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New Website Helps Russian Jews Track Ancestors Print E-mail

St. Petersburg, Russian Jewish Cemetery

The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author.

A new Russian language website is helping Jewish families discover their ancestors and visit their gravesites in St. Petersburg's Preobrazhenskiy Jewish Cemetery.

The extensive site, developed by the Jewish Community of St. Petersburg and supported by local businessman Mikhail Khidekel features a searchable archive and photographs of headstones and gravesite. Before the website became available, there was no way of finding the exact grave even if someone knew their relative was buried somewhere in the Preobrazhenskiy Cemetery. The site lets you search and verify that your relatives are there, and locate the burial site.

The site is in Russian so you do need to have a working knowledge of that language in order to use the site effectively. Soon to be added services include gravesite restoration and regular caretaking. The online listings for St. Petersburg's Preobrazhenskiy Jewish Cemetery are available at http://www.Jekl.ru.

from Gary Mokotoff:

The site provides name, birth and death information and a picture of the grave site. It is completely in Russian. Use the Google translator at http://translate.google.com , which does a good job of converting Russian to your native language. In addition, if you are unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet, use the English to Russian alphabet converter at http://stevemorse.org . Searches must be done using the Cyrillic alphabet.

Looking at the pictures shows the deplorable condition of the older graves at the cemetery. I searched using the surname Pevsner, the surname of the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg. Almost every grave more than 50 years old was overgrown with underbrush and trees. The cemetery plans to establish a program where people can pay for the maintenance of a particular grave.