When after the breakup of the USSR [1991] Ukraine gained independence I was hoping for a better life. Ukraine is a rich country: it has fruitful lands and natural deposits. There are good reserves requiring effective management, but I don’t see it happening. Life is more difficult than it was during the Soviet rule. My heart squeezes when I see comely old women digging in garbage pans looking for food leftovers.
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Major events (political and historical)
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- The German invasion of Poland (1939) 94
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Holocaust
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Communism
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Displaying 31981 - 32010 of 50826 results
Ignac Neubauer
Fortunately, Hesed provides assistance to us, Jews. Old people can have free meals in the Hesed canteen and Hesed delivers meals to those who cannot leave their homes. We also receive food packages and clothes. I’ve been invited to this canteen many times, but I prefer my own cooking. It’s not bragging on my part, but many housewives ask me for my recipes of traditional Jewish cuisine. My daughter’s family likes my cooking as well. I’ve had two infarctions and several serious surgeries. Hesed helps me with medications and I can consult a doctor from Hesed. When my wife was ill, Hesed also helped us. A visiting nurse from Hesed came to look after her and we received all necessary medications. Lubov died in 2003. Hesed helped us with funeral arrangements.
Hesed takes great efforts to revive the Jewry of Subcarpathia. There clubs where Jews of all ages study Hebrew and Jewish religion and traditions. My grandson also studies there. Besides, he is a member of the club for Jewish youngsters in Hesed. There are clubs of foreign languages, la literature studio, a choir and dance studio. There is a club for older people in Hesed where they can talk, listen to music or watch a film having a cup of tea. This is so wonderful since older people suffer more from solitude than diseases. Besides, there is a Jewish community and I have been chairman at the synagogue for 8 years. I know Yiddishkeit and can help those who are just coming to the religion of his ancestors. We go to the synagogue 4 times a week and people got used to this. Now we finally have a rabbi and this is a big relief for us. Young people begin to attend the synagogue and we are very happy about it.
However, there is still anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Actually, it exists on everyday life level, but it is still there. It is possible to fight open anti-Semitism through court or state authorities, but when a young guy in the street yelled ‘Heil Hitler!’ seeing me, this means that fascism is alive and it can come back in Ukraine. Only if everybody stands against it there can be hope that all those horrors it brought to our country once would never recur.
Frida Muchnik
Bershad is my hometown, too. I was born and lived my life here, and my parents were buried here. Bershad is a rather big Jewish town, in the 19th Century about 90% of its population was Jewish. In the early 1920s there were over 6 thousand Jews living there. Jews resided in small houses closely adjusting to one another in the central part of the town. The streets were paved with cobbles. In the old times Jews dealt in crafts: they were tailors, shoemakers, potters, glasscutters earning their living with what they were best at doing. They bought food products from Ukrainian farmers from the neighboring villages. They had good neighborly relationships. All residents of our town spoke Yiddish, but we all knew Ukrainian well, as well as Ukrainian residents could speak good Yiddish.
I don’t know what kind of education my grandfather Yankel had. I think he must have finished a vocational school. He worked as executive manager for a wealthy Jewish merchant. All I know about this merchant is that he lived near where my grandparents lived. Grandfather Yankel earned well, and the family was rather well-off. Grandmother Frima was a housewife, which was customary for a Jewish woman. According to what my father told me, grandfather Yankel was a kind and nice man, and grandmother Frima was a strong-willed woman. Papa said she did not only manage the household, but also inquired about grandfather’s business issues and gave him efficient advice. Besides his work, grandfather spent most of his time reading the Torah and the Talmud. He prayed every morning. He prayed at home with his tallit and tefillin on at home, and on Sabbath and on Jewish holidays He and grandmother went to the synagogue. They piously observed all Jewish traditions at home and raised their children Jewish.
My father was two-three years younger than his brothers: Motl, the oldest, was born in 1882, and Folyk - in 1884. I don’t know what they did for a living. I know, though, that they were married and had children. When WWI began, they crossed the border to Romania to avoid service in the army. At this point of time Jews gathered into groups, gave bribes to frontier guards, who pretended they didn’t see how they crossed the border. From Romania they could move further on.
My father Moisey Muchnik was born in Bershad in 1886. He took after his father: he was quiet, gentle and kind. Though my grandfather could well afford to pay for his education, my father finished cheder and decided that he had to go to work to support his aging parents. He became a craftsman making fur jackets and embroidering them, this was a popular craft in Bershad.
