I don’t know when exactly my great-grandfather moved to St. Petersburg from Polotsk, but I heard from my relatives that being a craftsman with a business of his own he obtained a permit in the second half of the 19th century from the Petersburg Crafts Board for residence in St. Petersburg with his family [1]. My grandfather and my father obtained such permits later, as they were in the same craft.
- Traditions 11756
- Language spoken 3019
- Identity 7808
- Description of town 2440
- Education, school 8506
- Economics 8772
- Work 11672
- Love & romance 4929
- Leisure/Social life 4159
- Antisemitism 4822
-
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
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- Collapse of Habsburg empire 3
- Dollfuß Regime 3
- Emigration to Vienna before WWII 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Mineriade 1
- Post War Allied occupation 7
- Waldheim affair 5
- Trianon Peace Treaty 12
- NEP 56
- Russian Revolution 351
- Ukrainian Famine 199
- The Great Terror 283
- Perestroika 233
- 22nd June 1941 468
- Molotov's radio speech 115
- Victory Day 147
- Stalin's death 365
- Khrushchev's speech at 20th Congress 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- German occupation of Hungary (18-19 March 1944) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (until 1935) 33
- 1956 revolution 84
- Prague Spring (1968) 73
- 1989 change of regime 174
- Gomulka campaign (1968) 81
-
Holocaust
9685
- Holocaust (in general) 2789
- Concentration camp / Work camp 1235
- Mass shooting operations 337
- Ghetto 1183
- Death / extermination camp 647
- Deportation 1063
- Forced labor 791
- Flight 1410
- Hiding 594
- Resistance 121
- 1941 evacuations 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristallnacht 34
- Eleftherias Square 10
- Kasztner group 1
- Pogrom in Iasi and the Death Train 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann system 11
- Struma ship 17
- Life under occupation 803
- Yellow star house 72
- Protected house 15
- Arrow Cross ("nyilasok") 42
- Danube bank shots 6
- Kindertransport 26
- Schutzpass / false papers 95
- Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) 24
- Warsaw Uprising (1944) 23
- Helpers 521
- Righteous Gentiles 269
- Returning home 1090
- Holocaust compensation 112
- Restitution 109
- Property (loss of property) 595
- Loss of loved ones 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Talking about what happened 1807
- Liberation 558
- Military 3322
- Politics 2640
-
Communism
4468
- Life in the Soviet Union/under Communism (in general) 2592
- Anti-communist resistance in general 63
- Nationalization under Communism 221
- Illegal communist movements 98
- Systematic demolitions under communism 45
- Communist holidays 311
- Sentiments about the communist rule 930
- Collectivization 94
- Experiences with state police 349
- Prison/Forced labor under communist/socialist rule 449
- Lack or violation of human and citizen rights 483
- Life after the change of the regime (1989) 493
- Israel / Palestine 2190
- Zionism 847
- Jewish Organizations 1200
Displaying 26251 - 26280 of 50826 results
Susanna Breido
![](/themes/custom/centro/flags/ru.svg)
I remember my great-grandfather Yerukhim from the time when I was five or six years old. He wore a moustache, a full beard, divided into two parts, and a skullcap.
When he spoke Hebrew with my father and discussed complicated stories, which were obscure for me, he translated something for me every two-three minutes, because he thought that a child shouldn’t be left in the dark. I couldn’t acquire a better lesson as a teacher-to-be. His influence on my father was great.
He told my father that he had to get back to the comments he had done earlier on the Talmud, because life had forced him to reconsider everything all over again. They talked a lot about the history of various nations and religions. It seems to me now that it was what is called kabbalism. Kabbalists have to know the history of various nations as well as the history of their own faith. They never mentioned in their conversations that people choose their destiny and their time.
My great-grandfather was an Orthodox Jew, he observed all the Jewish traditions and prayed a lot. He taught that if one found oneself in a foreign country, in a non-Jewish society, one should never express disrespect for the traditions of the other nations, as this makes one disrespectful of oneself; though one should know very well and stick to one’s own traditions. Of course, my father told me all this when I grew up, because at the time when I was in touch with my great-grandfather, I was too small to understand such things.
Great-grandfather died in Leningrad in 1932. He was buried near an old office, a red brick building near the synagogue. But owing to reforms and reconstructions, which took place later, his grave was lost. When we returned from Novgorod in 1939, we weren’t able to find Great-grandfather’s grave.
Grandmother Riva had probably had no education, but she was very thrifty and independent. She cooked perfectly and her food was most delicious on Jewish holidays.
Father worked at the Breido Brothers Chemical cooperative until 1930. Grandfather Chaim was the owner and Father was the chief administrator, who managed everything. He was dealing with the watches [duty teams], kept the accounting and held negotiations with the suppliers and customers.
On 15th January 1931 the workshop was shut down, Father was accused of using hired labor, regardless of the fact that members of the cooperative received a certain share payment, and at the end of the year the profit was distributed between all of them; besides, Father and his brothers worked from early morning till late at night. But no one was interested in this.
They were ‘bourgeois’ for the authorities and they were to be ‘dispossessed’ as kulaks [4]. Grandfather as an old man was exiled to Novgorod, to the ‘101th kilometer,’ he was deprived of his rights for three years. [Editor’s note: For any of several reasons the Soviet government did not allow people, who were exiled, to live closer than 100 kilometers to big cities. Novgorod was considered a big city.]
