Recordings › Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyy, Mohyliv-Podil's'kyy

MDV 463 · Arkadii Isaakovich Gelman; Abram Davidovich Kaplan

Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyy, Mohyliv-Podil's'kyy, Ukraine 18 May 2003 Interviewed by Dov-Ber Kerler Part 3 of 3 62 min · 1 passages

One conversation with Arkadii Isaakovich Gelman; Abram Davidovich Kaplan, continuing over MDV 461, MDV 462, MDV 463.

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Passages

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Interview

· MCO
From the machine transcript

Outside Gelman's house and on the drive to the old town, a speaker (probably Gelman) with Kerler discusses a small prayer house and the old buildings of the Jewish district of Kamianets-Podilskyi, when they were demolished and when the synagogue was closed by the Bolsheviks. At the former Great Synagogue, now a restaurant, they talk about its origin under Turkish rule and its later history, and local Russian speakers describe its fires and restoration, the old town, the prison, the burnt archive and the church. The speaker (apparently Gelman) tells how his family fled in the war, the sister died on the way and the father died in 1943 (?), and he found his mother and a brother on returning in 1946. From about 26 minutes Kaplan, in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, tells Kerler about the Jewish museum, the community room, the old cemetery with its tzadikim and the synagogue's weekly and Passover events, and about Polish volunteers, the monuments to victims of the camps and ghetto (Pechora, Skazyntsi), his army service and communism, and how prayer continued in homes until a synagogue opened in 1948. He discusses prewar Jewish numbers, synagogues, hasidim and shoykhets, relations with the Baptists who took over a synagogue building, the community leadership, and a critical view of Joint, Hesed and Sochnut aid and of emigration.