We often got together, celebrated birthdays, Jewish holidays and the European New Year. We always followed the events in Israel closely on television and radio. I remember when the Six-Day-War [43] began, my father turned 70 and we wanted to celebrate this birthday, but he said, 'Not while this is happening in Israel.' We were very concerned and couldn't believe that a small country like Israel could win. When all of a sudden victory came! Our friends got together in our home without any pre-arrangements and we had a feast.
- Traditions 11756
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Major events (political and historical)
4256
- Armenian genocide 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Ataturk's death 5
- Balkan Wars (1912-1913) 35
- First Soviet-Finnish War 37
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia 1938 83
- Invasion of France 9
- Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 65
- Varlik Vergisi (Wealth Tax) 36
- First World War (1914-1918) 216
- Spanish flu (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- The Great Depression (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler comes to power (1933) 127
- 151 Hospital 1
- Fire of Thessaloniki (1917) 9
- Greek Civil War (1946-49) 12
- Thessaloniki International Trade Fair 5
- Annexation of Bukovina to Romania (1918) 7
- Annexation of Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (1940) 19
- The German invasion of Poland (1939) 94
- Kishinev Pogrom (1903) 7
- Romanian Annexation of Bessarabia (1918) 25
- Returning of the Hungarian rule in Transylvania (1940-1944) 43
- Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia (1940) 59
- Second Vienna Dictate 27
- Estonian war of independence 3
- Warsaw Uprising 2
- Soviet occupation of the Balitc states (1940) 147
- Austrian Civil War (1934) 9
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- Kolkhoz 131
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- Waldheim affair 5
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- German occupation of Hungary (18-19 March 1944) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (until 1935) 33
- 1956 revolution 84
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Holocaust
9685
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Communism
4468
- Life in the Soviet Union/under Communism (in general) 2592
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- Life after the change of the regime (1989) 493
- Israel / Palestine 2190
- Zionism 847
- Jewish Organizations 1200
Displaying 5401 - 5430 of 50826 results
sarra shpitalnik
I worked at the Medical College for 34 years as director of the bibliographic department and I also held the position of junior employee translating articles from foreign magazines after work. I was good at foreign languages, and even translated from Dutch.
We were a team in the library and there was no anti-Semitism. We celebrated birthdays and Soviet holidays together.
When perestroika [45] began, my mother watched all information programs, particularly, when Gorbachev [46] spoke. She treated him with great sympathy and when he appeared on the screen, she said, 'It's like one's own father comes into the room.' As for me, I lost my respect for him, when he interrupted Sakharov [47] at the congress of deputies [The Congress of People's Deputies, founded in 1989, voted to end the Communist Party's control over the government and elected Gorbachev executive president.] However, we were enthusiastic about perestroika. There were many interesting publications in the press, something that we could only discuss with our closest friends, and there were books published which had been banned before.
By this time the Jewish society appeared in Kishinev. It was something very different for us. There were lectures on Jewish traditions where material and courses in Hebrew were available. In the 1990s the rest of our friends moved to Israel. In 1990 my husband and I decided to move to Israel. We studied Hebrew for half a year. We obtained a visa, when all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with fear. Our friends weren't very encouraging: 'You have no children. You won't have anything to do here. Moisey wouldn't be able to find a job with his occupation, and you wouldn't get any allowances since you've not come of proper age.' This had such an impact on me that when we went to the cemetery to visit the graves of our dear ones, I said, 'Whatever you decide I'm not going.' He said, 'All right, if you don't want to go.' He went back to work though he was a pensioner, and I saw an announcement that our library needed a person who knew Romanian and Yiddish. I went to work there.
My husband and I visited our friends in Israel twice: in 1996 and 1999. We lived in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv. The telephone kept ringing: my former fellow students from Chernovtsy University and our friends from Kishinev wanted to talk to us. We went on tours to Jerusalem, Haifa, Zefat, on the Kineret Lake and I sobbed by the Wailing Wall. My husband was shocked that they managed to grow a garden on stones. Besides, our friend took us to the cactus garden in Holon. This was an amazing view: there were little cactus plants and huge trees and they were blooming beautifully. We took our second trip on a boat from Odessa since my husband could obtain a free ticket as a former ghetto inmate. We bought a ticket for me. We stayed with our friends in Haifa. During our first trip we were in Yad Vashem [48] late in the evening and didn't see anything. In 1999 we went there for the second time. When the tour guide heard that my husband was in the ghetto, she treated us particularly warmly. Israel is very impressive; I believe one has to visit there.
