Emigration and relatives abroad

Rezmovits tells how the train taking his family from Debrecen stood for hours at Košice and was then sent to Austria instead of Auschwitz. He explains this from a historian's book based on German archives, which describes a mix-up of transport papers and an SS man's error, and gives the book's Hungarian title. He mentions that most Debrecen Jews survived, that his father was in forced labor, and that a camp commander picked men for a march toward Munkács, all of whom were killed when the Russians arrived. He ends by saying that surviving made him feel he had to do something for Jewry, and so he went to Israel.

Rezmovits speaks about his father's side, where his grandfather Avrom was a poor teacher (melamed), and about visiting his maternal grandparents at about age four. He recalls a cousin, Sara, who turned up in 1945 as the only survivor of her family, then married a ritual slaughterer and went to Manchester. He names his three sisters and brothers and says four of the six siblings are alive; his brother in Debrecen is ill. Kerler then asks about his childhood memories of Debrecen.

Rezmovits talks about Zionist youth movements and the songs he learned. A song about the attic and the pioneers is recalled by Kerler and sung in part by Rezmovits, and he also recites a humorous rebbe song. He mentions the Communist Yiddish newspaper Frei Israel, which he read in Israel, and says he felt reborn on arrival, though he found conditions difficult.

Kerler asks about the regional term for Jews from the Carpathians and about the term used in Debrecen. Rezmovits answers with a Hungarian-language stretch, then describes the Máramaros origin of such Jews. He then talks about meeting a woman at an Israeli university who invited him in, how he read Yiddish books there, and how he studied Aramaic for a year to understand prayer.

Smajovics describes liberation near Ercsi, about 120 km from Budapest, and the journey back to the Carpathians with two other boys. He recalls meeting Soviet officers, including Jewish ones, and being offered a place in the Czech army. He tells how his sister returned and how he took up work as a blacksmith. The coming of the kolkhozy, his move to Vynohradiv and his jobs there (a factory, a small furniture factory, warehouses, a garage) are covered, with the 1960s mentioned, and his move to Budapest in 1978 when he bought a flat. He mentions his two daughters and his pension.

Smajovics talks about the prayer books he used and says that his village synagogue was Ashkenazic. He tells how a Sephardic-style service in Israel (with his brother) and a stay in Tokaj, with an American Jew who objected to his Torah reading, differed from his own practice. He compares the Sephardic and Ashkenazic ways of saying kaddish, and then recites kaddish at Kerler's request, with the transcript largely garbled for the recitation.

Smajovics answers questions about the word for attic and for a bridge, and describes Passover food (matzo with milk, dumplings, kugel), before saying that a woman in a restaurant recognised him as a Carpathian Jew by his Yiddish for the seder. He says that few Yiddish speakers remain in the area and that his daughters can understand but do not speak it. He says that he taught his grandson in America bar mitzvah, and that the grandson is now religious and 31 and unmarried.

Smajovics answers a question about the word for 'sick' and then describes his time in Budapest, where before the war he worked for nine months in 1942 (?) and lodged with an old Carpathian Jew who spoke Yiddish. He says that he settled in Budapest in 1978, with his daughter having come earlier, that the move was difficult, and that he met a friend from cheder again.

Smajovics sings the song "Papirosn", about an orphan selling cigarettes in the cold. Kerler asks about other songs; Smajovics says he has forgotten some and recalls a song about a fire on the hearth in winter. He mentions the boys of his village, of whom he is the only one still living, and a friend in Brooklyn he sees on visits. He begins another song about a faithful hasid.

Opening chat with Kerler about the recording and the date; Herbst then gives his Hebrew and Hungarian names and says he was born on the eve of Passover in 1925 in Berlabash, a very small village between Rakhiv and Trebushany. He discusses the names of the village in different languages and the changing states that ruled the area (Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Soviet, Ukrainian), and says he lived there until the war. Early in the passage he also comments on American aid to Jews after the war.

Dof says he worked here after the war and stayed beside his ill mother for years; he is called a devoted son. He and Kerler exchange names, and Kerler gives his card and says he lives in America. Dof explains that his name is Yitshak Dof, not Imre (the Hungarian form), and mentions his mother's brother Bernstein in America, a confectioner. He then recalls the Purim play only dimly and says his wife also speaks some Yiddish.

Rezmovits speaks about Jewish collaboration during the Holocaust, mentioning Polish Jewish informers and the Hungarian Rezső Kasztner. He criticizes Kasztner's dealings with the SS (Eichmann, Kurt Becher) and the rescue train to Switzerland. He also recalls the controversy over Kasztner in Israel, and promises Kerler a book.

Asked by Kerler about Yiddish theater in Debrecen, Rezmovits says only the Bucharest Yiddish theater came after the war. He also says Hungarian Jews had difficulty understanding Yiddish dialect. He then addresses Hungarian Jews' negative attitude toward Polish Jews, and being mocked in Israel for his Hungarian accent.

Kerler opens with the date and thanks the people who helped the expedition, then asks Rezmovits to sing. Rezmovits, with another person joining in, sings a humorous song about a rebbe, the rebbetsin and the hasidim. Asked when the song was sung, he says he heard it in Israel and brought it back to Hungary, and tells how Polish friends there found he knew Yiddish.

Herbst describes his return in 1945: by lorry from Mauthausen to Melk, then on foot with a horse and wagon in the Russian zone toward Bratislava, then by train to Hungary. The Joint helped him in Budapest, where he went straight to hospital, and he was then sent to Debrecen, where the Joint supported the Jews with clothes and food. He later went back to a Budapest hospital and a sanatorium and began to learn a trade.

Herbst and Kerler talk about memory and lost phones. They then discuss how Herbst can get a copy of the recording and about relatives abroad. Herbst recites a series of prayer or psalm passages and says he reads the day's psalms daily. Herbst asks Kerler about his family; Kerler has a wife and two children of seventeen and fifteen.

Doman says that during holidays at home he sometimes spoke Yiddish with his father, while his mother spoke only Hungarian. He was an only child. Kerler talks about his own family, who were born in Moscow and left in 1971, and about relatives he lived with in Jerusalem.

Doman talks about teaching Talmud at the Budapest rabbinical seminary in the 1970s–80s, with students from abroad and from Hungary, taught in Hungarian and English. He says a seminary head named Scheiber (Adolf Scheiber?) knew no Yiddish. S2 tells an anecdote from Doman's book about someone praying in a different tradition, and they discuss the strictness of Hungarian yeshivas, including expulsion for reading Hungarian books. They also discuss the plan for a Jewish university and Kerler's summers in Jerusalem. Doman mentions siblings or relatives living in Israel.

Doman says he was in a labor camp. After liberation he began university studies in parallel with the rabbinical seminary. He says the observant Jews who spoke Yiddish in Budapest had mostly left for America, Israel and Australia. Kerler asks for a story about the old yeshivas, and Doman says he has too many to choose from.

Gotlieb and Kerler discuss the idea of founding a school for learning Yiddish in Budapest, and Kerler's wish to come and teach. They talk about Yiddish study at the university and among Lubavitch Hasidim. Gotlieb recalls a young man in Israel who would not or could not answer her in Yiddish.

Blobshteyn names the one yeshiva of Chaim Elazar (Spira) in Mukacheve, and bigger cheders, talmud torahs and a beis medrash, noting his late brother Wolf studied. He recalls the rebbe's son's wedding, when gendarmes beat him with rubber truncheons as he tried to run past. Kerler and he discuss Spira's family, including a daughter's daughter born on a ship, and grandchildren in Brooklyn and Williamsburg.

Blobshteyn talks about working as a kosher butcher after the war. He bought meat from a slaughterhouse chief who paid in a share, and he split it with two partners. He recalls another Jew who bought a calf and brought a shoykhet, was caught and sentenced to prison, and speaks about a Jewish family who lived opposite and later emigrated to Los Angeles.

Blobshteyn talks about his sister's husband, a famous wedding jester (badkhn) from Munkács who worked across America, his sister Feyge (Fayga) in Brooklyn, and her age and return home from the camp. He shows a family photograph with her sons and son-in-law. He tells about his own descendants, including a great-grandson who is seriously ill, and a visit to find a mother's gravestone near Solotvina.

Kerler asks Blobshteyn terminology questions, such as the plural of rabbi and rebbetsin, and forms of address for a rabbi. They also discuss 'Litvak', and Blobshteyn tells a story about travelling to America, where he met a Hungarian-speaking Jew in a restaurant and discussed food. It ends with food and drink words.

Smajovics answers questions about Hanukkah and Purim food. He says fried doughnuts were not a Hanukkah custom at home, though his mother baked at home, and he first met them on arrival in Israel in the 1980s. He talks about latkes and Passover foods. For Purim he describes baked shalakhmones sent to the poor and acquaintances, and children's pastries. He mentions a man named Leizerovich, born in Erdőd (?) in Transylvania, who still lives in Budapest.

Asked about the best time of his life, Smajovics says he became a driver after returning from prison (his own word), then a locksmith and truck driver. After moving to Budapest, he continued working as a pipe fitter with a master after retirement for six and a half years. He speaks about his two daughters, one in Budapest and one in America, and about his son-in-law, a businessman in the U.S. with homes in Queens and Miami.

Herbst recites a prayer, then speaks about the services in Linz, Austria, where he went to pray. He mentions the lack of young men there for a minyan, the people who attended, and the non-Jews who came to listen and pray. He says the recognition he received there meant more to him than other honors.

Walking to and around the synagogue, the group talks with Kerler about the Jewish community of Debrecen. They discuss how many Jews returned after the war, how many later emigrated, and when services in the synagogue stopped. They also touch on the building's history, prewar prayer rooms, a donor from America, and the arrival of Russian soldiers after the war. Much of the talk is in Hungarian, and the details are unclear.

Samadi talks about meeting elderly Yiddish speakers in Florida and how they spoke Yiddish while their children spoke English. He continues with his education, studying in a yeshiva in Tiszaeszlár for four or five terms after the talmud torah. He then trained as a baker and as a locksmith, and later worked as a merchant and in a sanatorium (?).

Stern talks in Hungarian, with some Yiddish interpreting, about Jewish life today. She keeps kosher with the help of a woman who shops with her, and the meat comes from Budapest. One of her sons lives in Israel, where the household is kosher, and her daughter lives in Debrecen, where it is not. The other speaker asks questions about her children and where they live.

Kerler asks what her parents called her in Yiddish and who her grandfather was. Stern says in Hungarian that she had no trade and, after moving to Debrecen, worked in a cooperative making plastic children's toys. The conversation also covers the words for city and village, an American Yiddish speaker, and her husband's job as chief bookkeeper on a state farm. She says they wanted to emigrate but were refused. The tape ends with some talk about travelling on to Oradea and about a woman from Mukachevo who lives in the building.

Galambos and Kerler discuss belief in God after the Holocaust. Galambos mentions prayers said by women, including the prayer to the God of Abraham at the end of the Sabbath, and Psalms. Kerler asks about the future of the Jewish people and whether he has relatives in Israel. Galambos answers about the Land of Israel and a story about Moses and the sea.

Galambos and Kerler talk about stale noodles, then about America and Canada, democracy and Israel, and how the United States has helped Israel. They go on to talk about the Jews of Debrecen, Romania, and Galambos's learning of Hungarian. Galambos says he spoke only Hungarian at school and Yiddish at cheder.

