Pogroms and civil war

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.

Opening exchange about a Soviet-era word list and the loss of Yiddishkayt, then Roif on his role as a patron for a community charity. He mentions sponsors, including one in Germany, and helping some forty-odd Jews. He also speaks of the writer Yankl Yakir, who visited the village before the war, and Yakir's son, an engineer who did practice in the kolkhoz and later published books in Israel. The talk moves to a writers'-union commemoration and to historians writing about a pogrom, with a death toll given as forty-nine (?). Much of this part is in Russian or garbled.

Discussion of the history of a pogrom and the Jewish hospital. Roif cites Slutski's booklet, written by an eyewitness, with a count of forty-three Jews killed (?). Lemster mentions a 1905 pogrom in a town whose name is unclear in the transcript, with fifty-two Jews affected (?).

Shpitalnik describes the districts of prewar Chișinău, including the poor lower town and the Old Bridge area, and the richer upper parts. She talks about the Teater Ekspres, the Auerbach family and two Jewish dancers named Seltser, who performed Yiddish theater and European dances.

Shpitalnik says the 1903 pogrom is overemphasized and that prewar Jewish Chișinău was poor, with good tailors, shoemakers and craftsmen but no rich people; she mentions about seventy synagogues. She recalls the short-lived Yiddish folk theater of the late 1960s, performances she saw, and a story involving an Ukrainian doctor friend. The passage ends with talk among the interviewers about Moyshe and arrangements.

Mitlaeva says that after Bukovina she worked as a teacher in Străşeni, a large town with several schools, including Russian and Romanian ones. She recalls a pogrom there in tsarist times, a conflict with a colleague who was dismissed, a Jewish surgeon and Jewish veterans working in the town. She also says she knew Romanian well and speaks it today, though she has never been to Romania.

Muchnik describes the activity of Romanian fascists in Orhei before the war: gatherings of peasants with sticks and sacks who were to plunder Jews. She recalls climbing onto the roof to watch their meeting place, and Jewish households closing shutters at night in fear of a pogrom. She tells of a night alarm in which neighbours knocked on windows to warn the Jews.

Kerler states the date and place of the interview. Moisei then gives a long historical account of Bessarabia under Russia and Romania, the Soviet period, and why Moldova and Transnistria split. He touches on Romanian treatment of Jews, pogroms under the tsar, and perestroika and Gorbachev.

Hirsch describes Jews being taken from Turda to a labor camp until the Red Army arrived in August 1944. He mentions the fascist government, the Iași pogrom and deportations to Transnistria, saying that only a minority returned. Kerler then asks about his father, who was named Avraham.

In her house Mehler shows photographs to the team, mostly in Romanian with some Yiddish. She identifies her daughter, her grandchildren in America, her parents and her husband, and her father's last photograph. He was killed in the Iaşi pogrom, and her husband died suddenly. The interviewers ask about her wedding and the wedding documents; her husband had been deported to Transnistria.

Soyfer compares Berdychiv with Zhytomyr. Berdychiv was more Jewish, and Jews could live there although they were restricted in Kyiv and elsewhere. He says that Berdychiv had no pogroms of its own except one by the Poles around 1918–19, and that young Jews fought non-Jews.

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.

Sofia describes how few Jews live in Bratslav today and that there is no militia or police presence. Asked by Kerler what she remembers of old Bratslav, she says she was born into a drayman's family. Her mother kept the home and lit Sabbath candles, and her grandfather, a melamed, was killed in the pogroms of 1918. The war began when she was twelve, and her father had a wagon with two horses.

Burg speaks about the graves of three generations of the Vyzhnytsya rebbe's dynasty in the cemetery. He describes how the old Jewish cemetery was turned into a sports ground and the gravestones reused for Soviet monuments. He recalls the First World War, when Cossacks killed two of his aunts in Vyzhnytsya; a Ukrainian carpenter buried them and a gravestone was later set up. He then speaks of Austrian-era tolerance in Bukovina, which in his view persists in Chernivtsi today, contrasted with antisemitic newspapers in Galicia and with Romanian rule between the wars.

