Shklov was a small, green, and very picturesque town. It's famous in Russian history. When it was still a village, Catherine II [1] declared it one of her favorites. Poles lived there, Belarus and a lot of Jews, too. They were generally craftsmen. Everyone lived in peace and friendship. The doors of our house were never locked.
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Displaying 9691 - 9720 of 50826 results
gisya rubinchik
My father was born around 1885. I don't know anything about his education. He served in the army from 1914 to 1918, participated in World War I, and then in the Civil War [3]. He was a very strong person, strong-willed and brave. He didn't join any party and stayed away from politics.
We lived with my father's parents. They were deeply religious people, strictly adhering to traditions. My grandfather's name was Yankel Lapis. I remember him praying and reading old books all the time. They were Jewish books, principally the Talmud. Grandmother didn't read books, she did all the housework. Grandfather had a tallit and tefillin, and, of course a kippah. He wasn't a rabbi, but read so much, knew so much about Jewish history, was such a wise and fair person, that 'Yankel Lapis from Shklov' was almost considered a saint by everyone in town! I can't remember any specific case, but people used to come and consult him.
Of course all Jewish traditions were strictly kept and respected in our house. Everything was done exactly in accordance with traditions. The oven wasn't lit on Saturdays - meals were prepared beforehand. And, certainly, all holidays were celebrated, including Pesach, and Sukkot. Grandfather made a sukkah out of fur-tree branches in the kitchen garden and lived there as long as it was necessary.
We attended the synagogue, too. There were two synagogues in Shklov. One of them was a big, two-storied synagogue. Women were praying separately from men, on the second floor. The other synagogue was one-storied. We went to the small one more often, because it was closer to our home. When I lived in Shklov with my parents, we visited the synagogue every week, and, of course, on major Jewish holidays.
On Fridays my mother used to put a clay pot with coffee and milk into the Russian furnace, and baked cinnamon buns. These buns, I think, were called plekhah. She also baked crackers: cut the dough, sprinkled the slices with sugar and dried them in the oven. Such a tasty thing that was! I took them to school to treat my friends. On Saturdays, after visiting the synagogue, grandfather Gersh usually came to see us.
Both Yiddish and Russian were spoken in the house, but adults mostly spoke Russian with the kids. I spoke some Yiddish with my grandfathers and grandmothers, and sometimes with my parents. I remember Yiddish a little bit; I could write in Yiddish, and I remember the names of the months.
Grandfather Yankel's home, where we lived, was a one-storied wooden house, but rather a large one. A part of the house was later taken away from him, when the so-called dispossession of the kulaks [5] began. We lived in terribly poor conditions. Father was an invalid and couldn't earn much. He worked in a company for the handicapped as a cutter of footwear.
My parents, and everybody else, wore very simple clothes. They were no suits or any fashionable clothes. In winter they wore short fur coats, and women wore checkered woolen kerchiefs. Jewish women didn't wear wigs in Russia in the 1930s. Both men and women wore Russian countryside-style clothes: a vest, a shirt and a frock coat. Men didn't wear kippot, only peaked caps. Kippot were only put on in the synagogue. All in all, it was a peasant's outfit. But we [children] were treated and dressed in better clothes.
Our parents also wanted us to get an education, and we tried our best to study well. Up to the 4th grade I went to an elementary school. I even remember, what my first teacher's name was - Evgenia Ignatievna. Later I changed to another school, where I studied up to the 8th grade. And it was in a third school that I finally completed my secondary education, the 10th grade.
My brother, Yuda, was born on 8th March 1921. He didn't go to cheder, because there were no more cheders after the Revolution of 1917. He studied in an ordinary Soviet school like me, with kids of various nationalities: Poles, Russians and Jews.
Nobody ever paid any attention to people's nationalities at school.
My brother loved to read, too, we had a lot of Russian books at home - purchased or borrowed from the library. We used to read even late at night. I wrote very good compositions.
I lived in Shklov until 1937. After leaving school I went to Smolensk to enter the Medical Institute. I went there with my friend Raya, though my mother advised me to pursue drawing. I studied for two and a half years in Smolensk. Then my parents decided that it was better for me to live closer to my brother, who was a student at the Leningrad Aircraft Institute by then. So in the winter of 1940 I found myself in Leningrad, and continued as a student of the 1st year at the Medical Institute.
When the war began, I lived in a student hostel in Leo Tolstoy Square, and my brother was staying in a hostel in Moskovsky Avenue. Soon we had to move to other places. The war turned our lives upside down. All students were ordered to take part in defense preparations. We [medical students] dug trenches near Kingisepp. When we were unloading heavy beams, one of them fell down on me, injuring my hip joint. Since that accident I have had trouble walking. When we returned from trench works, we were commissioned to night and day shifts in a hospital in the old center of Leningrad. In the meanwhile, lectures in the Medical Institute continued.
The first winter of the blockade [8], 1941-1942, was the most awful one. The temperature fell to 30 degrees Celsius below zero. People were starving. My brother was could not work any more. But Aunt Rose made the poor boys take out the slops and carry water to the third floor. They had to live one way or another! My brother was weaker than me, he had been suffered from a liver disease since his childhood. I supported him as much as I could.