When WWI began and his brothers decided to escape abroad my father didn’t dare to take up this risky venture due to his gentle character, probably. He didn’t want to go to serve in the czarist army either. Besides, religious orthodox Jews – and grandfather Yankel and his family belonged to them, could not kill people, even for the sake of their motherland. Some Jews turned to mutilation to avoid service in the czarist army. There were even such individuals, probably, the ones having primary medical education, who did such injuries that did not threaten those people’s life, but released them from their military duty. They injured eyes, and then the person actually grew blind due to the wall rye. My father was very handsome and girls liked him. He didn’t want to make himself ugly and he had one ear injured – they broke his ear drum and he had a hearing problem. My father avoided recruitment to the army, but he had a hearing problem fro the rest of his life and it particularly bothered him at his old age, when he actually became an invalid.
My grandfather owned a store selling an assortment of everyday consumer goods. Besides, my grandfather’s family rented a part of the river adjusting to the house and a mill. Every Friday my grandmother and her daughters sold the fish from the river in Chechelnik where Jewish housewives bought it for Sabbath. My grandfather’s family worked from dawn till late in the evening and was well respected by Ukrainians, particularly that my grandfather was a very honest man.
The Roiter family also respected their neighbors. Mama told me they never worked on Sunday to be seen by Ukrainian villagers or on Christian holidays respecting the other people’s religion. When the Roiters had candles lit in their house on Friday, their Ukrainian neighbors knew that Iosif could not take the money in his hands to sell his goods. They could come into the store, put the money where they knew and took whatever they needed. Not once did anybody cheated on my grandfather. On Saturday a Ukrainian woman came to my grandfather’s home to do whatever chores were needed.
During the Great Patriotic War3 Sura’s family wads in the ghetto in Obodovka.
During the Civil War4 in 1918 Ehil and his wife rode their own wagon to go a wedding in the neighboring village, when they were caught by a gang5, one of many in Ukraine at the time. They killed Ehil, bullied his wife and let her go. Ehil was buried in the Jewish cemetery according to the ritual. My grandfather recited the Kaddish over his grave. My grandmother mourned after him for a long time. She never recovered from the loss of her son.
My mother Elka, born in 1895, had no education. She worked hard helping her parents about the house. Her stepmother was not good to her and mama knew she needed to take care of herself. At this moment Leya, a matchmaker from Bershad, came onto the scene. She showed mama a photo of my father with his brothers where they were photographed wearing posh fur hats. Mama agreed to marry him. Since her mother had died recently, there was actually no wedding. In early 1918 the bride and the bridegroom were married under a chuppah at the synagogue in Bershad. There was a small wedding dinner at home for the closest relatives.
Mama told me that during pogroms6, their family and their neighbors took shelter in the basement of the house. When little Velvl was crying, mama went with him to hide in haystacks in the field.
Our family had two rooms and a kitchen with a Russian stove8 where mama baked bread and delicious challot for Sabbath. She kept Saturday dinners that she cooked in advance on Friday, in the stove as well. Mother and father did no work on Saturday in conformity with Jewish traditions. However, neither mama nor papa was as religious as their parents. My father was raised religious, but watching indecent conduct of Jews at the synagogue where they argued and cursed, he grew indifferent to religion. He said that if a Jew prayed from morning till night, wears a kippah, etc., this still does not prove his Jewish identity since a real Jew is the one who follows the covenants and lives an honest life. My father wore a kippah to go to the synagogue. Mama and papa went to the synagogue on holidays. In the course of time Sabbath turned into an ordinary day off in our house, and mama gave up lighting candles. She or father did not cover their heads. Celebration of holidays was just delicious dinners. I don’t remember celebrating Chanukkah or Purim in my childhood, but I started fasting on Yom Kippur at the age of 13 and I follow this fasting up to date.
