Gisia (Gisye) Meylikhovna Leiderman

The team greets Gisia Leiderman at her apartment. Kerler introduces himself, the cameraman and Yosef (probably the other interviewer). He asks her to tell her recollections in Yiddish, and she says she has forgotten much.

Leiderman says she speaks Yiddish but cannot read or write it, attended a Ukrainian school and was evacuated during the war. Kerler asks her patronymic and puts the consent and recording formalities, including the date of 18 July 2002. He explains that the interview is for the archive and asks for her address.

Includes the consent and recording formalities, and the date.

Start of the formal interview: Kerler speaks, apparently collecting personal details. The transcript has almost no usable text.

Leiderman gives her name and says she was born in Bershad in 1924 and lived there until the war. Her father, Melekh Brunfman, was a furrier who sewed felt, her mother Mariam kept house and raised the children, and her sister Etl has died. Her brother David lives in Israel.

Asked about her childhood, Leiderman says she does not remember which school she attended, only a later technical college. She remembers no friends and does not recall details of prewar Bershad. Kerler gives an example from his own mother's recollections.

Leiderman says that her parents went to the synagogue on holidays. Her mother prepared gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and she answers Kerler's detailed questions about the stuffing, the salt, pepper and onions, and whether it was sweet or peppery. There was no heating on the Sabbath. She cannot give the Yiddish for a certain word.

Includes her description of the fish stuffing and spices.

Leiderman cannot recall her father's travels. She says Passover was kept at home, with matzo, kugel and pancakes, but she does not remember the Haggadah, the four questions or the stories. Kerler then announces a set of Russian words for her to translate into Yiddish.

Includes the Passover recollections and Kerler's introduction to a translation questionnaire.

Leiderman answers dialectological questions from Kerler. Items include body and household words, a child's crying, verb forms, adjectives and comparatives, words for people and for luck, time adverbs, and the pronunciation of 'thousand'. She says she does not recall some words and is asked what her mother said. At the end Kerler asks whether she lived in Bershad' until the war.

Leiderman says she was evacuated to the Urals, to a place whose name is unclear (Izhevsk?), and returned to Bershad' after the war. She was about seventeen when the war began. She then answers many more questionnaire items: words for non-Jews, a gravestone, Hanukkah latkes and the dreidel, Purim pastry, Sabbath bread, 'rabbi' and plurals, tefillin, and other words and phrases. She says her parents were from Bershad'. She recalls her father laying tefillin only vaguely.

The catalogue lists only the evacuation and return; the transcript also shows questions on Hanukkah and Purim food, rabbis and tefillin, and her parents' origin.

After the interview with Leiderman ends, an informal conversation follows with local people. They discuss Hebrew prayer, the blessing over bread, candle blessings and the four questions of Passover. They say Passover was kept in Yiddish in many Bershad' families. Much of the speech is hard to follow.

Kerler talks with a man, said to be from Bratslav, about how his parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish, and about a coppersmith in Bratslav whom the team visited. The man says he was an editor of a Yiddish paper. They also discuss Yiddish-speakers in Ukraine today, then travel plans and logistics. The speech is largely garbled, and the catalogue's talk of contemporary religious life is not clear in the transcript.

The transcript shows more talk about the Yiddish of Bratslav and the team's travel plans than about religious life.

The interview with Bershadskaya begins. Her Yiddish name and her father's name are established, and Kerler gives the date and place of the interview, in Bershad'. Her Russian name is given as Elizaveta Konstantinovna Bershad'skaya.

Bershadskaya says she was born in Chernyatka, in the Dzhulinka (Zhulynka?) district, on the far side of the Bug, and gives its Yiddish and Russian names. She was born in 1927 and lived there until the late 1930s. Her father was born there too and was a barber; her mother, Khave, was from Bershad'. She says only about twenty Jewish families lived in Chernyatka.

The transcript adds the father's patronymic and the mother's name as Khave Bentsins (?), and says the family had a time in Chernyatka before the war.