Dzigifker describes her father's wealthy Goldenfeld-related family, with a distillery, mill and estate, and her father's trading business. She says robbers' gangs threatened Jews in the district, and her father was warned that his name was on a list, so the family left for Mărculești. She tells of the father's illness, a treatment in Czernowitz, and his contribution to the first kibbutz in Israel, which put him in the Golden Book. Mundrian adds memories of a 1930s antisemitic scare and of the family later living in Căprești.

Boltykh talks about his elderly mother's present illness and about a relative from America who wrote down the family tree and her whole story in Yiddish. He offers to send Kerler the manuscript. He also complains that life today is not good and everything is expensive.

Boltykh says his mother attended a Romanian school but could pray in Yiddish from the siddur. Recalling her stories, he describes Jewish Briceni with many tradesmen's clubs and a Jewish hospital where the wealthy paid for the poor. A relative of hers crossed the border illegally to Palestine (?) and later lived near Washington. He also mentions robbers who attacked the rich before the war and the lack of rights for Jews afterwards.

The Katerbergs talk about contemporary life: they speak Yiddish together only a little, do not hear Yiddish broadcasts, and there are few Jews in Briceni. They say they have no contact with former residents, apart from a quarrel with a relative in Israel. Kerler and Lemster thank them and end the interview.

Goldberg describes Sabbath table customs with kiddush and zemirot, and says prewar Jewish trades were mainly tailors and shoemakers. She says that now many people want to be Jews in order to emigrate to Israel or Germany. Questions follow on a tale of Hershele Ostropolier, the phrase "over there crazy" about a nearby town, and annual cemetery visits.

Roif speaks about Yiddish writers who visited or came from the area: Yekhiel Shraybman, Yankl Yakir, who was arrested after the war in the campaign against Jewish writers, and Vaysman. His father subscribed to Sovetish Heymland. He describes Yakir's son visiting his kolkhoz, knowing Vaysman in Israel, and the shoykhet Ari Meir.

Roif answers Kerler's questions about prewar books and Jewish life in Duruitoarea, saying there were few religious books and no library before or after the war. He recalls Hasidim visiting the villages and his father's visit to the Ștefănești rebbe when his mother was gravely ill. The family doctor, also from Ștefănești, had given up on her; the rebbe summoned him and asked him questions, and she recovered and lived to ninety. Roif also mentions his father's work for the landowner Burski (?) before his emigration to America.

Lemster and Kerler ask about words, such as a measure, a coin name and mazl, before the talk turns to Passover before the war: storing and kashering vessels, and an attic chest. Lemster recalls his grandmother dyeing wool to fund his bar mitzvah. Zelda and Lemster then sort out relatives in Edineț, including a sexton and tailor, Abraham Gendelman, Malke, Shlomo and Grisha, some now in Israel.

Roif and Zelda are teased by Lemster about how they met and why she chose him; Roif had served five years in the fleet. They go on to acquaintances and relatives, including people in Israel, a Rîșcani book in Yiddish by someone named Yozik (?) and a relative who left as a halutz in the 1930s. At the end Lemster and Kerler elicit a word of Moldovan origin (written as skapet) for something dropped or lost.

Farber describes his mother as a Jewish housewife who baked, cooked, sewed and sang, with a cheerful home. He says his brother has lived in Israel for about fifteen years (the transcript is unclear whether a nephew is meant) and that he lacks people to speak Yiddish with. He sings Yiddish songs at non-Jewish weddings. His father worked as a clerk until 1940 and then went to the mines.

In answer to questions Farber confirms that Vertiujeni had a rabbi before the war. He says a relative, his father's brother Hersh, worked at a factory in Iași, Romania. The talk turns to his father and plans to see him, and a trip to Israel in May.

Farber speaks about performing before German audiences who took a keen interest in Yiddish songs. He says he was asked in Israel why he sings in Yiddish rather than Hebrew. The interviewers urge him to record songs, and Farber says he sees his as the last generation to know Yiddish.

Shpitalnik says her father died young in Chișinău. She gives her views on whether Jews will remain in Chișinău, noting that mainly old people are left and some return from abroad. She tells of a young Yiddish singer whose parents opened a restaurant, and describes her monthly Yiddish radio program about Jewish personalities and anniversaries.

Lipovetskiy says he became a physical-education teacher after the war. He talks about prayer, noting that he attends the synagogue daily, that few Jews come, and about his health. He mentions that his children live in Israel, his pension, and the cost of housing and heating today.

Roif tells how a young female cousin, a daughter of her father's sibling (an uncle in America), was taken to Romania by the Red Cross in the war. The girl went despite the family's reluctance, and the family later wrote to Romania and to a television search programme without answer. Katz asks for names, her birth year, the girl's father in America and an address, so that an appeal can be placed.

Roif and Katz continue about the missing cousin, who was apparently born in Brichevo (?), Moldova. She was taken out of a camp by the Red Cross, probably in 1943, to Romania. Roif says the girl's father in America wrote asking about his wife, and says Russian-sunk ships carried other children away. Katz promises to place an announcement and asks about ghetto songs.

Sherman answers questions about non-Jews in the Telenești fire brigade (there was no organized brigade) and about prewar youth movements. Gordonia met in a hall for dances and heard speeches from visiting pioneers (chalutzim) from Palestine, and some friends emigrated. He also tells of clandestine communist literature smuggled in from Bucharest, in Yiddish translations, and of reading Freud.

Abelsky describes underground Chabad yeshivas in the Soviet Union, where he studied in Moscow before the war, with hundreds of students. He speaks of the wartime flight to Uzbekistan and studying in Samarkand, and of the postwar escape from Russia in 1946. He explains how a committee funded and forged papers to get Jews out via Lemberg and Chernivtsi, and mentions people who were caught, including a Matskin (?). He ends with a letter exchange with a Chabad contact abroad.

Asked by Kerler about life for Jews in Chișinău, Abelsky describes hardship: old people with tiny pensions, the young leaving for America, and elderly parents left behind. He criticizes wealthy Jewish businessmen who give little to charity and need to be educated, and talks with Kerler about the role of the Joint and of Jewish aid organizations and the difficulties he meets from the authorities.

Abelsky explains how he came to Chișinău from Moscow at the start of perestroika. An American Chabad organization wanted emissaries in Moscow and Chișinău, and he was encouraged to go to Chișinău, where nobody was active. Lemster remarks that he was in Moscow at the same time, and Kerler then turns to the old Chabad traditions about the Alter Rebbe and Napoleon.

Abelsky tells a Hasidic story about a Hasid of a rebbe who visited him in a short jacket, and names the man from whom he heard the stories (name uncertain). Lemster asks about Hasidic songs on Moldovan and Romanian motifs, and Kerler and Abelsky discuss Hasidic adoption of melodies. Abelsky says he was in Romania in 1948, just after the war, where many refugee Jews lived and few remain now. They also talk about a Chabad emissary in Iași or Bucharest.

Goldman says he still prays and goes to synagogue on Sabbath, but has been ill and not gone for a month. He recalls little of his bar mitzvah or prayers. He says some non-Jews near him spoke Yiddish, as traders buying goods. He recalls Gordonia in Ialoveni, with dancing, and says it had about twenty-five members, boys and girls together. Few made aliyah, perhaps two or three, one named Shaykele Bikhman (?). He cannot recall its leaders.

Asked about a Yiddish library, Goldman says there was one in another town and mentions relatives there, including his father's sister. He cannot recall what he read, whether Yiddish newspapers came, or Yiddish theatre, though he says there was one Yiddish book at home. Asked about the war years, he mentions two Jews with him, one named Shaykele Bikhman (?), who is now in Israel and unwell. The passage breaks off with Goldman asking to finish.

Goldman describes Sabbath in her parents' home: cholent, no fire lit, candle-blessing, and how observance and synagogue-going became forbidden under the Soviets. She mentions the synagogue and a rabbi, and a woman colleague at the printing house who emigrated to Israel with her journalist husband.

A short elicitation: Manevich is asked how to say a given Yiddish sentence, and she says she may forget Yiddish for lack of Jewish company. Kerler asks whether she knows the rabbi's wife and the rabbi (Rabbi Zalman) of the synagogue in Chișinău. Asked about Birobidzhan, she recounts that people went to Israel and returned to Birobidzhan. She says her sister lives there. She then comments on conflicts in Israel and Egypt and on violence everywhere, as she sees it on television.

Rojtman speaks with distress about travelling to Odessa and Russia, saying the city has changed and its market is gone. She talks about fear of travel today and about antisemitism, including the case of an acquaintance, a Russian woman married to a Jew from Donetsk, and a Jewish-looking man from Leningrad. She also mentions a granddaughter's trip from Israel to Petersburg.

Yaruskaya says she trained as a motor mechanic and, after the children were small, worked for thirty-six years as a bus conductor. She talks about visiting the cemetery where her mother, husband, sister and father are buried and what she says there. She speaks of her sons and grandchildren, and the son from America who phones and visits.

Kerler and Lemster settle in at the start, and Shmid is asked in which American city her brother lived (New York). She names him as Moshe Glikman (?) and mentions his two sons. Kerler then announces the date and place of the interview as the last of the expedition.

Shmid recalls childhood games with little stones and says her mother Faige, who came from Chișinău and had finished gymnasium, sang well, although she cannot recall the songs. She says her parents met at a wedding. She speaks of her sisters' marriages and of her brothers: David worked in the village and Yisroel went to the daughter in America, where he died.

Leibelman talks about her life today: she is old and ill and cares for three people with little help. She mentions a brother in Israel with four sons and a local official unfriendly to Jews. Lemster then asks about Jewish observance during the war.

Kleyman talks about hardship today: the small quarterly payment from Germany that Jewish survivors receive, her expenses for soap, utilities and gas, and aging acquaintances who are sick or paralysed. She complains that non-ghetto survivors get nothing and contrasts Germany's treatment of Jews with the poverty here. Her son went to Germany six years ago and is an immigrant there. Katz questions her about the sums.

Akkerman recounts that her father's brother, who had been wealthy in Brazil, visited the Ștefănești rebbe and died a few weeks after the visit. Kerler asks about the evil eye, a dybbuk and a golem, and she knows only the golem. She answers questions about prewar clubs and the Jewish library, and talks about the postwar years, her hard work and her sons' education.

Mundrian answers Lemster's questions about her mother's stories of Zionist pioneers (chalutzim) and her grandmother's friends who left. She mentions relatives who went to Argentina, and a relative now in Israel. She tells of her own wedding and a Jewish marriage contract and chuppah done discreetly in the Soviet period. She says her mother loved Sholem Aleichem and that Jewish books were lost in the evacuation. Lemster asks about Jewish weddings in Susleny, where the songs were mostly Russian.

Grinshpun remembers her father praying and singing and making the seder. She recalls her mother's tkhines, and the shroud he left for burial. She says she has lived in Peresecina since 1962, where her son was born. She tells of a relative returning from Argentina and her mother-in-law's family.

Grinshpun speaks about life today and her mother's tkhines. Kerler says he is leaving on the eleventh and lives in Bloomington, and she asks about Jews in America. She says she travelled little, only to Romania, and cannot afford Israel; relatives abroad help her and write letters.

Sharhorodskij answers Kerler's questions on the number of Jews today in Israel, America and Moldova (a few towns, with only a few thousand left). After the formal introduction he gives personal data: born in Rîbniţa, as were his grandfather, grandmother and father. He names his parents and grandparents, with his maternal grandparents living in Tiraspol. He tells of his brother Shmilik, who died of scarlet fever in 1937, his sister who died in 1958, and his eldest brother Moshe, wounded in the war and dead in 1944.

