Nova Basan and Kozelets, Ukraine

On Thursday, June 18th, Sasha (a taxi driver) and I traveled to Nova Basan and Kozelets, Ukraine.

NOVA BASAN

My grandmother's father Dave and his brother Charlie; their mother Hasse (Arluck);
her parents (Nussin Arluck and Esther Farber); and Esther's parents Ezra Farber and Chaya Sura Berkowitz all lived in Nova Basan. So it was (sort of) our ancestral home for at least four generations - between c. 1800 and the early 1900s.

It's kind of like Thetford, Vermont only much poorer and also much flatter.

You pass from forests (mixed hard & soft woods), to fields (corn, potatoes, hay),
and then into a small, not-well-tended village.

In the center of town there is a common...just like Thetford Center. Behind it is a church, just like Thetford Center: only this one is an Russian Orthodox Church.

Surrounding the square are very old & small houses, made of wood, brick & cobb. There is a small market / bazaar, which was not active.

In terms of climate, lot of the trees are the same: oak, maple, birch, pine, apple, cherry.

We nosed around for a couple of hours, but could find no one who remembered any of our family names, or knew of the former synagogue location, or of a Jewish Cemetery. We did explore a few Christian cemeteries at the north edge of the town.

KOZELETS

Then we drove to Kozelets. Kozelets is where Solomon Rozhowsky lived, and his son Pinye was born. Pinye Rozhowsky married Hasse Arluck - and they gave birth to Grandpa Dave and Grandpa Charlie. Dave later married (once in the US) Kate Gekowsky and gave birth to both my GG (Grandma Gladys) and Aunt Rozzie.

In the center of Kozelets is a huge, lovely Russian Orthodox Church. Visiting the church, we met a woman who steered us to the town clerk's office. At the town office, they tried to help us look for records of Rozhowsky's...but no such luck. (The family history says that Solomon ran an estate for a wealthy man, and that Pinye was a surveyor. Other Rozhovsky's dealt in cattle,
and one was a shoemaker.)

The town officials were, however, able to point us towards the Jewish Cemetery, and with
a few wrong turns, corrections, and turnarounds we found it at the edge of town & also a highway. There, behind a field of potatoes, amidst what looked like an overgrown dump were toppled headstones among the weeds, saplings, and in some case very large trees. I was able to find more than a dozen of them, and took photos of the several inscriptions that are still legible.

Once back in Kyiv, out looking for a restaurant, I came upon one of the three synagogues still functioning in Kyiv. I went in and said Kaddish in memory of those past and lost; and made prayers for a brighter future: one without genocide, without forgetting, and also with care for both the living & the dead.