During World War II, Gershl and his wife were in evacuation.
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Displaying 37021 - 37050 of 50826 results
Tsylia Shapiro
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Gershl observed Jewish traditions and celebrated holidays, although I wouldn’t say he was a deeply religious person.
, Ukraine
She had a teacher when she was a child and she could read and write in Yiddish.
, Ukraine
My parents lived in my father’s house after they got married. My father’s brothers and sisters, Gersh, Rachel and Raitsa, lived in the same house – they were single at the time when my parents got married.
Life was miserable. When my older brother Leonid was born in 1922 my mother didn’t even have milk to breastfeed him because she was starving. She dipped some bread in water, wrapped it in a piece of cloth and gave it to the baby to suck. The boy was very sickly: scrofulous and his body was covered with abscesses and boils.
When I was born on 11th July 1924 life was different. My father worked at the factory and my mother was a housewife. My father worked hard to make some money, but what we had was sufficient. We got new furniture in the house: a wooden wardrobe, cupboard and a sofa.
My mother said I had a babysitter: Maria – she was a German woman that came from a German colony [10] in the South.
My brother and I spent summers with my grandmother Khaya and grandfather Avrum in the village.
I often went for walks with other girls in the village. They invited me to their homes where we had dumplings stuffed with potatoes or buckwheat and fried pork fat. My grandmother told me off for eating forbidden pork and pork fat, but I liked this food so much that I continued to keep my visits a secret from my grandmother.
On Saturday our parents arrived to bring me and my brother candy and cookies. Our parents didn’t work on Saturday and came to have a festive dinner with our grandparents on Saturday.
At that time Gersh and his wife went to Birobidzhan [11] – many Jewish families went there to establish the Jewish autonomous region.
Grandfather lived with us in Malin. He began every day from a prayer and went to the synagogue on Saturday. My mother also observed traditions. She knew prayers and could read in Hebrew. I remember carrying my grandfather’s and my mother’s prayer books to the synagogue on Saturday, since they were not allowed to carry things on Saturday.
During the war Gedali was in evacuation somewhere in the taiga in the North.
Rachel, coming next after Gedali, was born in 1890. She became a very good dressmaker. During the Soviet power in the 1930s she had high official clients in Kiev. She went to Kiev where she made fashionable clothing for them and stayed there for several months in a row.
Motl, born after my father in 1895, graduated from the Agricultural Institute in Odessa and became an agronomist.
During the Great Patriotic War Motl was recruited to the army. He didn’t return from the war.
The youngest of the children – Grisha, or Gershl, was born in 1898. In the early 1920s Grisha entered the machine-building college in Zaporozhiye. He fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, a Jewish girl, Annette. She was a schoolgirl and Grisha promised her that he would wait until she finished school to marry her. They got married after she finished school.
At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War Grisha went to the army. Annette and their two children – son Emila and daughter Yana, who was born few months before the war – went into evacuation. Grisha couldn’t find them for a few years. After the war they met; his wife and children were in Omsk and Grisha joined them after demobilization.
Emil became a good doctor and Yana graduated from the Pedagogical Institute.
Uncle Gershl died in the middle of the 1970s and his children Emil and Yana live in the USA with their families.
My father Emil Potievskiy was born in 1893. He only studied in cheder. When his father and older brother were killed in America my father took responsibility for the family: Rachel was married and had to take care of her own family and Gedali didn’t care about the family.
My father went to work at the age of 14 – he became an apprentice of a cabinetmaker.
My father went to work at the age of 14 – he became an apprentice of a cabinetmaker.
My father served in the tsarist army and participated in World War I, he was a private, struggled against Bolsheviks [4] somewhere in Russia. In 1917 he was slightly wounded and demobilized. He returned home in 1917.
My father was a tall and handsome fair-haired man. When he was in his teens he fell in love with his cousin on his mother’s side – my future mother. It was customary in the Jewish community for cousins to form a family and my parents got married in 1921. My parents had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah in the synagogue. They had only a small wedding party – this was a hard period of revolution and civil war [5].