After shifts in the hospital and lectures at the Institute, I used to walk a long way through the city in the nipping frost, and brought my relatives bread. When Aunt Rose died, and Yasha followed her shortly after, Yuda gave himself up to despair completely. Each time I came, he said, that I would be burying him on my next visit. I remember him lying there, unable to get up any more, wasting away in front of my eyes, and I tried to convince him, 'Come on, Yuda, brace yourself up, this nightmare will be over soon'. But on 14th March 1942 I found him dead. A few days before, on 8th March, he had turned 21. I buried him myself.
My sister Sonya, who had only turned 11 at the outbreak of war, remained in Shklov with our parents. At the beginning of the war I lost contact with them. I still have my mother's last letter from 27th June 1941. She wrote, 'Maybe we can survive this thunder-storm, as we did in 1918...'. She couldn't imagine what would happen to them, what vile atrocities the Germans would commit. They were all buried alive in Shklov, in the mound between the lake and the Dnieper River, in the very same place, where the mill once stood, where my father and grandfather worked. [This was the famed Shklov killings.] [9] For three days the ground was stirring on that spot, and groans of people were heard from under the ground. All my relatives were murdered there: my mother, father, both grandfathers, both grandmothers, my sister Sonya, Aunt Haya and her son Misha; and, thousands of other Jews. I didn't know about it back then. After the war I wrote many letters to official bodies in Minsk and many other places. I was searching for exact information, but it was in vain. I got no answer whatsoever. Later I learned everything about this tragedy from eyewitnesses.
I received my diploma in 1946. After graduation I was directed to work in the House of Sanitary Education. When I came there, the managers were surprised. They didn't need practical doctors. So I was told to look for another job myself. I found one with the Institute of Experimental Medicine without any patronage and despite my nationality. There was no anti- Semitism yet. The only thing I was concerned about was my lack of experience. I remember walking down the corridor looking for the director's office. The director asked me what I was interested in. I said that I liked chemistry and knew how to draw. 'OK,' he remarked, 'we need someone who can work with the microscope and draw in the Histology Department.' But actually there was a vacancy only in the Department of General Comparative Morphology, headed by professor Nasonov. And my chief, Michael Abramovich Brown, was a wonderful man. Following the reorganization of the Institute I was transferred to the Department of General Pathology. I worked there for almost 30 years until my retirement.
I have to say that my colleagues treated me well. I didn't feel any humiliation.
Even in the most gruesome times, during the so-called Doctors' Plot [10]. We, just like employees of other Soviet establishments, constantly had political training: we studied Marxism-Leninism, Stalin's works and historical materialism. We were permanently engaged in all sorts of political seminars and meetings. I was often appointed secretary at these meetings because of my nice handwriting. I remember how we condemned the 'poisoning doctors' in our Institute. And everyone believed it was true, including me. The paradox of the Soviet regime consisted in the fact that people were made to believe the most improbable things and even renounce their relatives. This is what one can call mass foolishness.
I got married in 1945. We had no wedding celebration at all. What kind of a wedding party would it have been anyway, in 1945, after everything that we had gone through?! I got acquainted with my husband, Pavel Abramovich Rubinchik, a Jew, at a friend's home.
He was an engineer, fought at the Leningrad front and was wounded.
I did not lead a religious life. We only had atheism and the Soviet political propaganda before the war, when I was a student, and even after the war.
I was a scientific worker and thus didn't need to be a member of the Communist Party. Luckily, I didn't experience any anti-Semitism or political repressions.
I regularly get various kind of support from Hesed, and I appreciate it a lot.
Vera Burdenko
n religious Jewish families a wife had to be younger than her husband, hold a lower social position and education. She couldn't have been married before, or have a child. If she didn't meet all these requirements neither the parents nor a rabbi would have allowed such marriage. Of course, his parents were dead against our marriage. I, too, thought and told him that the differences made it impossible for us to be together. But Valeriy didn't give up. He visited me and he played with my son. He was so caring that I gave in. I also recalled that my mother was ten years younger than my father but that they loved each other so much and lived a long life with this love.
Valeriy was 14 years younger than me and grew up in a traditional Jewish family. His father was deeply religious. His whole family was religious. His parents were fasting at Yom Kippur. They cooked traditional food and observed Sabbath, went to the synagogue regularly and followed the kashrut. Valeriy was used to the Jewish way of life, but he wasn't religious himself.
, Ukraine
In 1953 Stalin died. There was a meeting in the concert hall and the actors went onstage to hold a speech, and they cried and each of them said that we had lost 'our father', etc. My friend and I were sitting in the audience. And all of a sudden we burst out laughing. It must have been either out of nervousness or because we just couldn't bear the hypocrisy of it all. The master of ceremony came to reprimand us. He threatened that they would ask us to leave the ceremony. So we had to calm down. We were afraid that they might dismiss or arrest us afterwards.
was a 4th-year student when I married Yavorskiy, a music expert. He was a Jew and he was many years older than I. We didn't last a year together. His attitude towards me was fatherly and he patronized me even after we got divorced in 1950. He was very well-known in the Kiev musical circles but even he couldn't help me to stay in Kiev.