Sharhorodskij speaks of his sister Frume, who finished school in 1941, studied law after the war, worked as a notary, married in 1958 and died of tuberculosis. Her daughter lives in Israel with her family. Kerler asks about the neighbor Shepsl who served the Germans. Sharhorodskij also describes his parents' observance: his mother's Friday candles, his father's prayer shawl worn in the kitchen after the war, and the seder.

Sharhorodskij recalls that Jewish children all came to school on Yom Kippur, and that matzo was baked at home. He talks about Rabbi Chaim Zanvl, a learned man who studied in a Romanian yeshiva and acted as shochet after the war, and about his hidden prayers in the Rîbniţa ghetto. He tells of his departure for Israel (?) and then America, his winter ritual immersion, his illness and death at about ninety-five, and how others saw him as a fanatic.

Sharhorodskij says he cannot recall the rebbe's melodies. He asks about Kerler's residence and discusses America and politics, comparing the American slogan to the German one. He says the Jewish situation in Moldova is painful because few Jews remain. He says that belief in liberation helped him survive the ghetto, and describes working in a German hospital, where he met a Hamburg field-feldwebel who read the paper and said Germany had lost after Stalingrad. A political argument with Kerler follows over fascists in Russia and democracy.

The camera records photographs while Sharhorodskij identifies a picture of himself after the war and a portrait of a rebbe. He then sends a message to Jews in Moldova, Israel and America: stay Jewish, help one another, be good to non-Jews, avoid war, and support Israel. He thanks the Joint for its help and ends with greetings to the interviewers' families.

Plotnik discusses Dumbraveni, which she says had around four hundred houses (?). Hired labourers from the villages worked the family's land. She recalls neighbors in the Zionist halutz movement and how some of them went to Palestine, and Lemster and Kerler ask about the halutzim and communists. She says her father made wine from his vineyard to sell at his inn, where people sang Romanian and Yiddish songs.

Milevskaya describes the local Jewish community: about 120 people receive assistance, of whom about 50 are Jews. Some stay for reasons of health or because their children live nearby, and mixed marriages are common. She mentions her daughter in Odesa, her son's three children in Israel, and her grandchildren's army service. Kerler then asks if she remembers a story or song from her grandmother.

Milevskaya recalls the war: the family fled Pervomaysk by freight car as the poultry plant arranged, crossing toward Golta amid German bombing, and the Germans took the town soon after. They returned in 1944, her mother collecting fragments of shell around the house. Her father returned from the front in autumn 1945, having reached Berlin, and told of Malaya Zemlya and Buchenwald. She also mentions her mother's work as a German interpreter, her sister's later move to Israel, and her son's emigration in 1991.

Milevskaya talks about elderly community members, many unable to speak Yiddish, and about young people having left for America and Israel. She describes former ghetto prisoners, including Ida Lazarevna (recently buried) and a woman held in the Savran camp under Romanian rule, and Pogrebinsky's family who hid in a tree and now live in Germany. The remaining speech covers the town's population and the geography of Pervomaysk, Golta, Bohopil and Olviopol, and the beer factory is mentioned. Arrangements for a visit to Sofia Lvovna follow.

Luminskaia describes what her mother cooked for holidays, including gefilte fish and a cholent baked in a Russian oven. She recalls the local ritual slaughterer, who was still active in the late 1920s. She mentions her grandfather's sons who went to America.

Asked about his childhood, Butorski recalls the stove and hearth where his mother prepared the meal and the table, and her blessing of candles. He remembers his father going to synagogue on holidays and waiting to be last when donations were made. He attended Romanian school for four years, with no Yiddish teaching. At home a teacher, not called a rebbe or melamed, taught him and his brother a little Yiddish. He mentions that he later spent nine years in Israel.

Butorski speaks of his present life, living alone and with two sons abroad. Lemster asks about the meaning of several Yiddish terms, such as dybbuk, golem, 'a good Jew', Litvak and Polish Jews. Butorski mentions his father's grave and relatives in Poland and America. He also says he now speaks Yiddish at home and in a small group of ten people, and that he spoke only Yiddish with his family earlier.

Moisei explains how he met his wife through a relative of hers, and why they settled in Bender: her friends had moved there after the evacuation, then left for Israel. He says he has lived in Bender for eighty-three years (?), apparently a slip for his age.

Moisei gives closing good wishes for peace in Israel, America and Moldova, and asks that greetings be passed to Bessarabian Jews around the world. Kerler thanks the couple and the interview ends.

Kerler asks David for a closing message about remembering the Jews of Botoșani. David speaks of the many intellectual Jews who left for Israel and of those who remain keeping up Jewishness as far as they can. He wishes all Jews health and unity, and Kerler ends with Amen.

Finkel says that as the eldest child she was not allowed to play with others and had to work. She mentions a brother, Sala Grinberg, who studied with rabbis, was sent to Siberia in the war and drowned there, though the account is garbled and mixed with Romanian. She also mentions a younger sister, Miriam, who lives in Petah Tikva and whom she has visited. Of three children, two sisters remain.

Finkel says the Jews of Sulita went to Israel and no one lives there now. She describes visiting the Jewish cemetery about two years earlier with the president of the community and her son. It is fenced with many stones and neglected. She asks who would work there. Lemster asks for the Yiddish word for the fence, and she says her father is in Israel.

Brief says that after the war Jews who came from the camp had to leave Romania, and that in 1945 one could still go. He says he has a good memory. Kerler asks when his father was born and then turns to his Chernivtsi childhood.

Brief recites a song about an orphan growing up and about the last dance. Kerler asks about a song on paper children. Brief then complains about the Joint's leadership and money in Romania. Lemster returns to Brief's youth, they discuss photographs and Lemster's origins, and Brief mentions cousins in Israel.

A long talk in Yiddish, apparently with a local man (probably Kurtsberg), about the small Jewish community of Siret. Only a dozen Jews are left, there is no minyan, and the speaker is one of the few who speak Yiddish. He tells of a man whose father died in Bershad and who became a president in Nazareth after the departures for Israel in the late 1940s. He also tells of a boy deported with his grandmother to Ukraine in the Transnistria deportations, and of a Rădăuți widow who married quickly to avoid being taken. Interleaved are chat about a bottle and about smoking.

Hershkovich tells of a family from America who came about three years earlier to find their roots in his native village, and how he helped them with a translator in finding graves. He recounts the story of the Rozman family and their sons who emigrated. They speak about the term for relatives and Yad Vashem, and Kerler asks whether there were other wedding jesters in the region.

Hershkovich shows photographs of his family, including a grandson's bar mitzvah in Israel, a brother-in-law buried in Israel and his sister's grave in Cluj. Kerler asks about Jewish weddings and famous cantors visiting Dej. Hershkovich names some cantors, including Rosenblatt. The conversation turns to Kerler's own background, his documentation of Yiddish, and Litvaks and the Vilna Gaon.

Kraus describes the postwar years: most young people left for kibbutz or Israel, he spent a year in a kibbutz, and he stayed in Romania. His sister lives in Israel. He married in 1955 and has two daughters, an engineer and a doctor. He says his wife speaks Yiddish only weakly. He then discusses what is Yiddish and what is German, calling Yiddish a jargon, and Hebrew.

Freundlich recalls a visiting rabbi who ate nothing in a Jewish home. She says she stayed at home with her children while her husband worked and shows photographs of her children and a Torah dedication in Canada. She names her grandfathers, a wine merchant and a grain merchant from Nirmada, and describes the wealth and death of her maternal grandparents. She also says she grew up with several siblings.

Freundlich talks about her family and life today. Her children and grandchildren keep in touch, and she mentions relatives in Florida, Flushing and California. Her limited eyesight means she listens to the radio. She recalls conditions of Jewish life in the postwar years and her uncle who was a bank director.

Hershkovich describes Jewish life after the war: a few years of communal life, then Jews leaving as the communists took over business, and almost no Jews left in Cluj. He tells of his own difficulties in recent years and of requests for help to the community. He moved to Cluj in 1969 (?) and worked in the tax service, and he describes synagogues, weddings, a wedding rhymer, and Jewish and non-Jewish musicians.

Asked what she remembers of childhood in Satu Mare, Freundlich describes a strictly observant home with honest Sabbath keeping and simple parents. She tells of her parents' and siblings' deportation, a married sister deported with her husband and three children, and her youngest sister now seriously ill in a hospital in the United States (Florida/New York).

Freundlich mentions a rabbi (Schonfeld) who left Cluj in 1958 and how her own family applied to emigrate and was harassed. She talks about her children: a son and a daughter in Canada and Israel, a grandson, and a daughter who is a piano teacher and a leader of the Jewish community. She speaks of her husband's grave, a memorial in Satu Mare for her parents and sister, and her father's saying on keeping a Jewish name.

Freundlich says she visited Auschwitz in 1969. At Kerler's request a Yiddish travel song about taking food for a journey is sung, apparently by another woman. Freundlich then speaks, partly in Hungarian, about Satmar, a mass killing and burial in a pit, and a history professor in Jerusalem originally from Satmar whose father was a shochet.

Kerler asks about Sabbath songs (zemires); Grunfeld recalls his grandfather at the Friday-evening table and singing Eshes Khayil and Sholem Aleykhem. They then discuss matchmaking and an observant man who ate only kosher food, died in Cluj, and was buried in Israel. They also describe religious life since the 1980s–90s.

Miller tells how Rabbi Halberstam of Cluj, deported to Auschwitz, was freed by the Americans and, in his account, flown to America by Eisenhower. He tells of Halberstam's later life, including his money going to Netanya to build a yeshiva, synagogue and hospital. He then describes how in 1985 or 1986 (as heard) workers in Cluj found boxes of ritual objects and papers from his house on Dezsma street, and the dispute over them between Cluj, Bucharest and Netanya.

Mentions summer visitors who speak Yiddish, many from Israel, and phone arrangements. Then recalls prewar business: a handshake sealed a deal, and a dispute went to a rabbi or dayan. A story about his mother and a commercial matter begins.

Shaia says he went to the Romanian school until the tenth class and then learned to make hats, becoming a hat-maker and section head. He worked through the communist period. He has two sons. One lives in Iași and has two daughters. The other lives in Israel and married a Christian doctor, who faced difficulties over recognition of her medical credentials, and both returned to Romania. The passage ends with Lemster's question about the word dybbuk.

Isidor tells of Jewish life after the war: after deportation about three thousand Jews remained, many emigrated to Israel in the 1950s–60s, and there were two shuls after the war. He describes a planned museum in the synagogue about the Jews of northern Moldavia, funded by the federation. In the closing minutes he starts to talk about his childhood and the interview proceeds at his home with an offer of cognac.

Grimberg says she was born, studied and worked in Dorohoi, and she trained as a teacher at a Romanian pedagogical school. She attended the Jewish school for the first two classes before being sent to Transnistria; no Jewish school existed after her return. She remembers a little Hebrew and has two sisters in Israel, with whom she speaks by phone.

Grimberg says her grandfather, a ritual slaughterer, was consulted in the town as an authority and wise man. She is asked whether her family were Ştefăneşti Hasidim, and she recalls visiting the rebbe's yortsayt and his grave, and throwing in notes (kvitlekh) written in Yiddish with Romanian letters. Kerler asks in which year the remains were taken to Israel.

