 names: privates, officers, doctors, and a hospital employee

The Federation published the names as they are recorded in the existing list. Leaving them in this form is currently more correct than trying to independently convert everything to Hungarian, German, or Czech spelling.

There is a reason for this. In 1914, Uzhgorod was Hungarian Ungvár, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary it became part of Czechoslovakia, and a significant part of the military documentation is stored in Prague today. One person can be found under several name variants in different documents.

The list itself prevents calling the found place simply “graves of fallen soldiers.”

Fodor Anna was a hospital employee. Gál Emil was a pharmacist. Gál Lajos and Ludvig Pál are listed as chief physicians. Hahn Halm Karel is related to medical staff.

The circumstances of the death of each of the 32 are still unknown. Some could have received fatal injuries at the front, others could have died after evacuation from infection or illness.

One person from the list allows us to see how exactly this happened.

Jenő Altheim: managed to reconstruct the life of the first person on the list

In the Federation’s publication, he is recorded as Altheim Evzen — Dr., senior lieutenant.

In the Hungarian study of Jewish servicemen from Hódmezővásárhely, there is a person whose biographical data almost completely matches: Dr. Altheim Jenő.

Jenő Altheim was born on August 7, 1885 in Hódmezővásárhely. His father, Oziash Altheim, was a cantor of the local Jewish community, and his mother was named Fani Kvittner. After high school, Jenő became a lawyer. He was married to Janka Gröber.

At the end of July 1914, he was mobilized into the 5th Honvéd Infantry Regiment.

Here, an explanation may be needed for the Israeli reader. Honvéd is the Hungarian part of the armed forces of Austria-Hungary. It is not a separate national army in today’s understanding: the empire’s military system consisted of several interconnected structures.

Altheim participated in battles on the Russian and Galician fronts. In documents, his rank is indicated as népfelkelő főhadnagy — approximately senior lieutenant of the militia.

Even his own correspondence has been preserved. On August 14, 1916, he wrote from the Russian front to the chief rabbi of Hódmezővásárhely, Lajos Zeltmann.

Two years later, the war ended for him not with a bullet or an artillery shell.

On October 18, 1918, 33-year-old Jenő Altheim died of Spanish flu in a military hospital in Ungvar. He was buried there.

Thus, the form Evzen in the published list becomes understandable. The Czech Evžen corresponds to the Hungarian Jenő. Most likely, the name passed through the Czechoslovak or Czech accounting system, although without reviewing the specific original card, it is premature to assert the origin of this particular entry.

Why Altheim died in Uzhgorod, although he was from Hungary

In 1914, the borders looked different.

Modern Uzhgorod was located in the Kingdom of Hungary — the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — and was called Ungvar. The modern Ukrainian-Slovak and Ukrainian-Hungarian borders near the city did not exist.

When World War I began, the Carpathians quickly turned into a large combat zone. The Russian army tried to pass through the mountain passes into Hungary, while the Austro-Hungarian army held the direction. Ungvar became a convenient railway and medical hub behind the front line.

Historical research mentions 28 hospital barracks in the city. The wounded and sick were brought by sanitary trains from different areas of the front.

A person could be born in present-day Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, or Ukraine, serve in a completely different part of the empire, get wounded or fall ill hundreds of kilometers from Ungvar — and end their life right here.

Therefore, the geography of the graves looks much wider than the geography of Transcarpathia.

Thousands of deceased and a military cemetery near the railway

According to the research of Yuri Fatula, the Memento bellum team worked with a huge array of documents. About 180,000 death cards of Austro-Hungarian servicemen stored in the Czech military archive were reviewed.

Researchers managed to establish approximately 3,500 names of people buried in Uzhgorod. They came from territories that today belong to about 19 European countries.

The total number of military burials in the city is estimated at approximately 11–12 thousand.

One large cemetery was located in the Shakhta area. In 2012, Ukrainian state sources reported the restoration of the necropolis there, where 1,003 servicemen of different nationalities were registered.

Another, much larger burial site emerged near the railway station and hospital facilities. Historical research describes thousands of graves there, including mass graves.

In the southern part, there were rows of individual graves and a separate Jewish military sector with traditional Jewish tombstones.

This fact makes the current work at the cemetery particularly interesting. However, establishing a connection between the historical military sector and the currently found section is yet to be done.

In the fall of 1918, Ungvar buried not only the wounded

The story of Altheim coincided with one of the most severe months of the Spanish flu epidemic.

Two days after his death, on October 20, 1918, an event took place in the Jewish community of Ungvar that would seem almost incredible today: a wedding was held at the cemetery.

The groom was Shmuel Weiss, the bride was Regina Grunberger. The community gathered 6,000 crowns for the young couple.