Gammer says she studied Yiddish for seven grades, reads it today, but cannot write by hand. She discusses her family. Her mother came from a rich family in Lithuania and knew prayers and Hebrew, and her grandfather Zalmen was a doctor. Her grandmother was Ite Beyle. Her paternal grandfather Shloyme was a poor tailor with six children. The matchmaking of her parents is explained by a Lithuanian typhus loss during the Petliura period. Her father, a young Komsomol member, worked for the Cheka and became a partisan.

Gammer recounts that her father was caught by Petliurists together with his brother and a cousin. He was thrown into the old bathhouse by the bridge and held in the mikveh to be drowned, but was dragged out. He survived and later lived as an invalid on a pension. Lemster asks whether he lived, and says he will look at a photograph later.

Gammer and her daughter show family photographs. They identify her father's partisan relatives, including Tule (Naftule) Goldis, a brother of her grandfather, and a cousin. Kerler relates one man to the Petliurists.

Kopyt recalls the outbreak of war and the family's flight on foot toward Kyiv, and says seventeen relatives were killed. She talks about her mother, who was a baker, and her grandfather, a synagogue gabbai, and speaks about neighbours and Babi Yar. She describes her first husband's death after Chernobyl and her second marriage, her grandparents' hiding in the civil-war pogroms, and a visit to the site where her grandfather was killed. She also tells of her own fall.

A formal interview, mostly in Russian, with an elderly woman from Odesa who says she knows no Yiddish. She recalls her grandfather's Passover seder and her father, who trained as a draftsman and architect in Odesa and studied in Switzerland. She also describes her private Russian gymnasium, antisemitism around Palm Week, and the hardships of revolution and civil war. She speaks of regretting not learning Yiddish, a Ukrainian husband who knew a few Yiddish words, and an episode at work in Bershad' when she could not understand a conversation in Yiddish.

Beigel describes Tyvriv as a Jewish shtetl with a center where Jews lived well, and Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors in the neighboring villages. The family fled a pogrom to Krasne, where they were taken in kindly, but after two years were sent back to Tyvriv and a ghetto.

Geller answers questions about Kotovsky's brigade. His mother served as a nurse and his father was a soldier. He says Kotovsky was a strong character and may have spoken some Yiddish. After the civil war his parents settled in Kuz'myn where he was born; his father was a shoemaker who met an old comrade in Staro-Konstantinov.

Gaiviker recalls cheder with the teachers Motl the Black and Khayim from Medzhibozh, and attending prayer with his father. He mentions his stepmother and half-siblings, his youthful mischief, love of music and jazz, and bands passing through Proskuriv in the civil war years. He then complains about the hardship of old age and says he was hospitalized several times.

Shapiro says two of his brothers left during the Petliura time, and that his father was an elder of the synagogue in Vinnytsya. He speaks of the elders' society and the wish that its members live to a hundred and twenty. He ends by explaining the name Ilya to a man in the society.

Shapiro says he wrote down in notes as a child which regime came to town, including Petliura. He says rabbis began to be shot under the first Soviet power. He recalls that his parents left Vinnytsya quietly in 1928 and went to Odesa, and he names his parents Yosef ben Yankev and Etele. He tells how his parents of ten children took in a refugee family from a pogrom in Kalinovka, since the house had five rooms. Kerler asks the names of his siblings, and he lists them: Yitskhok (Eyzik), Moyshe, Nakhmen (himself fourth), and the sisters Khaye Gitl, Leye, Rokhl, Rivke and Anele.

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.

Krotsh cannot recall the songs his parents sang, and a second man tells a song about a poor tailor in a Ukrainian shtetl, after which Krotsh talks about pogroms in Ukraine. He sings a Hebrew song to a Yiddish melody. He says there were no Yiddish newspapers in the Romanian-ruled town, only Romanian ones, and that Jewish organizations existed.

Krotsh recalls the words of a song about a small shtetl, a tailor and his beautiful daughter, attacked by bandits, and recites its plea to God. He says he heard the song in Ukraine and learned it from Vider's performance the day before. He sings a short fragment.