Hirsch discusses antisemitism under communism and today, calling it a paradox that it exists where almost no Jews remain. He says his son lives in Israel, apparently since 1987. He explains that his mother tongue was Hungarian and Yiddish was also spoken at home, and that the town was split between Hungarian and Romanian speakers. He studied in cheder in Yiddish and recalls Jews from the villages being concentrated in a ghetto in Luduș.

Hirsch talks about the years after the war: Jews returning to Luduș and settling in Turda, Cluj and elsewhere, and the 23 August 1944 armistice. He recalls that many Jews emigrated to Israel and that his parents left in 1960, and talks about Romania being neither communist nor capitalist, with poor people and the postwar growth of industry. Kerler then asks about his family's religiosity, and Hirsch answers that his father was religious but modern, not Hasidic.

Chajim talks about Purim and its customs, mentioning gifts, and says he spoke with an old Jew in Bat Yam over 100 years old. He tells of his youth, when he played music and liked girls, and says he would not marry a rich girl.

Chajim begins with a remark about a Jewish woman married to a non-Jew, then asks whether a car has come for him. Lemster says it has. Chajim mentions Jews he knew who went to America, and an American Jew who used to visit every year but now stays away. He mentions a Hanukkah lamp said to be two hundred years old.

Chajim says he refuses to sell the Hanukkah lamp to an American offering money, because he used it in Edineț. He describes his well-furnished house with two rooms. He repeats that he is a man of over a hundred, and Kerler thanks him at the end.

Finkelshteyn says his father read and wrote Yiddish, and received Yiddish periodicals from his brother in America, reading them aloud in the courtyard in summer. He describes his father's advice to the children about conduct, drinking and thinking before acting. He adds that he himself was known in Iași as an honest carpenter whom people trusted with the keys to their houses.

Finkelshteyn speaks about the Yiddish theater in Iași, the first Yiddish theater in Romania, and how children helped as extras and with scenery. He mentions touring artists, a musician family named Sigali (?), and plays on the theme of emigrants' families. He says Yiddish films never reached Romania except one, "A brivele der mamen", which people fought to get in to see. He notes that the theater building is gone, and that a monument now stands at its site.

Finkelshteyn speaks about his family: an uncle in America, Aunt Sara (?), sent food parcels soon after the war, and the father wrote to his brother in thanks. The uncle replied that American Jews owe help to European Jews because of Hitler.

Davidovich talks about his mother's father, the melamed Meir Hersh Shekhter (name as heard), and his wife Golda. The grandfather taught small children and older boys Hebrew, and gave lessons in Latin and Greek to students preparing for medical studies. He describes how the old people left behind in Siret at the deportation, eight in all, some blind, were murdered by legionnaires, beheaded and buried in sand. He also tells of his other grandfather, who visited a daughter in America in the 1930s and came back because he could not keep kosher there, and who died in a trench on the march. A large monument now stands in the Siret cemetery.

Shvartz says he belonged to the Zionist youth organization Gordonia, where young people put on entertainments in the evenings. He says he could not attend every day because he worked, including on Sabbath. He then mentions a postwar organization, the Jewish Democratic Committee, which opposed emigration to Israel.

Shvartz says Yiddish was spoken mainly at the community and the synagogue. He describes the Iași synagogue, now with few Jews because most left for Israel. He says he goes to synagogue and lives next to it; he worked in a factory with a good income.

Chirilau gives her mother's name as Lena and says she had one sister. She talks about the neighbouring family's children, one of whom died and another who lives in Israel and visits her yearly, and Kerler offers to find his phone number. Asked about weddings, she describes Jewish weddings with a buffet, dancing and the kolomeyke dance, in contrast to Christian ones.

Chirilau describes today's Mihăileni: few Jewish families remain, most people came from villages, and the town was once fine. Kerler shows her the photographs and addresses that he sent. They talk about a man from Chicago who wrote about her, about a very old émigré, and about her pension in old and new lei. Kerler then asks about Purim plays in the Carpathians.

Asked what should be remembered, Chirilau recalls playing with other children and the Jews coming back from Transnistria, ragged and barefoot, which she remembers vividly. She says the Romanians helped with whatever they had. She says the Jews left for Israel before and after the war, and Lemster ends the interview.

Leichtner says all the Jews in the village had a livelihood: tailors, carpenters, shoemakers. He then names his siblings: three sisters who did not return, including an eldest who was married with three children, and brothers in America and Israel (Bnei Brak). The transcript is unclear on which brother was killed. He explains that names were given after relatives. A grandson filming and his daughter are mentioned, and his first wife Miriam died of cancer. The passage ends with a question about the cheder teacher.

Leichtner says only a dozen or fifteen Jewish children and young people were in the town after the war, and they soon left for Israel and America. The parents, brothers and sisters did not come back, apart from his father, who returned and lived on for some years (the year of his death is unclear in the transcript). The synagogue building was sold and he discusses whether the building still stands.

Macarie says she cooks Romanian, Hungarian and Jewish food today, buying kosher meat. After the camp she returned home and married; her second husband has died. Her son is a school director with a good wife, and a daughter married a Jew from Johannesburg (?). She had no children with the second husband. Lemster asks about her first Jewish wedding.

Freundlich speaks about his siblings: of seven brothers and sisters five survived, an elder brother died in Israel and a sister in Argentina. Kerler asks about relatives, including a woman in Cluj. Freundlich talks about her family, children in Canada, and a relative's son whose fingers were injured. He mentions a relative named Lustig, a committed Communist.

Answering Kerler, Mezei talks about Passover in her prewar home: matzo dishes, borscht made by her grandmother, and whether matzo was soaked. She mentions her uncle and a relative who was a Vizhnitz Hasid, and says that her father studied textiles in Budapest and served as a Hungarian soldier in the First World War. She then shows photographs of her father, her school days, her sisters and relatives who died at Auschwitz or live abroad.

Sings the song about how what was is gone, with Kerler asking about the refrain's wording. She recalls the summer theater in Sighet, the Hungarian and Yiddish actors Strömer and his wife, and an actress who sang there. She sings a song that a Jewish girl needs a Jewish boy, tied to a woman who married a Romanian and later died in Auschwitz. She mentions her friends' fates after the war, including those who went to Israel, and the judge husband of the woman.

Lemster and Kerler ask how Purim was celebrated in Fălticeni. Grinberg talks about masked children and food, including sending gifts. She says only poor children dressed up and went from house to house to perform. She recalls that the poor were later sent to Eretz Yisrael.

Cojocaru says she was in Transnistria (Mohyliv). She does not remember her grandparents, and her mother was also from Dorohoi. Kerler explains the project's aims. She tells of three children in her father's household, a brother Dudl and sister Haya, both in Israel. Her two children live in Botoșani. She also notes that her grandchild and son speak little Yiddish and mostly Romanian.

Cojocaru says she married in Dorohoi in a Jewish ceremony, with a rabbi brought in from elsewhere for the chuppah. She explains why no one goes to the synagogue now and that the building still stands but is damaged. She recalls the circumcision of her son, with a Jew brought from elsewhere. She discusses a man whose son broadcasts in Yiddish on Israeli radio.

Marcus says he attended a Romanian school in Săveni. He estimates the number of Jews in the town before and after the war, and says his Jewish childhood friends spoke Yiddish and have all gone to Israel. He recalls studying with a private Hebrew teacher for several years at home, for two hours a day, and that he once could read Yiddish. He also says touring theater groups used to come from Bucharest.

Salamon discusses who counts as Jewish in the small present-day community, the difficulty of forming a minyan and why Hasidim do not use the synagogue. She recalls the prewar rabbi Dantziger, the small prayer houses with cheder, and the old synagogue with its mikveh, which was demolished after the war. She says the community brought in a cantor for the holidays and her father would finish praying quickly to hear him. She also describes why Jews emigrated and her visit to Canada, where the children knew little Yiddish.

Answering Lemster's questions, Kurtsberg discusses non-Jews who spoke Yiddish and says he has not heard of converts. He names the Zionist organizations in Siret (Yikhud, Maccabi) and the Jewish Democratic Committee through which people registered for emigration to Palestine. He also answers questions about a Yiddish library, newspapers, sports clubs and Yiddish theater performances in Siret.

Mehler describes Jewish life after her arrival in Vatra Dornei, mostly in Romanian. The Jews of the Bukovina region were deported to Transnistria in 1941. The rich sometimes bought themselves out, and one family avoided deportation by faking illness. After the war many returned to find nothing and emigrated in a mass departure, up to about 1961. She also talks about prewar Jewish trades and the good relations before Antonescu, and about the Romanian Jewish leadership. The passage ends on Ştefăneşti.

Galambos shows a book in English about Vaja, given to him by the grandson of a Jew from Canada. Kerler says they will obtain a copy, and the book's publisher and Weinberger from Munkács are mentioned. A Russian term for a labor battalion comes up. Galambos then repeats the yeshiva-student song with Kerler, who asks about its grammar.

Kerler notes swastikas carved on the wooden doors of the synagogue being excavated, and Steiner speaks about the cemetery. Gravestones were toppled some years ago and money was raised to repair it, and he describes the repair ceremony and good relations with local priests. He tells of a ten-day trip of priests to Israel, including Yad Vashem, and of the support of Rabbi Sher Yashuv Cohen. He says his family lives in Israel, and there is talk of phoning a man for the interviewers, and of plans to travel to Prešov and see the museum and synagogue from outside. He also discusses contemporary relations with the authorities and Jewish communities. He explains a memorial of the deportation route, with names of Košice Jews deported toward Auschwitz read at a ceremony. At the end he tells a cheder joke and there are languages questions, and car-travel talk partly in Hungarian.

Klimenko says she was brought to Balta as a small child. Her father worked at the pig-processing plant (?) and her mother was a housewife; their names are given. She cannot read or write and worked for twenty-eight years as a cleaner who heated stoves. Questions turn to the Jewish school and synagogue in town, and she mentions her sister in America and a son in the Odesa region.

Klimenko speaks of the end of the war and recalls that her parents spoke Yiddish at home. Her mother's parents were from Pervomaysk, and her father also wished to keep Yiddishkeit. Lemster asks about her mother's cooking and she gives little. She names her older sister Frume, who was sent to Odesa and later emigrated. She shows postcards from her sister's family.

Khotenko says whether there were more Jews or sons-in-law in prewar Balta, and discusses the houses on the street and a Jewish invalid living in a nearby village. She answers questions about her house, privatised in her name, her two husbands, and the surnames Litnavetskii (maternal side) and Shvartsman (paternal side), plus Russian surnames of her husbands and sister's husband. She names a list of towns, and speaks of an acquaintance in America selling his house. She says her mother sang Yiddish songs and wrote Yiddish letters. Her son writes Yiddish using Russian words and speaks it well, and his travel route is discussed.

Asked by Kerler about the best years, Khotenko says there were none, and the worst were the prewar and war years; now is somewhat better. Lemster asks about the years after her son's birth in 1952. She then talks about her son, who speaks Hebrew and Polish, works two jobs, and has an Israeli passport, and about his family and travel plans.

Borukaeva talks briefly about life today, including the family cat and a television programme, partly in Russian. Lemster asks her to sing, but she says she can no longer sing. She speaks of her brother who died two years ago and who had lived in Israel. The interview ends with thanks.

Miaskovskaia talks about her children, who live in Germany and Rybnitsa, her grandchildren and her late husband, a skilled mechanic. She shows photographs of them, and mentions that her husband died after an operation in Germany.

The scene moves to Angelova's flat, where the interviewers introduce themselves and Angelova speaks about her life today. She talks about her health, operations and a visit to Israel.

