Feiga (Feyge) Usherovna Magetman

Camera footage at the Soroca Jewish community center, with a few words in Russian and Yiddish among people present about the building and the Jews who remain.

The formal interview begins: Magetman gives the date and place, her birthplace Vadu-Rashkovo (forty kilometers from Soroca), her names, maiden name Lerner and Russian name Fanya, and her birth date in November 1927. She describes Vadu-Rashkovo as a Jewish shtetl, and talks about her father, who had a mill and a creamery, her mother, her grandparents (one had a creamery still operating), and her two sisters.

gives her grandparents' names and her sisters' names

Magetman recalls the Jewish town, which had more Jews than non-Jews, and a visit as a child to a tsadik, as well as a trip with her parents to Chernivtsi. She speaks of her mother's piety and descent, and of how her mother baked bread and gave food and money to poor people before the Sabbath, and held a meal for the poor. She then says her mother was killed in 1941 in the bombing at the start of the war.

adds the trip to Chernivtsi and the mother's death at the start of the war

Magetman recalls her first year at school and names rabbis in the town, Zukerman among them (the spelling is unclear). She remembers her parents going to synagogue on the High Holidays and a non-Jewish woman who came to light the stove; she cannot name the town's several prayer houses or a tsadik. She attended a Romanian school before the war and a Soviet school after it.

Answering Katz's questions, Magetman describes her mother blessing the Sabbath candles on Friday and on holidays, and her mother's charity. She recalls Sabbath cakes and challah in a Jewish home, and her grandfather, a man with a white beard who lived in a small house in the courtyard and ate with her mother.

Asked about songs before the war, Magetman says she does not sing since her husband died. She recalls Simchat Torah at home and kissing the Torah in the synagogue with her father, and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. She says she started fasting at thirteen, and still fasts on Yom Kippur.

Magetman tells how the German bombing at the start of the war killed her mother and younger sister on 8 July 1941, and how she and her father were injured. They were held in the ghetto at Chechelnyk, Vinnytsya region, from July 1941 to March 1944. Her father and his mother froze to death on 28 November 1941, and she lost her fingers and hands that same night, when people were driven out into the snow and forty froze.

the transcript says 1941 for the freezing; the catalogue gives both 1941 and 1942

Magetman says she receives German compensation, amounting to little, and no pension, since she worked for 43 years as a chemistry teacher. She mentions briefly attending a cheder as a child, remembering nothing of prayer, and compares what she receives with sums paid elsewhere and the cost of living.

adds the discussion of compensation amounts and comparison of living costs abroad

Magetman answers questions about the meanings of dybbuk, golem and related terms, saying a golem is a bad non-Jew who did not help Jews during the war. She then recites the verbal charm she used against the evil eye for her grandchildren, with spitting three times, and describes a local woman healer, Brokhe the sprekhern(?).

adds the dybbuk and golem terms and the evil-eye charm

Magetman recalls traditional Jewish weddings she attended with her parents, the last one in 1936. She describes waiting for the bride and groom, the chuppah and the procession, and the klezmer band from Rashkov. She does not remember a badkhn well and does not know the dances Katz asks about.

Asked about travel to a distant tsadik, Magetman names a local holy man, Moyshe Papovtsan (spelling unclear), a ritual slaughterer who was still living in Soroca after the war. She explains the terms rebbe and rov and the word litvak, which she takes to mean a left-handed person, and does not know the word epikoyres. She declines to sing.

adds the explanation of litvak and rebbe and rov, and her declining to sing

Magetman returned from the ghetto with her sister and brother-in-law and lived with them until her marriage in 1953. Her husband helped her because of her injured hands and died in 1990; they had two sons and three grandchildren, and she now lives alone and sometimes comes to the Hesed. She taught chemistry and biology for 38 years in Soroca, and in Floreşti, the Rezina district and other places.

Magetman says life today is hard, and then answers the dialectological questionnaire, with Russian prompts read out by S2 and help from S3 and Katz. Items include greetings and good wishes, household words, adjectives and adverbs of time and degree, words for illness, believer and pious person, a convert and a non-Jew, peasant, body parts, flowers and potatoes, and sample sentences to translate.

adds the long run of questionnaire items on vocabulary, forms of address and sentences

Magetman answers dialectological questionnaire items. These cover sentences to translate and the words for attic, vagon and plural forms, dreydl, 'a good person' and the cantor's lectern. She also gives words for a fence, 'face', suddenly and 'enemy'. Katz repeats items and checks her forms, and S3 prompts in Russian.

Katz closes the questionnaire and praises Magetman's memory. She declines to tell more but names her family: her father's siblings, of whom one brother, about ninety, lives in Chicago, and her mother's four sisters and brother. Only her sister, in Israel, survives with her children. Katz then announces the date and begins the interview with Plotnik.

Katz's opening of the Plotnik interview at the end