My mother’s parents, Khaya and Avrum Feldman, lived in the village of Guta near Zhytomir. It was a Ukrainian village and there were only three or four Jewish families there.
My grandparents were very religious. There was no synagogue in the village and my grandfather prayed at home twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, with his tallit and tefillin on. I remember taking them out to show them to my friends without asking my grandfather. This was the only time when my grandfather lost his temper and yelled at me, stamping his feet.
My grandparents were very religious. There was no synagogue in the village and my grandfather prayed at home twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, with his tallit and tefillin on. I remember taking them out to show them to my friends without asking my grandfather. This was the only time when my grandfather lost his temper and yelled at me, stamping his feet.
Every Friday my grandmother cleaned the house claying the ground floors – they were shining like an egg yolk. She made food for Saturday and kept it in the Russian stove [6] to keep it warm. On Friday evening we sat down for dinner after washing ourselves and dressing up. My grandmother lit candles saying words of prayer and we started our meal: freshly made challah, chicken and clear soup with dumplings, stewed meat with potato pancakes and stewed carrots. Sometimes my grandfather managed to get some fish from fishermen and we had gefilte fish then.
There was a big and beautiful synagogue in Malin. In the middle of the 1930s it was closed and religious Jews were persecuted [12]. They closed Jewish bakeries where they baked matzah and didn’t allow a minyan – gatherings of religious Jewish men. But still, we always had matzah at Pesach.
I remember my mother taking a big turkey to the shochet and he did something wrong and this turkey was not kosher. My mother cried bitterly – we led a modest life and my mother was sorry for such a loss, while my father hugged her and said, ‘Just take it easy – we’ll just pretend it is kosher meat.’
My father was a real atheist even though he wasn’t a party member. He found Jewish traditions and holidays funny, but he loved his wife and took part in our celebrations. My mother fasted at Yom Kippur and I began to fast when I turned twelve. My favorite holiday was Chanukkah when adults gave children sweets and money.
My father was a real atheist even though he wasn’t a party member. He found Jewish traditions and holidays funny, but he loved his wife and took part in our celebrations. My mother fasted at Yom Kippur and I began to fast when I turned twelve. My favorite holiday was Chanukkah when adults gave children sweets and money.
In 1931 I went to a Jewish school. There were four schools in the town: three Ukrainian and one Jewish one. There were many children in the Jewish school while the Ukrainian schools were not so full. We studied mathematic, Ukrainian language, history, geography. The only difference from Ukrainian schools was that we studied in Yiddish. There were nice children in our school: children of Jewish workers and craftsmen, as well as of Jewish secretaries of the district and town party committees.
In 1932 the period of famine began [13]. My father went to get flour in Kiev and my mother baked bread to sell at the market. We went to the market together and I remember her weighing rations of bread on her scales. There were raids on trains – the authorities captured people if they found food products and declared them ‘speculators’ [people that made money reselling things for higher prices].
My father was on the train once when a raid began, but he managed to escape jumping off the train. He came home without bread or flour, but with his ribs broken. I remember my mother crying. He didn’t go to Kiev again.
Once my mother gave me a piece of pie that she got somewhere. I bit on it greedily, but when I raised my eyes I saw my mother’s hungry eyes. I offered her a piece, but she refused – she said she wasn’t hungry. I was just a child and it didn’t occur to me that my mother pretended she wasn’t hungry to save more for me.
My father was on the train once when a raid began, but he managed to escape jumping off the train. He came home without bread or flour, but with his ribs broken. I remember my mother crying. He didn’t go to Kiev again.
Once my mother gave me a piece of pie that she got somewhere. I bit on it greedily, but when I raised my eyes I saw my mother’s hungry eyes. I offered her a piece, but she refused – she said she wasn’t hungry. I was just a child and it didn’t occur to me that my mother pretended she wasn’t hungry to save more for me.
There were hundreds of people at his funeral – my father’s colleagues, neighbors and relatives. At home the rabbi said a prayer for my father and then the funeral was civil – his friends and colleagues made speeches. My father was buried in the Jewish cemetery.