Kerler asks about Kazakevich's family. Her father died before the war and her mother survived, hidden among Ukrainians who took in the mother and the children; the daughter passed as Ukrainian. She had five siblings, including the eldest, Chaim, and a sister Bronya. A brother who was a football player died at the front and a sister who was a nurse also died. An off-camera relative speaks Russian and supplies much of the family information, including half-siblings now in America and Israel.

Vaynman answers Kerler's questions on Jewish life in Bar after the war: returnees still spoke Yiddish but few could read it, and they came to her mother's home on holidays to hear her pray. She describes minyans held in houses, gathering ten men for funerals, a local man looking after the community, and how it faded as older people died. She says emigration to Israel began a dozen or so years before and discusses how many Jews were in Bar then and now, with a Russian-speaking local adding figures.

Berman and his daughter-in-law talk about the family. He says his son is a gynecologist and his daughter-in-law an infectious-disease doctor, and one grandson is a doctor in Israel. His other grandchild and her husband are dentists. He calls it a dynasty of doctors. He then begins on the war years in Kyiv.

Bublitskaia recalls a few lines of the song Afn pripetchik and 'Mayn shtetele Belts', and says she has not spoken Yiddish for 65 years since leaving Beltsy because her husband knew none. She speaks about her brother in Kyiv, who died years ago and who was a Zionist before the war, and about her maternal uncle who left Romania for Israel in 1970 and whose family she writes to. She says her mother could not travel in Soviet times.

Berman tells how the rabbinate in Jerusalem asked him to find and restore the graves of the Royver rebbe (a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov) and other tsadikim in the old Bila Tserkva cemetery, which had been closed and built over with a military garrison. A woman (probably his wife) recalls the closed cemetery near her childhood synagogue. He appealed for three years to a deputy of Ukraine's Supreme Soviet, a general, and the defence minister's order released the area, after which Meyer Gabai (?) restored the graves within months.

The interviewee speaks of a daughter who married a Jew and now lives in America with her children, and of the couple's age and poor health today. Kerler wishes them good health before turning to questions.

Talks about weddings before and after the war, with half marrying Jews, and about the daughter and grandchildren in America and a grandchild who knows Hebrew and English. The conversation then turns to whether Jews drink, and the informants argue that Jews seldom get drunk.

Isaak's name and his marriage are discussed. He recalls living in Kharkiv after the war before returning to Berdychiv. The talk turns to a grandchild or relatives who went to America, and to the lack of Jewish children and a Jewish school in Berdychiv today. The interview ends with thanks and good wishes, with a mention of the rabbi.

Skobilitskii talks about his architect son, who lives in Rostov and has travelled abroad, and about the son's visits to Berdychiv. He mentions his daughter's family in Netanya and his plans to go to Israel via Rostov. He returns to the destruction of the synagogue by the Germans and its rebuilding after the war with money from rich Jews, and to his grandmother's Yiddish.

A speaker recalls a Jewish wedding in a Hungarian town, Pápa, in 1948. The speaker's mother had been there, and Hungarian and Hebrew were spoken. The passage mentions a stay in Austria in Tiefenbach (?), where Jews who spoke Yiddish lived. It ends with Jewish dishes such as gefilte fish from carp. It is unclear whether the speaker is Skobilitskii or an interviewer.

Breuer discusses Russian Hasidim (Karlin, Slonim) and Chabad's closeness to the Lithuanian world. He tells about his ancestors among Chabad Hasidim, with stories of the Alter Rebbe and of a Hasid called Yomi Kletsker (?), and about his eight children. He and the interviewers discuss Yiddish among Chabad and other Hasidim in Israel, where Hebrew is replacing it.

Talk about Yiddish-speaking Jews in a nearby town (Mezhybizh (?)), about Jewish students at the university and a shaliach, and a donor from New York. Katz offers to telephone Breuer from Vilnius. A man from the synagogue says he was born in Moscow and has lived in Berdychiv since the war, and says Kaddish for a deceased man. Furman introduces himself and gives his age (87) and birthplace, Berdychiv.

She recalls the arrival of refugees from her father's town in Poland to Berdychiv in 1939, seen from her window, while her father's parents and brothers stayed there and perished. She tells about a photograph of relatives that her granddaughter took to America, and about her three grandchildren there.

Berzon talks about which languages the family spoke after the war: Yiddish with her mother and mother-in-law, Yiddish and Russian with the children. She says her daughter speaks Yiddish well, has visited her children in America three times and lights Sabbath candles. Kerler then asks about Jewish school and literature.

The interviewee talks about her daughter and two grandchildren in America, who are not yet able to visit. Kerler and the interviewee compare distances in America and Ukraine and discuss the poor economic situation and prices in Ukraine today.

The speakers describe Berdychiv today as a small town, with only some hundreds of Jews left, many having emigrated. Kerler asks whether they studied in cheder or Yiddish school and whether they read Yiddish books and newspapers.

The speakers recall that they knew little of Jewishness or the Berdychiv rebbe's grave, and compare the Soviet period with today, saying clothes are plentiful but money is lacking and pensions are small. They also talk about relatives in America and Israel, dental costs and the present situation in Ukraine and Israel.

They discuss the language spoken with grandchildren, who understand Yiddish, and the family in America. A grandson there is a pious Skver Hasid, and the interviewee talks about the visa and emigration difficulties and his studies there.

They talk about life today: the possibility of travelling to their children in America, staying at home, pensions and war benefits, rising prices of medicine, and the fall of the dollar. They also speak about the Skver rebbe's family and his grandson, and the death of the rebbetsin, who left eight children.

Conversation about a singer, Jewish theater and the happiest times of life, with talk of a daughter in America who works in a mikvah. They also discuss visiting other towns and travel, and Kerler's remarks on Russian.

Soyfer explains how, before the revolution, Jews were barred from living in many places and from owning land unless they had served long in the tsar's army, or converted. He gives a story of a Jewish family in a village forced out unless it converted, and speaks of the cost of gymnasium for Jews. He says Berdychiv was a place where Jews could live and mentions pogroms, emigration to America and his grandmother's languages. Kerler then asks for his birth year (1930) and he begins to speak of his mother's death.

Kerler asks about family, and Vainshelboim says his mother came from Ulanov (?), and gives her name, Faige. Her older sister Perl, who had gone to America, visited him in 1961. He describes how she kissed him and mourned his murdered mother, and speaks of a family photograph and his own photograph as a soldier.

The couple talk about relatives in America, two cousins on the mother's side. They do not know which city they live in, but the relatives phone on holidays and may visit.

Vainshelboim answers questions about relatives in Israel, including a cousin of his mother, and about people phoning and sending money from abroad. Kerler recalls the team's first visit in 2002, when there was no electricity. Vainshelboim then gives long opinions on America, wars, peace and terrorism, and mentions a man named Isaak (?) whose mother was Jewish and father Tatar, who speaks Yiddish and could be visited at the synagogue. The transcript is partly garbled.

Burmenko says that her father died when she was four, that her mother was a widow, and that she had a stepfather. Kerler provides the Yiddish word for it, shtiftate. A phone call comes in. She says she lives alone, and that her daughter urges her to move to Israel but she does not want to.

Burmenko shows photographs of her daughter and son-in-law in Israel and of her second husband, Dimant, a specialist with machines. She says she is glad the team came, and mentions a visiting Jewish woman from America named Tani Golfeld (?), who left an address. Kerler asks for the town and writes the address down.

The team phones an American visitor, Tanya Goldfeld (?), who had been photographed with Burmenko, and speaks to her in English and Russian. Burmenko speaks to her in Russian, gives her phone number, and the team promises to send her address. She states a proverb.

Snook talks about her son, who is in hospital after an operation, and about her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, who live in Israel. She says she has two daughters and eight grandchildren and that her son keeps Jewish tradition. Lemster asks whether a mohel was available when he was circumcised. Snook mentions that her husband died fifteen years ago, that her parents lived in the village, and that she was in Auschwitz.

Snook says the village had about a hundred Jewish families and a synagogue, and that people went to pray. She compares observance then and now, mentioning her grandchildren in Israel and her daughter-in-law's synagogue-going. Lemster asks how she herself studied.

Outside, Kerler and Snook's daughter-in-law talk about a man named Misha Berger (?), who held the key to the holy place, and about her brother, who died long ago. She says her siblings and children are in Israel. They speak of the children phoning daily and of her husband.

Kerler and the woman look at family photographs. She identifies a son abroad (in Germany), a daughter-in-law and the children, and mentions her marriage in the late 1950s (?). They also look at a photograph from a prayer group. The hosts and the team exchange thanks.

A woman, Bershadskaya, joins the talk. They discuss where the team has been traveling from (Uman and another town), how the place names are said in Yiddish, and the fact that she speaks Yiddish and Ukrainian. She speaks of religion, the synagogue and how older people go there. There is talk of terror attacks in Tel Aviv, and the surname Bershadskaya. Kerler mentions an actress called Bershadskaya who left for Israel and a family named Kazakov who emigrated.

Kerler announces the date and place of the interview. Gvinter gives personal and family information: her father's two brothers in Washington and a relative there named Oister, and the naming of a relative Igor. She says she was born in 1930 but her passport gives 1928 because documents were lost and her mother resisted the change. Her father Yankl died in the famine of 1933, aged 38. A family album with photographs from America was lost in the Dnieper during evacuation, and her mother, Sharke, died in 1977.

Opening exchange with Lemster, then Gvinter tells of a trip from Israel on which the driver fell asleep, and of phone calls with a daughter (called Natasha?) afterwards. Kerler asks when the accident happened. Gvinter mentions his brothers and a shoemaker father, and talks about his back trouble and massages.

Gvinter says that in the Bershad' ghetto speaking Yiddish was forbidden and prisoners were beaten and made to clean toilets. His mother made food for him, and Romanian and German soldiers passed through. He tells how a Jewish partisan from Chernivtsi was hidden by neighbours. He then speaks of his wife Nekhama, who died in 1993 (?), and of the difficulty of getting passports for the family; Kerler and Lemster ask what happened to her.

Gvinter talks with Kerler and Lemster about the song of going to Palestine, which was sung in secret in the ghetto and more openly after the war, and comments on politics and the Israel–Palestinian conflict today. He mentions his own illness and a daughter's family. He answers terminology questions about Bila Tserkva, about words for non-Jews and for a foolish or wicked person, and about a convert. He recalls the Bershad' ghetto, people from Chernivtsi held and shot at the stadium, and non-Jews who learned a few Yiddish words. He then speaks about his own life: neighbours and the shoe workshop, the sale of a building he was asked to sell, his marriage in 1958, his children, and his siblings. Finally he explains why one synagogue in Bershad' stayed open after the war while others were closed, and mentions the building turned into a cinema.

Feldman speaks about Passover matzah and baking, and about hiding the pots on the attic. She answers Kerler and Lemster on toasts and who led the ceremony at weddings, and on whether a huppah was set up. She recalls a local kosher slaughterer, whom she helped by plucking fowl. She answers questions about the Jewish school, which her sister attended, and says her sister now lives in Israel and no longer writes to her.

Sklyarskiy talks about his flat and Hesed's help in the heating season, then about his sister, who lives in Kaliningrad, and the older sister who went to America in the 1970s with her daughter. Lemster and Kerler ask about her, and Sklyarskiy answers.

Answering Kerler's questions about postwar Bershad', Sklyarskiy says the synagogue was used and many Jews attended, and that Yiddish was spoken in the streets. He says he was married in Bershad' with Jewish music and klezmer, and that kosher meat could be bought. Kerler then asks about his granddaughter Lena in Israel and begins asking for an address for correspondence.

