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Home > Virtual Museum > CHGS Exhibitions > Remembering Luboml : Historical Introduction

Historical Introduction to Luboml

Luboml is a market town about 200 miles southeast of Warsaw, Poland. It is a border town whose history dates back to the Eleventh Century. The town, along with Chelm and Belz, was part of the Eastern European region known as Volhynia-bordered by Lithuania on the north, Russia to the east, and Poland to the west. Luboml lies in an ambiguous area of changing borders and has belonged in succession to Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Poland (again!). In 1939, the Germans occupied Luboml. By agreement with the Soviet Union, however, the region was turned over the Soviet control until 1941 when the Germans reoccupied the town.

Today Luboml is a part of the Republic of the Ukraine, but today there are no longer any Jews in the town. On 1 October 1942 the Germans, who controlled the town, with the aid of Ukrainian police units rounded up the remaining Jewish inhabitants of Luboml and marched them into the countryside. There the Jews were lined up in front of open pits and shot.

The story of Luboml is like the story of many European Jewish communities. In 1940, Luboml, a prosperous Shtetl (market town) in Poland, had a population of more than 5,000. 90% of the town's population was Jewish. It was a town deeply involved in many facets of the Zionist movement-from extreme leftist to rightist organizations. The Betar movement (forerunner of the Likud Party in Israel) was one of the dominant factions. Menachem Begin, head of Betar in the 1930s and later Prime Minister of Israel, visited Luboml in 1934.

The fortress-like Great Synagogue was the major architectural presence in Luboml. The four-story structure with its Moorish battlements was built in the Seventeenth Century. Above its doorway was the ornate engraving of the biblical passage, "How goodly are thy tenants, O Jacob."

Luboml was not a conspicuous place. It didn't have an important river, and no one famous came from there. Nevertheless, it is an exemplary town because of its ordinariness. The Holocaust consumed the village as it did every other Jewish community in Poland and throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. However, according to Aaron Ziegelman "before the people of the town became victims of the Holocaust, they were people." Ziegelman continues to emphasize this important fact. "I don't want them to be remembered because they were murdered. They went to synagogue, they got married, they danced, they were people. Just like you and me."

By the time the Soviet Red Army liberated Luboml in 1945 only 51 Jews from Luboml (excluding those who had emigrated before 1939) survived the Holocaust. More than 1,000 died in the mass execution on 1 October 1942. The German liquidation of the town effectively ended a six-century history and presence of Jewish life in Luboml.