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79018 Lviv Ukraine

BRODY

Brody is an amusing small town with 23,239 inhabitants (according to the last census in 2001). The city is located 90 km northeast of Lviv (Lvov) and belongs to the Lviv (Lvov) region. Here many famous people were born, among them the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, Austrian historian of literature and writer Markus Landau, mathematician and chess master Jakob Rosanes and mother of Sigmund Freud Amalia Nathansohn Freud.

Brody is an amusing small town with 23,239 inhabitants (according to the last census in 2001). The city is located 90 km northeast of Lviv (Lvov) and belongs to the Lviv (Lvov) region. Here many famous people were born, among them the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, Austrian historian of literature and writer Markus Landau, mathematician and chess master Jakob Rosanes and mother of Sigmund Freud Amalia Nathansohn Freud.

In the 17th century the city of Brody was bought by Stanisław Koniecpolski (Polish nobleman and crown hetman). There was built the castle with fortifications in Brody. The castle was designed by the French military engineer William le Vasseur de Beauplan. The "ideal" city (star-shape with regular geometry and straight streets) was built around the fortification.

At the same period Armenians, Greeks and Scots arrived in the town contributing its’ multinational environment, but still the largest part of the population here were Jews. Brody was the transshipment point for goods from Western Europe in exchange for raw materials from Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Due to its’ important geographical location and trade at that time the town became the richest and one of the most important in Poland.

As a result of the First Partition of Poland in 1772 Brody became a part ofthe newly created Crown land Galicia, thus the most eastern part of the Habsburg Monarchy on the border with Russian Empire. 

The city experienced the highest point of its development during the Napoleonic Wars. At that time Brody was considered as the largest importer of colonial goods to France due to the Treaty of Schönbrunn (according which the neighboring Tarnopol region became a part of Russian Empire).

Besides the significance of Brody as a trading town, the German-Jewish secondary school should be mentioned which in the 1815-1816 was one of the Haskalah background (Jewish Enlightenment) and affiliated Israelite private school.

In the 1860s Austrian government reformed the lower real school into imperial-royal four years real school named by Crown Prince Rudolf. It is important to mention that the language of classes at the school was German until 1906, while in the rest of Galicia, aside from Lviv, there were only Polish and a few Ukrainian schools.

With the building of the railroads in 1869 Brody lost its privileged trade position and began to degrade: it had 20,000 inhabitants in 1880 and only 12,500 in 1931. Most of its inhabitants were Jews.

In 1939 Brody became under the Soviet rule. Shortly the Second World War broke out. At that period all Jews of Brody left the town – some of them emigrated, others (the biggest part) were murdered or deported to the concentration camps.

After the WW II Brody were again under the Soviet rule up until the Independence of Ukraine in 1991 was proclaimed.

In 2009 Wolfratshausen (Bavaria) became the twin town with Brody.