The Jewish cemetery in Solotvin (Solotvyn, Sołotwina) is one of the largest and best preserved Jewish cemeteries in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. 2,105 tombstones are extant in the cemetery. All of them were documented by the participants of the August 2009 field school supervised by Dr. Boris Khaimovich of the Jewish History in Galicia and Bukovina project.
The oldest preserved tombstone in the cemetery dates back to 1665 and the latest one - 1940. There is also a mass grave of 75 Solotvin Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1942 which has no tombstone. The last burial in the cemetery took place in 1997 or 1998 although no tombstone marks this grave.
The cemetery is situated on the souther outskirts of the town, on a slope of a high hill. It is accessible through a fenced passageway from the town which leads visitors to the cemetery's northern side. A footpath crosses the cemetery and divides it into a eastern (left) half and a western (right) half.
During the documentation phase, rows of tombstones were marked by letters (A, B, C, etc.). The place of the tombstone in the row was further distinguished by numbers (A001, A002, etc.). In the cases where the rows could not be traced, a letter marks the rectangular sector. Tombstones on the right, western side of the path are marked with the letter "R" (e.g. AR001, BR001, etc.). The numbering of the tombstones begins from the top of the hill and proceeds downward (from south to north).
The oldest part of the cemetery is situated in the middle of the slope, and is marked as sector L. Distinct areas dating to the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identified. Prominent leaders of the community from the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries are buried in rows E and A. There is no division between male and female sections; children's graves are usually concentrated in separate areas. In addition to residents of Solotvin, Jews from the surrounding villages are also buried in the cemetery. Sometimes the names of these villages are mentioned in the epitaph.
Almost all of tombstones face west and all of them bear Hebrew epitaphs. Inscriptions in either Polish or German with the name of the deceased and sometimes with the Gregorian dates began to appear on the lower part of the tombstones during the interwar period.
The list is currently under construction.
Click here to see the map of the cemetery with tombstones' numbers.