Visiting

In this site, the author describes what is interesting to visit in Khashchevatoye. From restaurants to crafts, from music to a beautiful legend about how the village begun. The page is in Ukrainian but can easily be translated with Google Translate.

Müntz, Johann Heinrich (1727-1798), The village of Chaszczowata on the Boh, after 1781

drawing: pen, brush, wash, ink, graphite sketch, manuscript on a laid paper with the mount, 121 x 184 mm, Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library, Inw.G.R. 829/62

From Jan Henryk Müntz Journal

12 August 1781, in the afternoon.

A view of the village of Chaszczowata [Khashchevatoye] on the Boh [Piwdenny Bug, Southern Bug], 4 miles north of Balta and 8 miles to the west of the new Russian fortress of St. Catherine in Orzel [Oryol, today Pervomaisk], also lying on the Boh [Bug], near the confluence of the river Siniucha [Sinyukha] with the Boh [Bug]. The general character of this beautiful region, more than half of the whose land lies fallow of a lack of people, because the population suffered greatly during the last war between the Russians and the Turks (1770-1774).

Chaszczowata [Khashchevatoye] is a pretty settlement, inhabited by agricultural workers. The large house on the right is the home of the steward, there we had dinner. A beautiful region, fertile more than any account. According to what we were told by the administrator, the river Boh [Bug] can be made navigable at all times of year from here as far as the Black Sea.

Between Balta and here you see woods and the remains of extensive cleared forests. An undulating surface. The surface soil black, of vegetable mould, on a substratum of clay. Half a mile from Balta a large village with the name Pieszczana [Pishchana], situated in an extensive depression: great water-meadows, enormous numbers of livestock. The rest of the region sparsely populated. No trace of limestone. The limestone required for burning comes from Tulczyn [Tulchyn], about 6 miles to the west.

All food inexpensive. A crown korzec [bushel] of rye costs 2 1/2 florins - and even somewhat less. Oats for a florin. Wheat for 5 florins.

Good quality butter is generally something of a rarity from Jampol [Yampil] as far as here. local people do not pay much attention to this product, since almost everybody is of the Greek rite, so for three-quarters of the year they fast. For this reason they cultivate a lot of flex and hemp, which grow very well everywhere in this region.

The river-bed is full of stone blocks, granite and feldspar. These are visible as far as the cataract on the Dnieper. These rocks of granite and feldspar are in places covered by clay to a depth of 300 to 400 feet.

In all these districts the soil pampers the peasants, which puts the rural economy to sleep. They rarely plough and sew the earth for more than three years, without letting it rest. They never use cow-manure nor any kind of fertilizer to enrich the soil. Two or three years' rest are sufficient, to return the strength to the soil. As a result the peasantry has it very easy as regards work. If, however, the population was to increase at some point, and necessity was to occasion a proper rural economy, etc., these lands would reimburse a hundredfold in all kind of crops.

Drawn on Sunday 12 August 1781 in the afternoon, looking north. J.H. Müntz

The drawing is included in the album: Voyages pictoresques de la Pologne par Müntz 1781-1783 (Inw.G.R. 829/1-142)

תרגום 2.mp4

A video made by Serge Kolot about the Lopushansky estate where Khashchevatoye was located. Khashchevatoye then and today.

Sophie de Gunzburg

The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, a book by Lucy Dawidowicz was published in 1967.

In it, she documented Jewish Civilization in Eastern Europe before its destruction during the Holocaust. In this chapter, Sophie de Gunzburg tells us about her memories of her family, the family that created the sugar factories around the village. She also narrates their visit to the village.

Gloria Geller's visit

I travelled across Ukraine with a cousin by marriage, Marty Richman, his son, Alex, and our guide, Alex Dunai, from September 14 -September 30, 2011.

On September 25, we arrived in Khashchevatoye, my paternal ancestral home, where about 2000 people live in this layered town nestled in a valley. My great grandparents, Elimelech and Tzivia Geller raised their eight sons in this town.

We first stopped at a building that would have been a synagogue, perhaps where my grandfather, Israel Geller and his seven brothers had their bar mitzvahs. I have an image of what it would have been like for my great grandmother, Tzivia, to try to keep on eye on eight young boys. The building has been used for other things for a long time. We see a goat resting nearby.