Sklyarskiy speaks about the village of Ivanky, where people were shot, and about a visit there about ten years earlier. He shows letters and talks about his granddaughter Lena, who recorded an interview with his wife. Kerler asks about Lena's surname and city in Israel, where she studied at a university, and about a number abroad.

Kerler explains the interview's purpose as an archive of earlier Jewish life. Schreier mentions the recordings made with him and says he was asked about Bruno Schulz. Kerler asks whether Jews survived in Drohobych after the war. Schreier says they emigrated or died, and then turns to Polish tangos he sings and a film soundtrack.

Loyf continues about her husband's family and the deaths of his mother and her own mother, who died in Israel. She says she spoke Yiddish at home and read in Russian and Ukrainian rather than Yiddish, and gets Yiddish booklets from abroad. She mentions trips to Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil for Jewish gatherings. She also talks about her mother's older brother.

Loyf says she has a daughter in Israel and a son in Berehove, Transcarpathia, who has two daughters. She sorts out when she married and when the son was born, and that he was circumcised in Dzegovka by someone she cannot name. Her grandchildren are not Jewish. Lemster asks whether her mother told Jewish stories, but she says there was no time.

Pustilnik talks about life today, saying there are no Jews left and no one to speak to. Her brother and sisters call from Israel and speak Yiddish, and she says she supports her son's children there. She says people were afraid to circumcise under the Soviets, and that she recites the groom song again without completing it. Kerler talks about the archive and about Yiddish speakers in Drohobych (?).

The interviewee describes the Dzhurin synagogue (large windows, white stones, women seated) as Kerler asks about its appearance, then Katz invites her to recall early childhood. She sings a little of a lullaby, says her mother could read Yiddish and wrote to relatives in America, and recalls a parable of a rich and a poor brother.

The Gellers speak about the Bratslav Hasidim who now visit the town from America and Israel and who are not descended from local people. Katz asks who they are. Kerler mentions an Israeli youth of Moroccan parentage who speaks fine Yiddish. A story follows about visitors the husband guided towards Nemirov, one of them on a motorcycle. Katz then moves on to prewar food.

Sofia says her father's mother was a Lithuanian Jewish woman who died in 1939, and Katz asks what her Yiddish was like. They discuss differences between towns' Yiddish and how David, who knew no Yiddish after the war, learned it from his in-laws. Sofia says her mother kept turkeys, geese and ducks but no goats, and describes the family leaving the animals loose on the day of the evacuation. The conversation ends with Katz and Sofia naming Bratslav families now in America, including Feldman and Levine.

Kupershmidt says there were four synagogues in Bratslav before the war, including the big one with two floors. His father believed in a rebbe whose name sounds like Proyke (?). He says the late 1930s were better. Kerler then asks Hebrew-derived words such as bread, water, meat and apples, and Kupershmidt supplies a few. He closes on the dwindling Jewish community and intermarriage in America.

Kupershmidt recalls Passover at home, including how as the youngest child he asked his father the Four Questions. He gives his parents' names and a grandfather's, and then they discuss relatives in Canada and Brooklyn.

Koifman recalls Jewish Vapnyarka after the war, with a number of Jewish families who later left for Israel or America. She says she lived in Bershad in 1972 and mentions its old synagogue. She also discusses the languages the teacher Anya speaks, Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and gives local distances and directions.

Kelmenson says Bratslav was a Jewish shtetl in 1937 but now has no one, and that Jews remained after the war until they left for Israel and America. Kerler says he has read about the town's pious Jews. She finished ten classes and went to Vinnytsia to study. Her later move away, with a mention of Kishinev, is garbled in the transcript.

Kelmenson describes the house divided between her family and her parents, and says her children live in Tulchyn and she has grandchildren. Kerler and Lemster ask how important Yiddish is to being Jewish, and she answers it is a duty of the nation. She also mentions her sons' travel to Israel.

Kelmenson talks about her father, who was in Vorkuta for sixteen years and questioned God though he was a pious man, and about her grandfathers, one of whom lost his plantation and died in the Crimea. Kerler then asks dialect questions about words such as magazine, bucket, sick, come, pious and honest. Kerler explains his own origins, and they discuss relatives in Israel, Bratslav surnames and a woman who gave a short interview, before thanks.

Khavin describes Soviet-period private minyanim and then speaks about his family at Kerler's request: his grandfather the melamed, grandmother Kune and his learned father. He names his mother Malka Rakhel and eight children, of whom five survived, with names given, and his parents married in 1902. He mentions a sister who died in Haifa.

Lifshitz describes Birobidzhan and the Jewish kolkhoz at Bergefeld (Birefeld), where the family was given a house, a cow and chickens. He says life was hard but better than in the surrounding villages. There was a Yiddish school, and he recalls no Yiddish songs. He left after the war and came to look for his parents, his father having died before the war.

Khavin tells about his older sister and her husband Pinye Rozenblum, a Polish Jew and revolutionary who worked in Moscow at an institute for nationalities. Rozenblum was arrested in 1937 and exiled to Magadan for ten years, and was rehabilitated under Khrushchev. He lived in Moscow until his death, and his son emigrated to Israel. At the end Katz and Khavin discuss the Yiddish form of the town name Kozelets.

Khavin and Kerler discuss his brother-in-law's later life: he stayed in the party and did not want his son to leave, but the son emigrated to Israel as an engineer and later lived in Haifa. A woman relative and a niece in Haifa are mentioned. Talk turns to Khavin's granddaughter, who lives in Simferopol and is of marriageable age.

Khavin recounts how after the war Jews prayed in a club in a basement and then received a building through the Hesed, with Sasha as chairman until he and his wife emigrated to Israel a couple of years earlier. They collected money to buy tables and a kiddush table, and the talk covers support from Zhytomyr and payments. Kerler and Khavin discuss a young Hebrew-speaking rabbi (?) and a bearded man named Nokhum. The passage ends with Russian proverbs, which Kerler renders in Yiddish.

Burg reflects on the fate of Yiddish culture. He names Hitler and Stalin as destroyers of Yiddish writers and culture, and the State of Israel as sharing the blame for weakening Yiddish. He lists great Yiddish poets and writers such as Leivick, Manger and Halpern. He notes that Hasidim in Israel still speak Yiddish, and that younger people elsewhere do not. He recounts a Berlin evening commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz and speaking Yiddish there, and receiving letters from Germany about Yiddish study. He tells how the German journalist Michael Martens (Frankfurt) visited him in Chernivtsi and Vyzhnytsia and wrote a small book about him; Kerler remarks on the German interest in Yiddish.

Burg recalls Vienna in 1937, shortly before the Anschluss. He met a circle of Yiddish writers there, including Abraham Fuchs, Mendl Neugroschl, and Turkow, and speaks about Neugroschl's wealthy family and his son in America. He heard Hitler and Goering speak. He describes being seized in the street and taken in a truck with other Jews to barracks outside Vienna for forced labor. He was released after speaking German and showing his Romanian passport, and was driven back to Vienna by SS men. He tells an anecdote of a Galician Jew waiting at a tram stop, and shows a photograph of the writers in Vienna, naming others.

Burg recalls how he began to write, going back to Steinberg's summer colony, and the discouraging response to his first poem. He printed his first story in the Czernowitzer Bleter at age twenty-two, in 1934, and he names the years of his published books. He also talks about reviews and recognition, including a German newspaper article and a Yiddish paper in New York, disagreements with a journalist, and an Austrian medal.

Burg recalls leaving Ivanovo when it became dangerous and going to Moscow, then taking a posting at the Pyatigorsk institute in the Caucasus for about four years. He then spent four years in a Cossack village in the Stalingrad region, he teaching German and his wife Russian literature, before returning to Chernivtsi, where a daughter was born. He speaks of his standing as an honored figure and writer in Chernivtsi, his vice-presidency of the Israel–Ukraine association, his readings in German-speaking countries and elsewhere, and the tourists who now visit him. Kerler then asks which writers influenced him most.

Burg names the Russian prose writers (Bunin, Paustovsky) and Yiddish writers (Peretz) who influenced him and recalls his father calling Yiddish a golden language. He describes greeting the ambassadors at his jubilee, his meetings with Dr Yosef Burg of Jerusalem in Vienna and Zurich, and the confusion between the two Yosef Burgs. He discusses growing up with four languages. Then he talks about his parents: his father, who read German and Yiddish and died in 1938, and his mother, from a Carpathian village, who could not read. Burg adds an account of saying Kaddish and praying before the amud in Chelyabinsk during the war.

Shames says that after the war there was still a synagogue and a shochet in Khmil'nyk and people prayed, but later that stopped and Jewish life faded. Few Jews remain today because many emigrated to Israel. Lemster asks about her memory of the Jewish holidays.

Shames remembers only buying matzo at Passover; she recalls no other holidays. She says her mother died long ago and she is alone. She mentions an aunt in America and a cousin who went to Israel.

Gammer says she worked 37 years in a bread shop and now lives on a pension. Her daughter is also an invalid. She spoke Yiddish with her husband at home, and her daughter Genia learned to read Yiddish from her father. She comments on Jews who left for Israel, Germany and America, and on the town's Jewish population: about twelve or thirteen thousand before the war and five or six thousand after.

Kapustina speaks about her family. She explains that the interviewers can have the tape sent to America, and that her brother lives in Los Angeles. She was born in Khmil'nyk; she gives her maiden name Kolomeir and her first name Sonya. Her father was a simple worker at a poultry combine, her mother was Liba. She discusses her grandfather Mordkhe, who traded in leather and built a house for his daughters, and her paternal grandfather Meyer, a leaseholder from a village near Khmil'nyk. She names her three brothers (Grisha, Avrasha, Nyoma) and talks about her second brother's illness and her own operation.

Kapustina describes life after the war: raising her young brother, working her way up to chief accountant in Khmil'nyk, and later her marriage and her husband's departure to America. She describes her relatives in Israel (Netanya), Los Angeles and New Jersey, her visit to Israel in January 1991, and her long account (largely Russian) of trying to get an Israeli, then American, immigration, being refused over pension and medicine. She says she is upset and lives alone.

Shames says she did not attend a Yiddish school; Yanushpol was a Jewish shtetl, and a synagogue existed. Her father worked in a mill and her mother was a housewife. She cannot recall aunts and uncles, and mentions possible relatives in America. She worked 23 years as an accountant in a factory after the war.

Kerler asks about antisemitism after the war. Shames says it has always existed, that there are very few Jews now and that everyone struggles. Kerler then asks about relatives in America, and she knows nothing of them.

Asked by Kerler to tell something of the war and postwar years, Srulova says her older brothers were killed in the war. The family returned to no home, and her father worked as a shoemaker. Older sisters married and took her to live with them. She describes the children's games with a bench and a doll made from her father's shirt. She says her father's brothers in America stopped writing after the war, and that relatives' dollars were exchanged for flour and sugar in the shop. She mentions that the poverty continued and that her daughter and grandchildren abroad bought a refrigerator and a washing machine. The passage ends with mutual thanks.

Weiss shows photographs to Kerler, including the school class and the synagogue before the war. He discusses the second synagogue, which functioned until 1995 and was closed after four antisemitic attacks, then set on fire in 1998. He describes community efforts to rebuild it, the Hesed centre, and a community of around 350 mostly elderly, poor people, many having emigrated. Asked about Drohobych-born Jews who remain, he names two or three people, none Yiddish-speaking.