A man named Groysman, from Tarashcha, is introduced and speaks some Yiddish about his move to Korsun' in the 1950s (?) and later departure. The rest is a tour of the museum of the association of Jewish shtetls. A Russian-speaking guide explains exhibits: old family photographs, famous natives such as the Tverskys of the Chernobyl dynasty, writers including Ivan Kulyk, Shimen Dobin and Itsik Fefer, descendants of Mendel Beilis, and the 1919 Jewish self-defense unit of Korsun' with a saber from Kotovsky's cavalry. Other exhibits are pogrom committee papers, a 1926 Berdychiv prayer book, Yiddish-Russian documents from Jewish village soviets, a Jewish school open from 1924 to 1938, family silver, a gefilte fish mold, a clockmaker's tools, a mezuzah and handwritten calendars. The guide also describes how the museum was assembled with American help after the association was founded in 1993. Kerler asks about scanning and clock terminology, and at the end the guide shows books by Poroshenko and Malka Pen.

A woman tours the center in Russian, showing a photo exhibition of Jewish faces and explaining that people gather for events there. The team discusses possible interviewees, among them a 103-year-old woman born in Vinnytsya whose daughter worries about her health, and a woman of 78 from the Kurylivtsi district. They mention an earlier American interviewer from the Joint who sought people remembering a pogrom, and the film 'Nedopetaya pesnya' made in Sharhorod with Baba Fanya. They also speak of Nesya's singing at the concert.

Prompted by a question about Kaganovich, Listengurt describes him as a transport minister without formal education and mentions his Jewish daughter. She speaks of her mother as a Trotskyist and her father as a Stalinist. She then recalls the 1923(?) Crimea plan for a Jewish republic, a three-day pogrom, and Stalin's postwar deportations, and mentions the Karaites. She also touches on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Listengurt continues on the Jewish plan for a republic in Crimea and the 1923 pogrom. She then explains Stalin's deportation of Germans and Tatars, Khrushchev's role, and the later Jewish settlement in the Birobidzhan region between two rivers. She describes a bare area and what an acquaintance said of the Crimea's beauty, then moves to the doctors' plot at Lemster's prompt.

After the interview with Dorfman, the team greets Feldman and sets up the recording in his home. He gives his name and birth year, and says he was born in the village of Yanova Rudnya, about 20 km from Ovruch. He talks about his father, who leased a mill and farm from a landowner and was killed in 1919, and about his mother, sisters and five brothers who went to America. He tells of his melamedim and the Velednik tsadik, whom his father followed. He recalls his father's Sabbath tunes, studying and teaching at cheder in Luhyny, and recites prayers (kabbalat shabbat, kaddish, kiddush); the transcript is garbled for most of this. He also remembers Christian farmers in his village and begins to speak about Rosh Hashanah.

Feldman tells how his father was killed in 1919 by a band of local peasants, apparently Poles, who wanted his boots; he had refused. The band took him to the forest at night and killed him, and the family searched a week before finding the body. After that they moved to Skrebelychi.

Feldman says there was no antisemitism before 1917 and that Petliura's forces killed Jews around 1919–20. He explains that Ovruch was a district town, that Korosten grew to three times its size, and that it was a railway junction. They return to the Yiddish form of the town's name.

Turovskaia explains that she knows from her parents' stories about her father's encounters before the revolution and her uncle Yakov Leyzer's actions at a funeral. She narrates her father's time in the Gulag, working at a brickyard, and being sent into the cold river, with a Russian stretch about sentence and bonus. Her mother then sent him parcels, and the family sent the girls away.

Bentsianov points out memorials near the road. One is for those killed in the war. Another, for the Civil War, names revolutionary-committee members tortured by Petliura's men, among them a Jewish teacher and a Pole. Bentsianov and another voice read out the names and discuss how Petliura is now treated.

Litvak gives her father's name, Shilek, and her grandfather's, Yerikhem, both born in Zvil. She recounts a family tradition of coming from Lithuania, with ancestors expelled from Spain, and says the local rabbi and his wife tell her she speaks like a Litvak. Her father also told stories of the Civil War years.

Shveibish speaks of earlier persecution and pogroms, then of the Romanian-run Transnistria period. Local non-Jews looted Jewish property while police and soldiers with dogs and horses drove the Jews, shooting those who could not walk. At night the column was driven through a village called Torkiv, then on to Pechera.

Participants recall childhood in prewar Tul'chyn: songs and stories, sitting on the porch, borrowing live coals for the fire, tea from the samovar and white bread for holidays. They mention pogroms and going barefoot at Purim and Passover.