Our family had a modest living. My father was a skilled jacket maker and worked hard. Since there were many jacket makers in Bershad they divided the adjusting areas to avoid any disagreements about their customers. My father made jackets for few neighboring villages. He often stayed in one village for weeks to cover the demand of villagers for jackets. Villagers also stayed in our house, when they traveled to the town. They left some food products to pay for the warm welcome and a place to stay overnight. Mama was different than my gentle and quiet father. She was business-oriented and took up any work she could lay her hands on. In due time she developed her own business that was a great support to our family. Villagers brought their meat for sale to our house. Mama weighed and sold it and gave the money to villagers. They gave her some meat and other food products, so we never felt short of food in our houses. Mama’s business was based on trust, and she never demanded any receipts or other security from villagers.
We locked our home, took the most necessary things with us and moved to the Jewish kolkhoz9, in Dnepropetrovsk region, 600 km from Bershad, where we received an apartment in the house with another Jewish family. Mama went to work in the kolkhoz and soon she became leader of a crew of wine growers. She was used to hard work. My father also worked in the kolkhoz.
The joy of coming home was saddened: this was a period of famine10 in Ukraine. Only many years later we got to know that this famine was provoked by Stalin and his government, but at that time people felt perplexed: how could people starve to death in Ukraine that had never lacked bread? I remember dead people in Bershad, early in the morning wagon pulled by a weak horse rode along the streets full of dead bodies. The situation was hard in our house as well, but thanks to mama’s energy and hard work our family survived. Mama went to work to a recently established Jewish kolkhoz. She was a crew leader. She received some miserable ration of food in the kolkhoz. My father went to work in a craftsmen association in Bershad. It consisted of those craftsmen, who managed to survive after the NEP was liquidated. After work my father made and altered clothes for the villagers he knew and they paid him with food products. They managed to grow some vegetables in their gardens. Villagers came to the town to sell whatever little food they had and mama was an intermediary for them and received some small reward for her work. Any people took their valuables to the Torgsin,11 but mama had spent all her jewelry to build the house, and we had nothing left. However hard the situation was for the family, they never let me feel it – mama adored me beyond limits, and my father and brothers loved me dearly. I always knew I would never be refused of anything.
When it was time for me to go to school, my parents had no doubts about what school to choose for me. My brothers went to the Jewish school and this was where I went. This school was built as a Jewish gymnasium for girls by a wealthy Jewish woman before the revolution of 1917.12 The construction was completed after the revolution and became a Jewish school.
Our family spoke mostly Yiddish and this was the language of my childhood. Our family also spoke fluent Ukrainian and so did I.
There was a big new club in Bershad where theatrical groups came on tours. My father brought tickets from his work. Mama and I dressed up and went to their performances. These were amateur and professional Jewish theaters for the most part.
I had many friends, they were mostly Jewish girls – my schoolmates. I became a pioneer13, and I liked wearing a red neck tie. I liked Soviet holidays: 1 May, October revolution Day14, when there were parades in our town. I went to parades with my school, and asked my mother to make me a new outfit for every parade. I wore a Ukrainian folk outfit one time, an embroidered blouse and a coral necklace, or a kossack costume15 another time. There were concerts in the club in the evenings. At one time I recited poems in these amateur concerts. Our favorite pastime was going to the cinema. I remember children’s movies, movies about the Civil War and comedies. The boys were fond of the legendary hero of the Civil War – Chapayev [Chapayev, Vassiliy Ivanovich (1887 - 1919), Soviet commander, hero of the civil War. Played a significant role in the defeat of counterrevolutionary forces.] and there was a movie about him entitled ‘Chapayev’. My brother Ehil watched it 15 times. I liked comedies ‘Volga-Volga’, ‘Circus’ and others. In the late 1930s we got a radio at home and I listened to brave and optimistic Soviet songs.
We didn’t celebrate Soviet holidays at home. If it was a day off, mama cooked a festive dinner. Our family traditionally got together on Jewish holidays. Mama prepared for Pesach according to the customs. She cleaned the house. We also had special crockery that we kept in a special box. There was also a special dish to place the food required on this holiday. Besides mandatory dishes mama cooked gefilte fish, stew, little pies filled with mince, potatoes and cabbage, beetroot borscht. Mother and father went to the synagogue, but we didn’t have seder at home. A holiday was another occasion for the family to get together. This became particularly important after my brothers left home.
Or family got to know that the Great Patriotic War began from the Molotov18 speech that the whole country listened to on 22 June 1941 at noon. On that same day the recruitment began. Mama was sobbing. She knew that her sons would be taken to the army and she would not see them. This was true – we never saw my brothers again. We know that Velvl perished during the defense of Odessa, but we know even less about Ehil – he disappeared during the retreat in 1941. We got this information after the war.