Shekhovich says that few of 'our Jews' remain in Drohobych, only 'Russian Jews' whom she regards as a different people, and contrasts Polish-Jewish culture with theirs. She is bitter about Jews emigrating to Germany after what the Germans did to her family. Kerler explains the university project and, at the end, begins to put the formal opening questions on record, asking her name and the date and place of the interview.

Kerler asks about Shavuot, Hanukkah, Yom Kippur and Passover food and customs; Shekhovich remembers little, saying that her parents spoke Yiddish but the children Polish, that her family was not so religious, though Yom Kippur was fasted and Passover had a seder without bread. She says her daughter makes gefilte fish very well, but declines to give a recipe, calling it women's business. Later there is talk of Polish and Ukrainian language, her birth year (probably 1919), and her views on Israel and troubles there.

Kerler opens the interview with Schreier, giving the date and place. Schreier was born in Drohobych in 1922 and says he is the last Jew born there before the war. His father, a chemist, studied in Germany and took his doctorate in Switzerland. The family lived for ten years in Jasło, where his father was chief chemist at an oil refinery. He lost the job in the Depression and the family returned to Drohobych in 1932. His mother, Leontina, was a pharmacist's daughter. The passage ends with the great action of 1942.

The team arrives at Kopyt's house; there is brief greeting talk, partly in Russian, about acquaintances, among them someone named Khandros, and about relatives in Israel (a place in Ukraine that is unclear). Kopyt says she once visited Israel. She says that a Polish old woman taught her Yiddish in Uzbekistan. She also mentions her son and language mixing. The camera is then set up.

Kopyt talks about her aunts, who sang, and about neighbours during the war: the Grossman family, whose children were hidden by Russians. She says that her grandmother's home housed many families. She tells of being pressed to testify that people were Jewish, and she talks about Jewish writers from Fastiv such as Khashevatskaia (?) and Khentin. She says she gets no Yiddish newspapers, only Sovetish Heymland, and that she has helped make a museum in Korsun with artifacts.

Beigel speaks of the hunger and hardship in the ghetto, and says that no Jews remain in nearby Voroshylivka and only a few in Krasne and Tyvriv. The Jews left for Vinnytsya, America and Israel. At the end Kerler asks about the gefilte fish her mother made.

Beigel talks about life today. She has a few younger friends in Hnivan' with whom she speaks some Yiddish, though mostly Russian. She discusses radiation and emigration, saying people stay where it is good, but that Jews are not loved here. She does not remember songs.

Iuris recalls that Yiddish was spoken at home but Russian outside, with both Jewish and non-Jewish children, so as not to be laughed at. She has friends in Israel who speak Yiddish. She tells of her mother and father after the war, the death of her father's first wife and his marriage to her mother, and the poverty after the war. The family was offered a house in Chernivtsi in the former ghetto.

Iuris says she moved to Kolomyya in the postwar period, where her husband came from, after her mother died and her father remarried. She describes Kolomyya's Jewish community then and now, and that her husband was transferred for work to Ivano-Frankivsk. Kerler thanks her, and she then speaks in Russian about her family's history, mentioning her grandmother's sister, relatives in Romania, food parcels, and the closing of the border.

Bukshtein states that only Yiddish and Romanian were spoken in Novoselitsa. He recalls the Cuza government in the 1930s and the antisemitic pressure on shopkeepers and customers to speak Romanian, with a joke about a woman buying figs. He then tells about a visit by a cousin from Israel and his wife Mila, a Yiddish speaker from Vashkivtsi, and an anecdote of Mila speaking Yiddish with Hasidim on a plane. He also tells about a Chabad visitor who knew a relative, and about an older sister who went to Palestine after the war.

Informal conversation in Russian and Yiddish with congregants. A Dagestani (Mountain Jewish, Tat) congregant talks about the Tat language and Jewish life in Makhachkala and Israel. There is also talk about a Yiddish theater coming to town, an Israeli relative, and comparative forms in Yiddish and Russian. Kerler mentions a book by the poet Avrom Gontar (?) and says the team is going on to Chernivtsi to record living people. Parts are in poorly recognised Russian.

Fishman talks about his family. His daughter is disabled, his son died after illness, and the Hesed in Zhytomyr helps with parcels. His sister lives in Baltimore with relatives in San Francisco, and cousins live in Israel and Canada; he gives their names, including Alla Fishman and a Feldman. He gives his name and patronymic and says he does not remember his grandparents. His grandmother died in evacuation in Kazakhstan.

Fishman and the interviewers go through dialect items such as attic, cross, sick, sleep and tree. He says his father was born in Chudniv and his mother in a village nearby. He recalls that many Jews lived in Chudniv and then emigrated, and mentions his sister in America. His father held several posts, including chairman of an artisans' cooperative and factory director, and then retired on a small pension.

Fishman is asked what people knew in the Soviet years about the Six-Day War and emigration to Israel, and says very little. He recalls that television reached Chudniv in 1964. He says no old synagogue or Jewish school survives in Chudniv, and the interviewers thank him and take their leave.

Geller tells of his 2005 trip to Pyatka with a grandchild (the catalogue says great-grandchild) to visit the Jewish cemetery. A hundred or so gravestones remain. He describes the killing of Jews buried there and the survival of a boy and a girl who later lived in Berdychiv and emigrated to Israel. Kerler asks how many Jews lived in Pyatka, and the passage ends with a Jewish man with a surname like Pastovsky (?) who was killed by a car.

Geller recalls prewar Jewish life in Pyatka. There were about five hundred Jews until the famine of 1932–33, after which artisans (carpenters, shoemakers, tailors) left for Odesa, Moscow and Kyiv. About 200 Jews remained in the mid-1930s, and 169 were drafted into the army. Relations with non-Jews were peaceful. Some non-Jews spoke Yiddish, and Jews and non-Jews lived on the same streets, with Jews mostly on one side.

Burshtein sings a Yiddish song expressing hope for a future in Eretz Israel and a song about longing for his home town, which he says he wrote recently. He mentions that he keeps writing songs and that the radio carries little about Israel.

Lys speaks of his granddaughter, who studies Hebrew, lights Sabbath candles and visited Israel, and his hope that she will marry a Jewish man. Kerler then asks about prewar holidays. Lys recalls his mother's strict Passover kashrut and Sabbath, and his grandfather, a kohen. He also recalls his father, who read Yiddish and Russian books and Sovetish Heymland, the seder with the four questions in Yiddish, and that he holds a seder himself now.

Lys tells of the town's synagogues and says Jews prayed secretly in his father's house after the war. The synagogue buildings became an evening school, a music school and a factory. He describes celebrating Victory Day with Jewish veterans, the many Jews in professional and official posts after the war, and later emigration to Israel, America and Germany. He mentions a letter from a former teacher abroad, and Kerler ends with a Yiddish phrase question.

Geller speaks of a nephew in Chisinau, whose family now lives in Israel. A relative's wife and son drowned in a shipwreck, and Geller mentions a Yiddish newspaper (Yiddish 'Vek'(?)) article about a man who grew up Jewish. Kerler and Geller then read a document granting Geller a pension supplement for special service to Ukraine.

Geller answers Kerler's questions about prewar Jewish cultural life in Kuz'myn. There were only Russian clubs and no Yiddish activities. He remembers no visiting actors, and mentions a Russian-language circle or sewing workshop. He does not remember a bar mitzvah of his own. He says that a nephew in Israel was recently given one, according to a letter, and that his sister's children and others in Israel are relatives.

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.

A Hesed social worker reads aloud a Yiddish poem about Jews speaking Yiddish all over the world, apparently reprinted in a local paper. She and the others discuss its author (the transcript is unclear) and recall an aunt who wrote letters from America in Yiddish.

Gaiviker says his father was a barber and that he himself worked for more than sixty years as one, mostly in a central barbershop, and has been home for twenty-odd years. He mentions his wife of sixty-two years, a good cheder education including Rashi, a daughter and grandchildren in Israel. Sonya adds that a daughter lives in Russia. Kerler explains the project's aim of interviewing older Yiddish speakers about prewar history, and asks about the town's earlier name.

A questionnaire on forms and vocabulary: Lemster and Kerler ask for thanks, father and mother, sick, sleepy, peasant, and Lithuanian-Yiddish differences, and a sentence with 'whether or not'. Gaiviker also tells of his army years in Lithuania, Kaunas and Kaliningrad, being pelted with stones, and Berdychiv and its Jewish girls, and Sonya says her grandson lives in Israel. At the end he speaks of his wife's care and food he likes.

Vaisblai sings a few more songs, including 'Itsik hot shoyn khasene gehat' and one about a bride. Kerler asks where old Jews remain with whom one can speak Yiddish, and Vaisblai says there are none in nearby towns such as Lyubar, only one non-Jewish woman who knows it. He mentions grandchildren in Israel and America.

Bivson answers what it means to be a Jew: having pity for everyone, loving animals, and being honest and good. She mentions her two cats and a dog and her flowers. Lemster returns to the questionnaire with items on flowers and a flowerbed, a Yiddish expression, 'come', and the word for book. She then speaks of her age, the war and the people she lost, and of her forty years as a telephone operator, including calls from Israel.

Kaviner and Kerler discuss Yiddish writers and critics, chiefly Nakhmen Mayzl, whose son Khayim, a doctor, Kaviner knew from the army, and Marek Varshavski, author of a famous song. They also talk about which Yiddish poems were not printed in Soviet times. Kerler asks him to sing something, and they talk about sending him materials and about writers buried in America.

Snook describes the hardship of life after the war, working at whatever she could, and her marriage and move to Drahovo (?). She gives her son's birth year, 1946 (?). She mentions emigration to America in the 1950s, the surviving minyan in Khust and the old synagogue, which has been repaired with American help. Kerler asks about the synagogue under Soviet rule, and he asks again for songs and prayers; she recites a prayer for the parents.

Snook talks about her son (Katz and others say he knows Hebrew and Yiddish), her own advanced age, her health and her daily routine. She describes the hired help. She was not able to visit her grandchildren in Israel. Katz and Kerler press her for old Passover songs, including Chad Gadya, which she remembers from childhood but declines to sing, and a counting song, and she tells about the counting of the Omer. They ask her to repeat the song sung earlier.

Zinger says he never smoked or drank. He answers Katz's questions about prewar antisemitism: Jews were blamed for things, but he says nothing very terrible happened. Kerler asks about blood libel and about Yiddish words for non-Jews (goyim, orelim). Zinger then speaks of Swiss visitors who bring food aid and help Jews emigrate to Israel, and mentions a visit to his son there.

Snook sings a Yiddish song of longing and lovers' letters from America. She recalls returning home from the war naked and barefoot and how her husband slowly rebuilt their life. She speaks of her children and her daughter-in-law, a teacher from Svaliava (?). Her family is abroad. She describes the life of children abroad, and says a Christian neighbour helped her with pills.

Snook talks about Kaddish and a hired person saying it, while a visitor who has come by car (her son, per the catalogue) leaves. She talks about her health, her descendants, relatives in Israel and America, and keeping kosher. Kerler asks the Yiddish words for 'Jew' and for 'non-Jew' or 'fool', and the word for a crowd, which she explains. She offers the guests a drink made of grapes.

Snook speaks of 1941, when her parents were taken away; she was staying with a relative and a neighbour, and the family went to Poland (?), where they were killed. Later she was taken to the camp, rescued by a German from the child, and freed in 1945. She returned home and lived hard years after the war; her family relations and her own illness are mentioned. Kerler tells of his birth in Moscow and move to Israel, and Snook talks about children and relatives in Israel and America.