This is also where my father, some of his siblings, and numerous cousins were born, and from where my grandfather, Israel Geller and his second wife, my grandmother, Gussie Grossman, emigrated, first to Philadelphia and then to Toronto in the early part of the 20th century. All but one of my grandfather’s seven brothers, as well as the children of the brother who stayed behind and even my great grandmother, Tzivia, emigrated to Toronto in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

We visited two cemeteries, one close to the center of the town which was well-maintained. As elsewhere, there was an old and a new section of the cemetery. One of the things that touched me deeply in all the cemeteries was to see post-War matzevot, indicating that survivors had returned to their home communities. There were a couple of older and a more recent (2010) memorial to those who had perished during the war. We were directed to an older unused cemetery, which had a few stones, but mostly there is an open field, with no one caring for the cemetery. There is a third cemetery outside of the town.

We were told there was one Jewish woman left in the community, Ada Melnik, a woman in her 50s. When we visited, I admired her flower garden which was still in blossom although it was late September. Like other homes we were invited into, her home was made up of several separate buildings. We were taken to a building that housed the sitting room. I was interested in the way in which the homes were decorated, with carpeting on the wall, floor and over her couch. Carpets on the wall, would be good insulation for the winter, I imagine.

She told us there had been 6000 Jews in the town before the war. A number came back after the war. However, over time all the other Jews left, mostly for Israel or America, although her two sons live in Ukraine. She hadn’t left because she is married to a non-Jewish man. She received money from former townspeople who live in Israel to take care of the cemetery.

It felt to me that like most of the ancestral towns we visited, Khashchevatoye is a sleepy little town. It is off the beaten track, situated in the southern part of Ukraine, on the western side of the Dnipro River, heading toward the beautiful city of Odessa. Life there would have been so different from what my family would have encountered in early 20th century Philadelphia and Toronto.

Gloria Geller

Hamilton, Ontario

August 28, 2024

View to Khashchevatoye from the bridge

Courtesy of Barbara Krueger

Barbara Krueger's visit in 2011

To prepare for our trip to Khashchevatoye, we knew we needed a guide. Don’t remember how we did it, but we arranged for Alexander Dunai from Lviv to be our guide in Ukraine. Prior to our arrival, he contacted the school principal and head of the museum [Olena Vdodichenko] which was on the top floor of the school to say descendants of the Tarakan family were coming to visit Khashchevatoye. The information that follows about when people arrived America is from the Immigration records at Ellis Island in New York.

My husband and I, our son and his husband arrived as planned and met up with Mr. Dunai. We were seeking history related to the Tarakan family. We knew that my grandfather, Jossel/Josef Melamed, through an arranged marriage came from Kharkiv - which was beyond the Pale of Settlement - to marry my grandmother in Khaschevate. They lived there for some years and had 4 children. Jossel left for America in 1904, and returned when Idel had a miscarriage with their 5th child. He stayed in Khaschavate for 4 more years and returned to New York in 1908. In 1912 their eldest son Wolfel/Willie joined him in New York and eventually filed to change Melamed to Meldofsky, and then Moldofsky. In 1916 Udel arrived in New York and a year later had twins - Faye and Philip.

When we visited Khashchevatoye, the house in which the Tarakan family had lived, no longer existed. But the school principal, whom Mr. Dunai contacted, had talked with her 92 year old grandmother and had some wonderful history to share.

The Tarakan family owned a leather factory in the town - which we knew about. But they also owned a jacket factory - which must have used the leather from their own production. That made a lot of sense to me because when Jossel Melamed arrived in America he got work as a sewer. He must have done that work for his father-in-law also. Both factories were long gone when we visited in 2011.

Udel’s sister, Chaia Laia left for New York after Udel did but she was a “Fusgeyer” - she walked with a group out of Russia/Ukraine west to somewhere in France or Germany where she got a ship to America.

We know that in 1921 there was a pogrom in Khashchevatoye that took the life of Udel and Chaia Laia’s father. The Tarakan and Melamed family were buried in the Jewish Cemetery just outside of town. In that cemetery all of the grave stones were overturned or removed.

In town there was another more recent cemetery. Also in town there was a Rape Seed Oil factory which once was the Synagogue where the Jewish families worshipped.

The town functioned currently, with a town market on the street and horse-drawn plows working the peripheral fields. There were also cows-probably the source of the leather for the leather factory, now gone.

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