Yesterday -- October 20 
    The route from Lutsk to Vinnitsa took us through Rivne, Novograd Volinsky and near Berdichev.  Our hotel in Vinnitsa (the France) is sizeable and pretty modern.
   On the way into town I spied a big store called Roshen.  I know Roshen as the wonderful chocolate company owned by the President of Ukraine; I had discovered a particular bonbon made by Roshen, червоний мак (chervonyy mak -- red poppy), which a friend brought me from her trip to Ukraine several years ago.

I loved that candy and saved the wrapper. I finally found that I'm able to buy it at a Russian/Ukrainian market in San Francisco, but I still had to get some directly from the Roshen store. I would love to work in this store for a day!
Even better than the Roshen store was a fantastic dinner we ate at a Georgian restaurant called MARANI -- fantastic food! Google it. If you're ever near Vinnitsa, go there; it's small, charming with brick walls and great service. We'll go back at least once before we leave Vinnitsa.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21
After another blah hotel breakfast, we headed for SHARGOROD, our family's town throughout the 19th century (and maybe before that).
For anyone who wonders why we returned to Ukraine after visiting last year, I only learned from research done after our last trip about our strong Shargorod connection. Before that, I knew of the town, but didn't visit there. Now I wanted to go there and spend time in the large and very old cemetery and learn more about this town.
The town was founded in 1583 ! The synagogue in 1589 !

Alex had called the mayor of Shargorod, who is Jewish -- Igor Mikhailovich Vinocur, who said he would be in meetings, but could meet with us later in the day. He told Alex that there was some written information about the graves and that there was a caretaker at the cemetery.
We drove to the cemetery with high hopes. We had heard from our grandmother, Pauline Berenson Finkelstein, that her father, who died in 1909, had a photo of himself placed on his stone so that people could come back and find his grave.
The attendant gave us two handwritten partial notebooks, which covered about 750 graves in the new part of the cemetery, the earliest entries were from the 1970's. I doubt that I had any family left in that period. Alex reviewed the lists several times and found no Berensons.
I was not going to give up easily and climbed to the older sections of the cemetery and climbed and climbed, followed by my loyal brother. Graves were in severe disarray, some askew, many toppled face up or face down, but all stones in Hebrew and without dates (or dates were hidden -- sunk into the ground), some etching legible (if one could read Hebrew), some not.
We looked through many rows of stones, but sadly it was not possible to identify any of them. We took some photos, but left without the satisfaction of finding family graves.
We then went to lunch and waited for the mayor's phone call. It turned out that he owns the only restaurant in town that was open. He soon arrived as we were finishing lunch.
We talked to this very friendly man for quite a while. There are now about 10 Jews in the town, who get together on major holidays at the mayor's home.
Among many other subjects, I brought up the possibility of a project to photograph and document the entire cemetery -- the result to be on JewishGen, of course. He is very open to this project. I will follow up with him.
He is in his second term as mayor, having been elected by 87% of the electorate. Here he is:

More about him tomorrow -- or sooner from Vic.