So-called cemetery weddings are known in the history of some Eastern European Jewish communities as a folk custom during epidemics. This is not a prescription of Judaism and not a usual wedding tradition. Such a rite was resorted to in the hope of stopping the plague.

For Ungvar, such a case was not the first: the local press described a cemetery wedding during the cholera epidemic in 1878.

Therefore, the date October 18 next to Altheim’s name says more than just “died in the hospital.” In the last weeks of the war, the city simultaneously received military personnel and experienced a pandemic.

Two more names from the list lead to pre-war Jewish Ungvar

Next to Altheim appear less complete but also recognizable biographies.

Gál Emil, designated as a doctor and pharmacist, is highly likely to be Emil Gál, born on April 2, 1888, in Ungvar. His religion is listed as Jewish in university documents. He studied in Budapest and Kolozsvár — today’s Cluj-Napoca — and received professional qualifications in pharmacy.

The city, name, Jewish origin, and specialty match. But so far, no found posthumous military card allows for a definitive equal sign.

With Gál Lajos, listed as the chief physician, the situation is similar.

School documents know Lajos Gál, born on August 25, 1879, in Ungvar, also of Jewish faith. In the materials of Ungvar at the beginning of the war, a doctor with this name is mentioned, previously working at the St. Roch Hospital in Budapest.

The coincidences are strong. For final identification, a document linking this doctor directly to the burial is still needed.

Here the search becomes more like compiling a family dossier than archaeology. The stone gives a name, the military archive — part and death, the university list — profession, the old newspaper — address or place of work.

32 names — this seems to be just one fragment of the list

This can be checked on a specific person.

Hugo Langschur is absent from the current list of 32 surnames.

However, his story is well documented. He was born on June 25, 1888, came from a Jewish family, and served in the Austro-Hungarian army. His father Abraham led the Jewish religious community of Ronsberg — today’s Poběžovice in the Czech Republic — and the local burial society for many years.

On September 25, 1914, 26-year-old Hugo died of an infectious disease in the military hospital of Ungvar.

His name is preserved on the memorial to Jewish servicemen of his native community.

But among the 32 surnames published by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine now, Langschur is not present.

This does not mean that the current list is compiled incorrectly. It means something else: 32 people cannot be called a complete list of Jews who died in the military hospitals of Ungvar or were buried in the city during World War I.

Most likely, it is about a specific cemetery, a certain section, or a separate group of archival records. How exactly the list was formed, researchers still need to explain.

Where did so many Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army come from

For modern Israel, this is an almost vanished page of military history.

The IDF Archive and the Ministry of Defense of Israel provide an estimate of approximately 320,000 Jews who served in the armed forces of Austria-Hungary during World War I. In historical literature, a wider range is encountered — from 275,000 to 400,000.

About 40,000 Jews of Austria-Hungary died.

They were privates, artillerymen, doctors, officers, pilots. The army had a system of Jewish religious services: during the war, the number of field rabbis reached 76, they were given the officer rank of captain.

This does not mean that hundreds of thousands of people had the same attitude towards the empire or voluntarily went to fight for the Habsburgs. The state had conscription. There were conscripts, volunteers, career officers, doctors, and reservists.

But there was also a special Jewish context. Austria-Hungary granted Jews civil equality, while Tsarist Russia was associated with legal restrictions and pogroms for many families. The Israeli military archive separately notes this factor, explaining the attitude of some Jews of the empire to the war on the Russian front.

It turns out to be a paradox familiar to the history of European Jewry: Jews were on both sides of the front. Hundreds of thousands of Jews also served in the Russian army.

In the Carpathians, they could shoot at each other in the uniforms of two empires.

Jews made up about a third of Ungvar’s population

The found graves did not appear in a city without a Jewish history.

According to the 1910 census, about 5,300 Jews — approximately a third of the population lived in Ungvar. The community existed here for generations and was a noticeable part of the economic, religious, and intellectual life of the city.

Today, this world has to be restored in pieces.

Sometimes it’s a grave. Sometimes an old register. Sometimes a building. In 2026, practical restoration began in Uzhgorod of the wooden synagogue from Velyki Komyaty, dismantled and moved to the Transcarpathian Museum of Folk Architecture and Life.

For NANews — News of Israel, these two stories go side by side not by chance. The synagogue returns the physical space of the vanished community. The military graves return its people.

The same problem exists throughout Ukraine: part of the Jewish memorial sites have been preserved, part has to be practically returned to public memory.

Where to look for the families of people from the list

Here an unexpectedly specific clue appeared.

In the international register of Jewish burials JewishGen JOWBR, there is a Uzhgorod database with 3,971 entries. It was not made from modern photographs of the cemetery.