When the charity center Hesed [49] Jehuda opened in Kishinev, I went to work there as a volunteer. Before they got their own building they worked in our library partially. They generated the lists of needy Jews, distributed matzah, or clothes. Every month I lecture on Jewish literature for them. Now I'm working on a lecture on Kanovich, a Jewish Lithuanian writer, who lives in Israel now. We've had a club of pensioners in Hesed for ten years and I'm an active member there. In 1995 I celebrated the presentation of my book 'Jews of Moldova' at the library; it's an annotated guide in Romanian. In 2000, its extended and added edition was issued with a resume in English. Here in the library we celebrated my 70th anniversary [1998] and my husband and my golden wedding [2001].
My maternal grandfather, Srul Orentlikher, came from the town of Starokonstantinov in Ukraine [a district town in Volyn province; according to the census of 1897 it had 16,300 residents and 9212 of them were Jews]. I even have a document confirming that he was a common citizen of Starokonstantinov. Grandfather Srul finished a private Russian gymnasium as an external student and was a private teacher of the Russian language. My mother told me that my grandfather was a follower of Baal Shem Tov [1].
My grandmother's older sister Sura-Feiga Zilberman had a dairy farm near Kishinev. During a pogrom in 1905 the pogrom-makers drowned their cows in the Byk River [this river flows in Kishinev] which was deep at that time. [Editor's note: a lot of pogroms took place all over the western provinces of Russia after 1905. When the Kishinev pogrom broke out in October, the first Jewish self-defense groups [see Jewish self-defense movement] [3] stood up to pogrom-makers.
My mother, Beila Molchanskaya [nee Orentlikher], was born in Kishinev in 1905. Since she had lost her father she was entitled to free education. At first, she finished an elementary Jewish school and then studied at the Skomorovskaya private gymnasium. They studied in Russian, but there was Jewish history and Jewish traditions taught at the school. My mother spoke Yiddish at home.
My paternal grandfather, Meir Molchanskiy, was born in Bessarabia in 1854: I don't know the exact location. He lived in the Jewish farming colony in Dombroveni [Jewish farming settlement in Soroki district, founded in 1836. They grew tobacco and sheep. According to the census in 1897 there were 1,815 residents, of them 1,726 were Jews]. My grandfather Meir rented and later purchased a plot of land. I don't know any details of their everyday life, but I know that Grandfather Meir was deeply religious. When he visited us in Kishinev I always went to the prayer house in the yard of our house to call him for dinner. He prayed there with his head and shoulders covered with a tallit and had a tefillin on. He wore a long black tunic and a cap on his head. My grandfather had a big white beard and a moustache. His sons studied in cheder.
My grandmother Haya was born in Vertyuzhany near Dombroveni in 1860. She observed Jewish traditions and wore a wig.
My father, Shlomo Molchanskiy, was born in Dombroveni in 1897. My father was a very interesting person. He wanted to study instead of farming. He went to cheder where his teacher was Steinberg. At the age of eleven he became an atheist based on some conclusions that he made after studying some discrepancies in the Tanakh. His teacher Steinberg use to say that even if such a decent person was an atheist, it was alright. My father's brothers were against my father's intentions to continue his studies. He had a conflict with them and moved to the neighboring village where he taught Hebrew, the Torah and prayers that he already knew.
Later, my father moved to Soroki and entered a Jewish gymnasium there.
In 1918 Romanian forces came to Bessarabia. [see Annexation of Bessarabia to Romania] [4] Some were marauders. One soldier took away a watch and some other belongings from the Kerchmans, but my father remembered him and when he saw this soldier on a military parade in Soroki, he pointed out this soldier to the officer: 'This soldier robbed my landlords.' I don't know what happened to the soldier, but the officer told my father, 'You must leave Soroki within 24 hours.' My father came to Kishinev with no money, but he found his fellow countrymen there and they helped him. One of them was Samuel Abramovich Magin, who was living in Kishinev. He was an official in the EKO [5] Jewish colonization association funded from London. Samuel Abramovich hired my father to teach his sons, Dodik and Nyuka, Hebrew. He had always wanted to be a teacher and enjoyed teaching the boys, but to be able to earn more he took up a course in accounting. He hated accounting, but worked as an accountant till he died.
Shortly after he rented a room from Grandmother Hava, my parents fell in love with each other and got married in 1927.
