Jewish life in Lviv
Centuries of Jewish life
For centuries Jews lived in Lviv (Lemberg). The city was the cultural centre of the Jews of Eastern Galicia. Well-known writers and thinkers such as Martin Buber, Joseph Roth and Stanisław Lem lived and worked here. There were Jewish schools, theatres, libraries and newspapers. Almost nothing of this world survived the Shoah.
A city of many peoples
With around 900,000 inhabitants, Lviv is the largest city in Western Ukraine. Joseph Roth called it “the city of blurred borders”. Many peoples and faiths lived side by side; in the streets you could hear Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, German and Yiddish. Before the Second World War about 160,000 Jews lived in the city, more than a third of the population. Today there are just over 4,000.