It is based on a typewritten register in Hebrew, which, in turn, was compiled from an old handwritten book in Yiddish. This book was taken to Israel by Eliyahu Reisman. His father Emanuel Reisman kept records of burials until his deportation in April 1944.

Most of the registered burials there relate precisely to the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

That is, part of the answer to the question “who lies in Uzhgorod?” today may physically be not only underground in Ukraine but also in a register whose history leads to Israel.

NANews — News of Israel sees here another practical line. If researchers have complete archival cards of these 32 people — with place of birth, parents, part, and date of death — the search for descendants becomes a real genealogical task, not an appeal “to everyone who knows anything.”

Surnames can be matched with metric books, military archives, Jewish cemetery databases, emigration documents, and Yad Vashem materials.

Who among the descendants might live in Israel today

The Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine now asks to report any information about servicemen, their relatives, and descendants to the Jewish community of Uzhgorod.

Over the past 108 years, families from this list have experienced the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Hungarian rule, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and several major waves of emigration. One family tree today may have branches in Israel, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the USA, or Canada.

Some descendants may well know the surname of their great-grandfather but not know that he died in Ungvar. A short formula might have remained in family memory: “did not return from World War I.”

Now at least for some families, there is a place to start the search.

Jenő Altheim already has it almost to the last line of his biography: born on August 7, 1885, son of a cantor, became a lawyer, married Janka Grőber, went to the army in the summer of 1914, wrote to the rabbi from the front, survived four years of war and died of the Spanish flu in the military hospital of Ungvar on October 18, 1918.

He was 33.

On the sheet published in 2026, only a few words remain of all this: Altheim Evzen — Dr., senior lieutenant.

Now a person is visible behind them again.

What is Uzhgorod and why does Jewish history occupy a special place here

For an Israeli reader, Uzhgorod can easily be imagined simply as a small Ukrainian city somewhere on the western border. Historically, this is not the case. The modern regional center of Transcarpathia has been at the crossroads of states, languages, and cultures for centuries, and its name has changed along with the borders: Uzhgorod in Ukrainian, Ungvár in Hungarian, Užhorod in Czech, Ungvir in Yiddish.

The city stands on the Uzh River just a few kilometers from modern Slovakia. A settlement existed here as early as the early Middle Ages. Starting from about the 11th century, these lands were primarily in the Hungarian political space for many centuries, later under the rule of the Habsburgs. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ungvar was a city of the Hungarian Kingdom within Austria-Hungary.

After World War I, the map changed again. Transcarpathia became part of Czechoslovakia, and Uzhgorod became the administrative center of Subcarpathian Rus. In November 1938, the southern part of Transcarpathia, along with Uzhgorod, was returned to Hungarian rule. In the fall of 1944, the city was occupied by the Red Army, and after the war, Transcarpathia was included in the Ukrainian SSR. Since 1991, Uzhgorod has been in independent Ukraine.

It turns out that a person could be born here as a subject of Austria-Hungary, then live in Czechoslovakia, find themselves in Hungary again, and end their life in the Soviet Union — without moving from the same city.

This is especially important for working with Jewish archives. The same address, one family, and even one person can appear in documents in Hungarian, German, Czech, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian. That is why in the list of found military burials, forms of names like Jenő and Evžen, Lajos and Ludvik, Károly and Karel appear side by side.

Jews lived in Ungvar as early as the 16th century

The first documentary traces of Jews in the vicinity date back to the 16th century, and the first known record of a Jewish family directly in Uzhgorod is dated 1575.

Initially, the community was small. In 1769, documents counted only 93 Jews in the city, by 1830 — already 762. The real growth occurred in the 19th century when previous restrictions on Jewish settlement gradually disappeared, and Ungvar became an important trade and administrative center of the region.

By 1891, 3,735 Jews — about 31% of the city’s total population lived here.

In 1910, just four years before the start of World War I, there were already 5,305 Jews out of 16,919 residents. That is, almost every third resident of Ungvar was Jewish.

For understanding the current find, this figure is perhaps more important than any map. Jewish military graves appeared not on the outskirts of a city foreign to Jews. They emerged within one of the notable Jewish centers of then Hungary.

Ungvar was not only a trade but also a religious Jewish center

The city had synagogues, beit midrashim — houses of prayer and Torah study, cheders, Talmud Torah, yeshivas, mikvahs, Jewish charitable organizations, a hospital, and a nursing home.

Ungvar was associated with rabbis known far beyond Transcarpathia. Here served Rabbi Meir Eisenstadter, usually called Ma’aram Ash and considered one of the influential halachic authorities of Hungarian Jewry in the 19th century.

