One of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland was largely wiped out during the Holocaust. Now, some artifacts from the Luboml community are soon to be on display at the Library of Congress.

“Only 51 Jewish residents out of the population of about 4,000 survived the Holocaust,” Nicole Saylor, the director of the Library’s American Folklife Center, told Washington Jewish Week. “The remains of the village are in modern-day Ukraine.”

A hand-drawn map of the town, an 1873 map, a brick fragment and a street sign are on display in the exhibition, “Alive in Many Hands: The American Folklife Center at 50,” open to the public as of Sept. 17.

These 19th- and 20th-century artifacts are part of the Aaron Ziegelman Foundation Collection, which documents everyday Jewish life in the pre-World War II world. The Library of Congress acquired this collection in 2002.

The exhibition also features oral history interviews collected by the Aaron Ziegelman Foundation.

“They recount the experience of people who lived in the town and what life was like there before it was destroyed,” Saylor said.
Jews first lived in Luboml — about 200 miles southeast of Warsaw — in the latter half of the 14th century. By 1897, under the Russian Empire, the Jewish population had grown to more than 3,200, almost three-fourths of the total population.

Like many Eastern European Jewish communities, Luboml became a prosperous market town with Jews making up more than 90% of the population. It enjoyed an active cultural and religious life. Many Jewish residents were heavily involved in Zionist organizations.

Then, antisemitism and the Nazi threat disrupted life in the 1930s. Some Jewish residents emigrated to Palestine and others to the United States.

In 1942, German Nazis rounded up and executed the remaining Jewish population of Luboml, Saylor said. More than 1,000 Jews were fatally shot in a mass execution on Oct. 1, 1942, ending six centuries of Jewish life in Luboml.

Few maps of Luboml survived, but two are on display at the Library of Congress: one from 1873 and the other drawn from memory showing the town as it was in 1939.

Another artifact is a Nazi-era directional sign, the only one from Luboml known to still exist. The sign was originally posted on the first house outside the Jewish ghetto at an intersection.

“When Jewish people were sent away, [the Nazis] whitewashed the sign, but you can still sort of see the name coming through, so it’s really powerful,” Saylor said.

Sixty years after the massacre of Luboml, former residents returned to the site to film a 2003 documentary, according to Saylor. During the trip, photographer Mikola Dzei dug up two brick fragments on the grounds of a machine shop. He gave one fragment to former resident Abe Getman, who escaped Luboml in 1942 and lost many family members to the Nazi occupation. That fragment is now on display.

As director of the American Folklife Center, Saylor appointed exhibition curators to peruse the Library’s collections and determine which of those materials tells the story of AFC and what tells the breadth, depth and variety of the materials it houses.

“We have a lot of things on a lot of subjects, and this one rose to the top because of its historic importance and how cultural memory is such a meaningful component of the archives,” Saylor said.

Today, Luboml is part of what is now Ukraine, but no Jews live in the town.

“Very few things remain physically from this place that no longer exists,” Saylor said. “We have these rare fragments, but what exists is people’s cultural memory, and they’re in these recordings, and that’s how this place lives on.”

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com