My father worked as an accountant in a few offices to make ends meet. He also took part in public activities and worked for a number of Jewish organizations: he was a member of ORT [6], and worked for the League of Culture - Kulturliga [Jewish Kulturliga in Kishinev - public organization. It was spreading modern enlightenment among Jews.] My father had some ties with the communist underground movement. He wasn't a member of the communist party, but he supported communists: they used to type some communist posters on the hectograph in the slaughter house. It was said at home that even Anna Pauker [one of the leaders of the Romanian communist movement, Jewish] was hiding in the slaughter house.
My father also had some contacts with Zionists. He subscribed to a Zionist newspaper in Yiddish in Kishinev, 'Unzere Zeit' [Our time]: it was a must in each Jewish house to have it.
My father also had some contacts with Zionists. He subscribed to a Zionist newspaper in Yiddish in Kishinev, 'Unzere Zeit' [Our time]: it was a must in each Jewish house to have it.
We spoke Yiddish and Russian at home.
At the age of six I went to a Romanian elementary school.
By that time my father was earning well. When I was seven, we bought an apartment in the building in the yard connecting Yekaterininskaya Street and Chasovennyi Lane. There was running water, electricity and gas in the house. There were 26 apartments in the building and all tenants were Jews by some coincidence. It was a whole Jewish settlement: a real eshuv. There were all classes of Jews: from one who married a prostitute to very intelligent educated families. They spoke Yiddish, but knew Russian and many spoke Romanian. We had an apartment on the second floor which comprised four rooms: two had windows on the ceiling, always dirty. My grandmother, who worked and lived with us, had her own room, my parents had a bedroom and there was a living room. I slept in the living room, and had a desk covered with green cloth in my parents' bedroom. One of our relatives, who later perished during the Holocaust, had made this desk. My parents had a nickel-plated bed decorated with shining balls. The rest of the furniture was plain. We had many books in Russian and Yiddish at home. I had my own collection of books in Romanian and Yiddish.
In late 1930, when Hitler came to power a depressing atmosphere settled all over Europe. There were fascists in Romania. Anti-Jewish laws were issued: Jews could only work for Jews, Jews couldn't have Christian servants and there were other restrictions. We heard about what was going on in Europe. We knew that Mr. Baron, the owner of the hotel in which we stayed in Vienna committed suicide before the deportation of Jews.
At first, the Cuzists [8] failed with their first putsch. On our way to the gymnasium we saw dead bodies of Iron Guard [9] members, on the corner of Pushkin and Alexandrovskaya Streets. There was also a poster with the inscription threatening that this was what was to happen to all traitors. We were very inspired thinking that this was the end of fascism, but unfortunately, it wasn't.
Though my father was an atheist, he knew and honored Jewish traditions. He was a real Jew deep in his heart. He had a good conduct of Hebrew and Yiddish and was interested in everything Jewish.
We celebrated Jewish holidays at home, though my father didn't go to the synagogue. Grandmother Hava played an important role here. She was very religious and observed all Jewish traditions: she followed the kashrut and didn't work on Sabbath. The rest of the family didn't follow the kashrut. We ate treyf food. On Jewish holidays my grandmother went to the choral synagogue. She fasted on Yom Kippur and spent a whole day at the synagogue. I would run there to see how she was feeling. My mother also fasted.
On Pesach we always had matzah at home and celebrated seder with the Gersteins. Aunt Sonia's husband, Haim Gerstein, conducted seder according to the rules: He read the Haggadah; his sons Shmuel and Ershel posed the four questions [mah nishtanah] and searched for the afikoman. I remember my father muttering that Haim messed it all up on our way back home. I also remember learning these four questions in Yiddish, I remember I had asked them somewhere, but I can't remember the place.
We celebrated Rosh Hashanah. My parents had many friends, they visited us for a meal and then we went to the town park. This was the season of nuts and grapes. We drank freshly squeezed grape juice. It foamed and was wonderfully delicious.
We also celebrated Chanukkah with Aunt Sonia: this was her birthday. I don't remember money, but Grandmother Hava always made latkes and dumplings filled with cottage cheese and potatoes.
On Purim we made shelakhmones, filled baskets with hamantashen, and other sweets, to take them to our relatives and acquaintances, but there were no performances.
I also remember Khamishoser bishvat, called Tu bi-Shevat at present. We always had Israel fruit on this holiday: raisins, dates, almonds, figs and horn tree pods. Pods had a divine taste, and they looked like acacia pods.
My grandmother and mother cooked delicious food: clear soups, borsch [a traditional Ukrainian beet soup], green soup, dumplings and of course, gefilte fish.