An even more familiar name to the Israeli religious reader is Shlomo Ganzfried. He was born in Ungvar in 1804, later served here as a dayan — a judge of the rabbinical court — and became the author of “Kitzur Shulchan Aruch”, one of the most famous concise codes of everyday Jewish law. The book was first published in 1864 and then reprinted dozens of times.

That is, for an Israeli, Uzhgorod can be associated not only with today’s Ukraine and Transcarpathia. It is also the city from which a book came out that generations of religious Jews studied far beyond Central Europe.

In the same 1864, a Jewish printing house began operating in Ungvar. Religious books in Hebrew were printed here, and before World War II, another Jewish publishing house was active.

Orthodox, Hasidim, Neologs, and Zionists lived in one city

Jewish life in Ungvar was not homogeneous.

After the split of Hungarian Jewry in the second half of the 19th century, separate Orthodox and Neolog communities existed in the city. Neologs — a specific direction of Hungarian Jewry, sought to combine Judaism with greater integration into modern Hungarian society. An Israeli reader might want to automatically compare them with modern Reform Judaism, but legally and historically, this is not the same.

At the same time, Ungvar remained a strong center of the Orthodox and Hasidic world.

Yeshivas, religious schools, and numerous charitable societies operated here. Since 1890, there was a Jewish primary school, and later schools with teaching in Hebrew appeared.

And after Transcarpathia became part of Czechoslovakia, the Jewish national movement noticeably strengthened in the city. In the interwar years, Zionist organizations, youth movements, cultural associations, and Jewish educational institutions were active.

By 1930, there were about 7,500 Jews in Uzhgorod, again almost a third of the population.

The Great Synagogue of Uzhgorod survived the community for which it was built

One of the most noticeable traces of that world still stands in the center of Uzhgorod.

In 1904, a large synagogue was built in the city in an unusual combination of Neo-Moorish style and Hungarian Art Nouveau. Its scale itself shows the position of the community: it was not a small prayer room of a provincial town, but one of the most notable buildings in the city.

After the war, the Soviet authorities took the building from the Jewish community. It was converted into a concert hall; for decades, the Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic operated there. The external appearance of the former synagogue has been preserved quite well, although its religious space was significantly altered.

There is also an active synagogue in the city. Today, the Jewish community of Uzhgorod once again has a rabbi, prayer life, a mikvah, children’s and educational programs, engages in kosher food, and helps the elderly and needy. Its current rabbi is Menachem Mendel Wilhelm, the same one who, together with Yuri Fatula, is now searching for the graves of Jews from World War I.

Thus, a direct connection appears between the modern community and the people from the 1914–1918 list.

The year 1944 almost destroyed Jewish Ungvar

The most drastic break in this history occurred not during the First, but during the Second World War.

After Uzhgorod returned under Hungarian rule in 1938, Hungarian anti-Semitic laws were applied to local Jews. People were gradually pushed out of professions and businesses, and men were sent to Hungarian labor battalions. In 1941, some Jews, whom the authorities considered not to have proper Hungarian citizenship, were deported to the Kamianets-Podilskyi area, where one of the first mass shootings of the Holocaust on such a scale took place.

But the destruction of the community itself occurred in the spring of 1944.

On March 19, 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. Soon after, the Jews of Uzhgorod and the surrounding area were herded into two ghettos. One was set up on the grounds of the Moskowitz brick factory, the other at the Gluck family lumberyard near the railway.

Here, two eras echo particularly terrifyingly. The same railway that during the First World War brought wounded Austro-Hungarian servicemen to Ungvar, in the spring of 1944 became part of the route for the destruction of another generation of the city’s Jews.

From May 17 to 31, 1944, the prisoners of the Uzhgorod ghettos and Jews of the surrounding region were transported in five transports. Their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Within a few weeks, the centuries-old Jewish community of one of the largest cities in Transcarpathia had virtually ceased to exist in its former form.

After the war, only a few hundred Holocaust survivors returned to Uzhgorod. Many then left — some to Israel, others to the USA and European countries. Soviet policy further destroyed the old system of communal life: religious buildings were nationalized, organizations were closed, and the large synagogue became a concert hall.

Why the 32 names found are important here

Therefore, the current search for war graves cannot be separated from the overall history of Uzhgorod.

The people who are being brought back from the archives today belonged to the Jewish world of Ungvar before the Holocaust — a world where Jews made up about a third of the population, where rabbis, doctors, pharmacists, and merchants worked, books were printed in Hebrew, yeshivas and Zionist organizations existed, and young men went to serve in the army of the state of which they were then citizens.

This world survived the First World War.

The Second — almost not at all.

And therefore, the preserved matzevah of a serviceman from 1914–1918 today tells of two losses at once: of a specific person who died more than a hundred years ago, and of the large Jewish community that still existed around his grave, but within one generation was almost completely destroyed.