Collection of the Kherson Regional Museum of Local History

Collection

Holding institution (official language):: Херсонський обласний краєзнавчий музей

Scope and content:: Visual sources include photographs of an ethnic Jewish typical resident of Anan’ev county (Kherson province; late nineteenth century); a Jewish school, its pupils, and a synagogue in the Jewish colony of L’vovo (Kherson county) (1909); barracks that constituted the temporary residence of Jewish settlers in Kherson (1920s); an external view and the interior décor of Kherson’s Staronikolaevka Street and Zabalka synagogues; photographs of children and teachers at the children’s shelter of the Jewish commune in the village of Kalininskoe (Velikaia Aleksandrovka district, Kherson region) (1940s); a first-grade Russian language lesson at Kherson’s Jewish national school no. 59 (1955); the Jewish poet and translator A. L. Katsev (1977); the décor of the entrance hall of the Kherson Jewish School (1995); etc. Cartographic materials include charts and maps of the Jewish colony of L’vovo (nineteenth century). Also included are personal documents of Jews (entrepreneurs, doctors, writers, and persons who took part in the revolutionary movement and the Second World War) whose fates were in some way connected with the Kherson region; and also a letter from the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg to N. A. Kharenko, a resident of the village of Rubanovka, expressing gratitude for saving the Jewish woman Finshgoyt from the fascists (1944).

Archival history:: This was established by the public figure, archaeologist, and researcher of local history B. I. Goshkevich (1860-1928) as the Kherson Provincial Statistics Committee’s Archeology Museum. From 1898-1911 it was under the trusteeship of the Kherson Provincial Archival Research Commission; and in 1911 it became the municipal Museum of Antiquities of the Kherson Territory. It was nationalised in the Soviet period, and beginning in 1963 was called the Kherson Regional Museum of Local History. The museum includes departments of literature and natural history, as well as a Kakhovka branch. Its archival fonds numbers approximately 17,000 documents from the seventeenth century through 2010, and approximately 14,000 photo-documents from the late nineteenth century through 2010. Materials on the history of peoples who have settled in the Kherson region, including Jews, have been collected by the museum since its inception. Its first exhibit items were photographs taken by the museum’s founder V. I. Goshkevich during an ethnographic expedition in the Jewish agricultural colony of L’vovo (Kherson province).

Access points: locations:: Anan’ev county; Kherson; Kherson province; L’vovo; Rubanovka; Ukraine

Subject terms:: Children; Education; Education--Schools and universities; Education--Students; Health and medical matters; Health and medical matters--Physicians and nurses; Holocaust; Holocaust--Righteous Among the Nations; Jewish colonies; Literature; Literature--Writers, poets, and playwrights; Maps; Personal records; Photographs; Resettlement of Jews; Synagogues; Trade and commerce

System of arrangement:: Documents on the history of Jewish culture are housed in various fonds storage groups (History; Documents; Archival Materials; Books; Photos), and are recorded in the museum’s inventory log.