When fascists came into the town, they gathered all Jews in the ghetto that occupied the central part of the town. Our house was beyond the boundaries of the ghetto and we had to leave it. We moved into the house of a Jewish family that had evacuated from the town. The ghetto was fenced with a barbed wire and there were policemen guards at the gate. The inmates were not allowed to leave the ghetto. Bershad belonged to the so-called Transnistria19 zone that was annexed to Romania. The Romanian occupants replaced the German troops. Many people think that the life was easier under the Romanian rule. It is true that the Romanians did not conduct actions aimed at the extermination of Jews, but we lived under the constant threat of death from hunger, infectious diseases, and hits of drunken Romanian policemen with their batons. Our lives were within a hair’s breadth from death. The girls of my age were abused in a beastly manner, and my mother decided I should stay in hiding from the very beginning. It’s hard to imagine that I stayed in shelters for two and a half years: in the basement, in the attic or in the shed, when fascists or policemen searched the houses. My parents managed to hide me so that I didn’t go to work one day through this period. Girls were taken to wash floors in the commandant office and hospital, wash blood-stained bandages, they were beaten and abused. Mama rescued me from this. She gave money to representatives of the Jewish counsel Judenrat,20 established in the ghetto and responsible for supplying workforce to the occupants, when they came to the house searching for me, or she just kept me in a shelter. Mama was also our breadwinner. She bribed policemen to get out of the ghetto where she could always find some Ukrainian friends willing to help us. Mama gave them money or things, or worked for them and they gave her potatoes, bread, beans that mama brought to the ghetto. At least, I did not starve, and mama and papa pretended they had enough food: for them the most important thing as to provide sufficient food for me. Many Jewish families gave shelter to Jews from Bessarabia21 that had been deported here. They were in a terrible condition. They were not so used or adjusted to hardships. They were exhausted after their long walk here. Many of them had died. When they arrived at Bershad, they brought typhus and tuberculosis to the ghetto. Many inmates were dying. Their dead bodies were removed by a wagon and buried in a common grave in the vicinity of the ghetto. Mama refused to have Bessarabian Jews where we were staying. She was afraid of diseases, but she tried to support them sharing whatever little food we had with them.
Of course, there was no way to observe Jewish traditions in the ghetto. All we were concerned about was how to survive. However, all three of us fasted on the Judgment Day [Yom Kippur].
In the middle of March 1944 the Soviet army liberated us. The Partisan unit with Yasha at the head of it was the first to come into the ghetto and the Soviet tanks followed them. They installed their field kitchen and made delicious cooked cereal for inmates of the ghetto. I got out of the basement: I could not believe that the horrific years of occupation were over.
I went back to school and finished the 8th and the 9th forms. Then I had to go to work to help my parents. The thing is, in the postwar years education in senior school was not free: they charged 150 rubles per year. I still studied in the 10th form, when I became an apprentice in the bank where my cousin sister worked as a cashier. Director of the school did not know I was working. After finishing school I entered an extramural Bank Technical school in Vinnitsa. I worked diligently and was a smart employee, when in 1947 the bank received a direction to have no related employees in the bank. Though a nephew of the manager of the bank worked in this bank, and chief accountant had her niece working in this same bank, they fired me since I was the poorest and had no rights. So I lost my job in this hard and hungry year of 1947. Life was very hard, and again my father’s Ukrainian friends helped us. Shortly afterward I went to work as a cashier to the ‘New life’ cooperative of invalids. I worked there a little over one year. The members of this cooperative happened to distort their documents, speculated, produced many products without registering them in production lists, and in 1949 an assize court took place in Bershad. All employees, but me, went to trial. They were sentenced to imprisonment. I went to work in the ‘Trud’ [labor] cooperative. I worked there for many years.
There were many Jews in Bershad in the early 1950s – almost all those who survived the Great Patriotic War returned home. Probably for this reason there was no such adamant anti-Semitism here in the late 1940s-early 1950s, the period of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’23 and the ‘doctors’ plot’24 went past us. We didn’t read newspapers and had no interest in politics. The main thing then was to survive and the rest seemed insufficient. I didn’t hear about these campaigns till the 1990s. I remember a meeting in the central square, when Stalin died: all people were crying and so was I.