Kerler and a second speaker describe the former Jewish neighborhood as the group walks to the synagogue. Once rich, with factories, it emptied after the war because the Jews left for America and Israel. Part of the talk, partly in Russian, concerns the market and shops nearby, followed by a conversation about Yiddish and a Jewish identity with a man who says he was brought up with Yiddish in the home.

In the Khust synagogue Repkin explains its history in Russian: construction began in 1861, much of it is original, the paintings are original, the lions part came from Oleksandrivka, and the wiring was replaced two years before the visit. He recounts the Khust Jewish population in 1940 and its losses in the Holocaust, the ghetto from April 1944 and deportations to Auschwitz, and that Soviet authorities tried to close it for a club in about 1965–66 and a protest by women and children, apparently, saved it. He describes the books found there, with stamps from villages in the region and Yiddish, Hungarian and Slovak printings, and his catalogue of owners for a future museum. He also describes the repair of doors, donors from abroad, the mikveh-side rooms and a slaughtering knife found in the building, and talks about his own career at the shoe factory and the synagogue's upkeep, caretaker and minyan.

Smelanskii greets the interviewers, then talks about Yiddish schools in Smila from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, including a Yiddish technical school. He recalls a director and devoted teachers, classes up to the seventh grade, and moving afterwards to a Ukrainian school. He also mentions his maternal grandfather, who taught the grandchildren religion, prayer and Hebrew, and the grandfather's seven children, some of whom emigrated to America.

Smelanskii addresses Jews in America with wishes for peace in the world and help for the Jews of Israel. Katz and Kerler then ask where Smila lies and what kind of Jews lived there. He says they were Ukrainian Jews, that he was born there, and that the town held ten to twelve thousand people, about thirty percent Jewish. He adds that few Jews remain and that many emigrated to Israel, and mentions his father's wish to see the Jewish land.

A second informant answers questions about food at weddings. He explains how a knife was sharpened on a nail, and says every Jewish household made a noodle kugel for the Sabbath. He recalls a Sabbath visit to a synagogue in Israel, where the rabbi sent a kugel to his home. The interviewers thank him and the interview closes with wishes for a reunion.

Shapiro thanks the interviewers for finding him in Kyiv and speaks of a letter he has from people who went to Israel. He talks about his grandchildren, one of whom has gone to America and is a computer specialist. He then begins to give personal details, saying he is one of ten children and naming his father.

Braverman talks about her Yiddish articles. She wrote a column and a piece about Shapiro's booklet, and mentions an article for a Kyiv newspaper on the state of Yiddish after the Soviet period and its anniversaries. She also speaks about a Yiddish periodical and a Yiddish lecture course, and about a writer from Odessa (Tishchenko?) who emigrated.

Braverman describes holiday food: buckwheat latkes with goose cracklings and fat for Hanukkah, and potato latkes for Passover. She then recounts how her father's younger brother, a Zionist who founded a Jewish gymnasium in Solkhov, fled during the civil-war period, went through Poland and settled in France, and how the relatives there lived. She talks about her cousins in France, a cousin's birthday, and her own parents' fates: her mother was killed in Kalinovka. A discussion of where Kalinovka is follows.

Semyon Braverman describes the Zhmerynka synagogues and what they became after the war (a club, a bakery, a library, a militia building). His pious father led the congregation and made Yiddish calendars that were mailed across the country. The father's biography, from a Jewish gymnasium graduate, appears in a published book, and Semyon mentions a police fine for an unregistered prayer gathering. Semyon then begins the story of Zhmerynka friends who wrote a letter in 1948 asking to go to Israel.

Kipnis tells of seeing off her father's youngest sister's family to Israel at the Kyiv airport, where her relative danced and made merry. The year is given as 1971 (?).

Asked for his earliest memories, Torchinsky describes the Jewish town of Skvire with its synagogue and prayer house and the preparation for Passover. He recalls going to synagogue with his grandfather on Simchat Torah when he was about six, and discusses whether his grandfather could read Yiddish or Hebrew and the term for the holy tongue. He tells of his uncle Shmilik's attempt to take him to Palestine in 1924 and his running away to stay with his mother, and of his childhood pranks of stealing unripe fruit from a garden and throwing bread into the Passover borscht.

Torchinsky discusses a mischievous child, as in Sholem Aleichem, and how he too was a prankster, growing up without a father with his widowed mother and two sisters. He says his grandfather, perhaps a carpenter, gave them a small part of his house. He recalls how the relatives in America sent 25 dollars so that his mother could buy proper flour for Passover latkes, and that the flour was stolen at night, in the mid-1920s.

Kerler asks about synagogues in Skvire, and Torchinsky names a prayer house kept by a yeast maker and cantor. He describes a recent visit with American rabbis and Hasidim to Skvire, where he said Kaddish at the site of his father's grave and found nothing left of the cemetery. Kerler asks for Yiddish terms for the cemetery, such as holy place and good place, and explains their meaning. He answers whether the tutor taught him the morning prayer Modeh ani, and comments in Russian.

Khandros tells how he and other Jewish war veterans were bused to Babi Yar when the American president and his wife visited Kyiv in 1991. Afterwards he met in the Jewish library a man who had survived five camps and learned Yiddish in them. He wrote an article about him, and in the mid-1990s took it and his film about his town to Israel, where a Sokhnut official recorded him. Kerler then says it is late and proposes another meeting. Khandros ends with a story of a New York foundation director who did not answer about the film.

Derbaremdiker names his brothers: an elder brother born in 1913, now in New York and about to turn ninety, and a younger one, Yontl (Yontev). Yontev was named after the grandmother Yente, his mother's mother. The elder brother, Avrom, went to a Ukrainian school because no Yiddish schools existed in 1921, then studied in Berdychiv's Yiddish technical school and later at the Progress machine factory and in Kyiv. Derbaremdiker says he had a bar mitzvah in a secret prayer house in 1933, because officially it was impossible.

Derbaremdiker describes his cheder lessons: Chumash beginning with Vayikra, the letters, and the prayers. He says he can still read the siddur fluently but does not understand every word. He now goes to the synagogue because it is the only place to speak Yiddish, with the rabbi Yakov Dublikh (?). He mentions the languages he studied: English, German and French. He adds that after the war relatives in Canada found the family's address, which was in the Urals, through the evacuation centre.

Derbaremdiker tells how, once he was in postgraduate study in Kyiv and his brother had come back from the war, he wrote to relatives in Canada in English. They were surprised that anyone knew English so well, and he says his English is only fairly simple. Kerler then asks about Jewish holidays.

At Kerler's request Derbaremdiker talks about his family and the origin of his surname, naming his paternal great-grandfather (?) and tracing the Berdychiv Derbaremdikers back to Levi Yitskhok. He tells the legend of an official asking the rabbi his family name while he was praying, which led to the name. He also mentions relatives in the United States and a poem by an ancestor.

Derbaremdiker talks about a film on Yiddish culture, apparently made for the Moscow Kultura channel. He gave the filmmakers cassettes and sent one to his brother in New York, who had it converted to the American format. He offers the brother's phone number and a Russian text. He then speaks of Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kyiv for about fifteen years, whom he met around 1991, and of how his work as a laboratory head kept him from the synagogue.

Derbaremdiker says he went to Berdychiv once, when his brother from New York visited and Rabbi Yaakov lent them a car. He knows the Berdychiv rabbi. He describes his life now: he cannot leave his sick daughter, only goes to the synagogue, and gets some help from the Hesed organization. The talk turns to the team's coming travels in Podolia, to a Yiddish folklore and proverbs course he once gave, to his brother's work for the Russian Forverts, and to the Yiddish forms of family names such as Yente and Yontl.

The interviewers and Derbaremdiker exchange contact information, including his brother's address in Brooklyn and phone numbers. He says no university in Kyiv teaches Yiddish at present. He says he will turn 85 in July (?) and mentions that he has a copy of his Jewish birth record. They talk about visiting Rabbi Bleich briefly.

The informant speaks of a David, formerly the prayer leader of the Kolomyya synagogue, and of the blessings said when a deceased person is mentioned. He discusses the two other possible Yiddish speakers in town, how visitors from Israel and America speak Yiddish, and sings a Romanian song from his youth. He gives his views on Jews in America and Israel, on past enemies of the Jews, and on how life under the post-Soviet regime compares with Soviet times, with remarks on the freedom to attend synagogue. He also mentions a niece in Brooklyn and whether Kerler could write to him in Yiddish.

Vider names his siblings (two sisters and four brothers) and what became of them: his father and a younger brother were killed, a sister was taken to Palestine by the Red Cross, and an older brother fled Romania before the war and ended up in Palestine as a tractor driver. Kerler asks what Jewish history he learned in school, and Vider says mostly ancient history such as Samson. Vider says he remembers cantorial melodies because he sang them to himself on long cycling trips to fish, and begins to sing.

Krotsh says he is unwell and talks about having been in the hospital. He mentions a friend who urged him to rest, and a woman he spoke to who could not talk Yiddish, and says few people speak Yiddish today. He laments the destruction of Yiddish and Yiddish books in Poland and elsewhere, and says he teaches himself to read Yiddish. He mentions three years in Israel, his marriage and three sons, only one of whom is still alive, and a son who was a doctor and was killed. Kerler asks when he came to Kolomyya, and Krotsh says 1949.

Krotsh answers questions on old words and tashlikh, and names the small river at Ștefănești. He describes visiting his hometown at the Prut border in the early 1960s, after 17 years away, and the paperwork problems he had getting a passport. He begins his wartime account: in 1940 he and a brother crossed to the Soviets while his father and mother stayed.

In the restaurant one man tells a story about a worker who drank in a factory office to get hired and found two drunk directors, and another tells about repairs of the city streets paid by money from Americans from Kolomyya. S3 then tells a story about a Christian woodcutter who is invited to a Jewish Sabbath-eve table, eats the fish and kugel and asks the Jew why he studies the prayer book so much. Kerler comments on the answer.

Vider shows family photographs to Kerler: his father, who seems to have been born in the 1890s (the exact year is unclear), a brother-in-law and mother-in-law, his sister, and himself as a young man in photographs from different decades. He also points out his brother's daughter in a Purim costume, the Iraqi-born wife of a younger brother in Israel, and a sister who had worked in a mine. Kerler asks the year of each photograph, and 1964/65 (?) is mentioned.

Vider briefly tells of the war in Russia, where Jews were at first not taken into the army, and says he fell ill and the doctors would not let him go. Lemster asks about Itsik Manger and drinking songs. Vider says he was born in Sighet, moved to Hîrlău at age three and stayed about ten years. He mentions a younger brother who was killed, then went to Iași to study at a yeshiva. He wanted to learn carpentry, but his mother, helped by relatives in America, persuaded him to learn tailoring as an easier trade.

Krotsh recalls that his parents' town was wiped out and the Jews were driven to Botoşani. He had by then crossed over to the Russians, with his middle brother Michl. He names his sisters and brothers, and says his older brother served in the Romanian army or gendarmerie. He also mentions a cousin or niece now living in Israel.

Krotsh tells how his father had siblings in America and went there alone, while his mother did not want to leave her family. The rebbe told her they would not go and the father would return. He and Kerler talk about a visitor who died a year earlier and the widow's yahrzeit. They also discuss the would-be convert and his plans to travel to Kyiv.