On October 23, 2026, HERITAGE — an exhibition about the monuments of national communities in the south and east of Ukraine threatened by the Russian war — opened at the Museum of the History of Kyiv. On 25 stands are photographs of buildings, cemeteries, and former settlements. Some photographs allow for a comparison of the state of the monuments before the full-scale invasion of 2022 and during the war.
Author: Stas Shifer
On October 27, the publication JewishNews reported on the Jewish part of the project. But the exhibition is not limited to Jewish history: it also features German, Mennonite, and Swedish communities. It is about people who have lived for generations in Ukrainian cities and villages, building schools, temples, workshops, and farms. Today, some of these places are close to the front or on occupied territory.
The project “Virtual Museum: Heritage of Ethnic Communities of Frontline Regions” was organized by the charitable foundation “Society for Development” with the participation of the Council of Germans of Ukraine and the German Nordost-Institut (IKGN e.V.). It is supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. The exhibition materials are prepared in Ukrainian, German, and English.
What monuments are shown in Kyiv
Among the exhibits are the estate of the Bergman family in the village of Solyone, Dnipropetrovsk region, where the local history museum is now located, photographs of a Catholic church, a Lutheran church, the building of the former “Grand Hotel,” and Yakovlev’s printing house in Dnipro. There are also old Mennonite tombstones. Mennonites are a Christian movement whose members created agricultural settlements in the Black Sea region. Therefore, the organizers highlight them alongside ethnic communities.
Photographs were collected by historians, local historians, and volunteers. The preparation used research by scientists from the Dnipro National University named after Oles Honchar; among the partners mentioned is “Wikimedia Ukraine.” The organizers want to place archival materials, historical references, and virtual tours in an open internet museum. The full list of its future Jewish exhibits has not yet been published. At the opening, sample copies of a calendar with monuments for 2027 were shown. In the application of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, the total budget of the project is 1,185,470 hryvnias; this is the declared amount, not confirmed expenses.
What Jewish communities of Ukraine have already lost
In February 2026, the United Jewish Community of Ukraine published a separate monitoring of about 40 damaged or destroyed objects. These are synagogues, educational and charitable institutions, cemeteries, monuments to Holocaust victims. The data covers four years of war, but not all areas are accessible for inspection. This list cannot be issued as a catalog of HERITAGE:FRONT: the organizers did not claim that all the listed places are presented on the stands.
Among the recorded cases is the destruction of a small synagogue in Mariupol in the spring of 2022 and serious damage to the CHABAD building that operated there. In the same March, shelling damaged the “Menorah” in Drobytsky Yar near Kharkiv. This is a place of mass shootings of Jews by the Nazis during World War II; it should not be confused with Babyn Yar in Kyiv. In January 2023, the 19th-century choral synagogue in Bakhmut was damaged.
Later, strikes also affected burial sites. On November 28, 2025, about 240 graves were damaged in the Jewish section of cemetery No. 3 in Kharkiv. On January 15, 2026, in Belopole, Sumy region, a monument to Holocaust victims installed in 2021 was destroyed; the building of the former ghetto was also damaged. The mere fact of damage to a Jewish object does not allow concluding without additional evidence that the strike was made specifically because of its religious significance.
NANews Israel News Nikk.Agency compared the community list with the general statistics of destruction. By the end of September 2026, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine counted 2,161 damaged cultural heritage monuments and 2,665 cultural institutions. UNESCO confirmed the damage to 563 cultural objects by September 29, of which 165 are religious buildings. The difference is explained by accounting and verification methods, not a separate category of Jewish losses.
What is important here for families in Israel
In the Zaporizhzhia region, in the southeast of Ukraine, there was the Novo-Zlatopol Jewish National District. It was created in 1929 from settlements founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “National district” then meant a Soviet administrative unit with a large share of the Jewish population, not an independent autonomy. According to community monitoring, there are several synagogues and more than ten cemeteries there. The fighting was so close that the front line sometimes crossed the territory of the Jewish cemetery in the former colony of Bohodarivka.
In Kherson region, Jewish agricultural colonies appeared as early as the early 19th century. The first seven were founded in 1806, including Bobrovyi Kut and Seidemenuha. After the liberation of the right bank of the Dnipro in 2022, researchers planned to inspect the cemeteries of the former Jewish colonies Bobrovyi Kut, Mala and Velyka Seidemenuha. The expedition had to be revised: local residents warned of mines and unexploded shells. It is impossible to assess the losses without safe access.
For Israelis whose families come from these places, the name of the village or a preserved tombstone inscription sometimes gives more than a general map of destruction. A native of Ukrainian Volochysk Mordechai Shenhavi was at the origins of the creation of the “Yad Vashem” memorial in Jerusalem. NANews also reported on the Soviet authorities’ ban on the Babyn Yar memorial project in 1965: then censorship hindered the preservation of memory, today documents and monuments are not always accessible due to the war.
HERITAGE is open at the Museum of the History of Kyiv on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street, 7, until November 1, 2026. The virtual archive is designed for those who cannot come to Ukraine, including descendants of residents of disappeared communities. The organizers have not yet named the launch date of the full public version.