Yurkovetskij answers questions about his life, mostly in a loosely ordered conversation. He says he trained as a driver in Bratslav in 1937 and drove for decades. During the war he drove in Poland and Finland and served in Odessa; he was wounded in the leg, sent home, and later spent a year in the Pechera camp. He drove a general through Budapest, Prague, Vienna and Berlin, and describes the hunger in Budapest and a general's profiteering. He describes the 1919 pogrom in Tul'chyn, in which his father (a hatmaker), mother and grandfather were killed by a bandit band, and how his grandmother raised him and his brothers in poverty, with a Polish priest involved in his rescue. A brother died in the war, and his sons now live in America. He also names the Jewish streets of Tul'chyn and gives the Jewish population as over ten thousand. He talks about Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin, his school, an old synagogue, Poland and Finland in 1939–40, being wounded in Odessa when the war began, the ghetto in Bershad', and the visitors' own homes.

Poberevskii gives her birth date in July 1914 and says that Yiddish birthday greetings were brought to her by acquaintances. She finished the Jewish school in 1930 at sixteen and then worked as a typist in the court and procuracy. Her father, known as the Stanislavchyk rabbi, preached in Zhmerynka. She names an uncle Elye who was a ritual slaughterer in Moldova and later worked in a kolkhoz. She remembers Stanislavchyk as a Jewish shtetl with Jewish craftsmen and a market, where Christians worked the fields and her mother made ovens. Her father travelled to Proskurov and came back with accounts of a terrible pogrom there. She says there was no pogrom in their own town and relations with neighbours were good. The family left because her father wanted to go to Romania and sold the house cheaply, but they ended up buying a small house in Zhmerynka.

Geller says he left Pyatka in 1936 and that his father worked in the fields. He recalls the Yiddish heard in Vinnytsia region and Zhytomyr, then tells a folk tale about a matchmaker, three daughters and a suitor made to chop wood, which he performs in a rhyming refrain. He did not attend cheder. The Yiddish school became a Ukrainian one with the same director, Frenkl, and he learned a little from his older brother. He also mentions grandfathers killed in earlier violence (details unclear).

Shraibman talks about religion in the family: the grandmothers were very pious, while his grandfather kept holidays but smoked on Sabbath. He tells how during the Civil War an armed band (Budyonny's men?) nearly shot his grandmother. Katz and Kerler then greet someone arriving and mention their song collecting.

She remembers a Passover seder with an honoured guest, her grandfather, and gives her Yiddish and Russian first names, her father's and mother's names and the family surname. She says her father, a doctor, could not practise after the 1905 revolution and pogroms because of restrictions on Jews, and that she herself later joined the Communists.

Geller and Lemster compare how the town's name is said in Yiddish and in Ukrainian, and he places Pyatka about twenty kilometres from Berdychiv. He describes returning from flight to the plundered house, where nothing was left and the family was destitute. Lemster then steers toward Jewish life and the synagogue.

Nibulskiy tells how a childless Christian woman came to the Velednik rebbe on a Sabbath in the synagogue and asked for a child. The rebbe prayed for her, she bore a son and afterwards came every Friday to bring candles to the synagogue. The son later defended Jews in a pogrom, as his grandfather told him.

Nibulskiy tells anecdotes about the Makarov rebbe and his family. A fire burned down the house after the rebbe's advice, but the sick daughter, his grandmother, recovered. His great-grandfather Shimonke was a trader, and the rebbe stayed at his grandfather's house. Other stories are about a lessee at Burakuvka troubled by a German neighbour, the rebbe's way of answering by burning a written note, and a non-Jewish woman who asked the rebbe for a child. He also recalls a pogrom threat at Sukkot and a tailor's mishap.

Shraibman, born 1930, was eleven when the war began and was hidden by non-Jews for about a week and a half. He tells of his maternal grandfather, a tailor who worked in the surrounding villages with a Singer machine, and of another grandfather killed in 1918 by Petliura's men. He describes sheltering with a customer in the village of Dvorishche (?) and the decision to return to town despite warnings. He recounts the arrival of Soviet scouts, the German entry, the formation of a police force, the shooting of Jews and the roundup of about 700 Jews in the militia stable.

Shraibman recalls his grandfather's view of 1918, when he thought the soldiers were cultured people and dismissed reports against them as Soviet propaganda. He then describes how the family fled on foot from their town to Korosten.