The brothers were exiled to other cities. Father was arrested as the principal, put into the famous Leningrad ‘Kresty’ prison and later transferred to ‘Butyrka’ [Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow].
They were ‘bourgeois’ for the authorities and they were to be ‘dispossessed’ as kulaks [4]. Grandfather as an old man was exiled to Novgorod, to the ‘101th kilometer,’ he was deprived of his rights for three years. [Editor’s note: For any of several reasons the Soviet government did not allow people, who were exiled, to live closer than 100 kilometers to big cities. Novgorod was considered a big city.]
The brothers were exiled to other cities. Father was arrested as the principal, put into the famous Leningrad ‘Kresty’ prison and later transferred to ‘Butyrka’ [Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow].
Grandfather, as well as his father, wore a moustache and a beard and a skullcap. Grandmother didn’t wear a headscarf as many other Jewish women did, but remained bareheaded.
My father’s parents were Orthodox Jews, Yiddish was their mother tongue and they spoke only this language with each other. However, Grandfather also knew Hebrew. I remember that he always sat in the room with his prayer books. He was sent somewhere; then he came back and continued his prayers. All Jewish traditions were observed in the family. I remember how Grandmother was washing and cleaning the dishes endlessly; they only ate kosher food.
All relatives celebrated Jewish holidays at my grandfather’s. Up to 30 people gathered there. Grandfather lived with his daughter’s family in a big apartment one floor above his daughter. Grandfather checked that everything was according to the rules: prayers, candles lighting, all ceremonies. This was so in Leningrad, as well as in Novgorod. Grandfather attended the synagogue and in Novgorod he prayed in some chapel, where ten Jews [that is, a minyan] gathered for praying. Grandfather Chaim, unlike his father, had no interest in any other religion; he thought that Jews should by all means preserve their religion and traditions, that is why he was strongly against mixed marriages.
Grandmother Riva supported her husband with regard to traditions.
Grandmother Riva supported her husband with regard to traditions.
She died in 1940 of pneumonia. She, as many Galyorkins, had weak lungs, but suffered from such a form of tuberculosis, which allowed her to live up to the age of 80. She was buried at the Jewish Preobrazhensky cemetery in Leningrad. The funeral was carried out according to the Jewish rite.
Grandfather Chaim died at the beginning of the winter of 1942 in Leningrad, which was besieged by the Germans. He starved, in spite of the fact that his daughter Tsylya, with whom he lived, tried to provide some food for him. She sold her belongings, but it wasn’t enough. It was certainly not possible to keep kosher during the blockade [6], as there was nothing to eat at all. Grandfather died of dystrophy. It was really difficult to bury him. Albert, Grandfather’s younger son Isaac’s son, knocked up not a coffin, but a plywood case, which fell into pieces when it was pulled downstairs from the third floor. Tsylya’s husband Lyova Katznelson dragged Grandfather’s corpse on a piece of plywood to the Preobrazhensky cemetery, paid off the cemetery attendant with Grandfather’s bread [that is, his daily ration [7]] and buried him there.
Great-grandfather Yerukhim had more children, but I know something only about Grandfather Chaim’s stepbrother Isaac, who was born in 1889, the same year my father was born. At first he worked at the Breido Brothers cooperative, but later they had a fight and he quit. He married a Russian woman and converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. His name was changed to Alexander Zaozersky and my parents and other relatives terminated all relations with him.
Her younger brothers Girsh and Rafail worked at the glass factory of their uncle Lipa Galyorkin in Novka. They perished there in 1919 during a pogrom.
Bella’s brother Abram was a construction engineer, during the war [9]; he served in the field-engineering forces on the Leningrad frontline. He found himself in a brigade, which made mass graves using explosives at the Piskaryovsky cemetery. Each grave was for 1,000 people. When one grave was full, they started a new one. Everybody who participated in that digging was later on assigned to various frontlines. They were told, ‘Hitler shouldn’t know about our losses.’ Abram died after the war.
Their other brother Mendel was also in the war, he was a medical attendant and was taken prisoner when wounded. He was blond with blue eyes and didn’t look like a Jew, so no one gave him away. The Germans sent Mendel to forced labor in Germany, where he worked at a farm. The landlady of the farm, a German, knew that he was a Jew but didn’t give him away to the authorities, though there wasn’t much use of his work, as he was very weak after the wound and often fell sick. After the war he was transported to the Soviet Union but died in 1949.
Workers who were dissatisfied with that condition arranged a pogrom in 1919, having asked a ‘Green’ gang for help [11]. The Reds and the Whites [12] were at war with each other and there were also the so-called Greens, who put together armed gangs, for example, the famous bandit Makhno [13], and plundered the population. The bandits killed Jews and robbed their houses. Eleven members of the Galyorkin family perished in that massacre, including Leib’s sons, Girsh and Rafail. Lipa himself was in Petrograd at that time and avoided death.
Nota Moiseyevich was evacuated over the Urals together with his wife and daughters. Relatives of his wife, Emma Wulfovna Fridman – her brothers with their wives and children – were shot by the Germans in Shumilino in 1942. Nota’s son Yakov was in the war and reached Berlin.
My father Aron-David Chaimovich Breido was born in St. Petersburg in 1889. Soon after his birth the family moved to Polotsk. At a certain age he went to cheder, though he studied there for one and a half years only. When the family returned to St. Petersburg in 1897, he didn’t study at official institutions. He began to work at an early age, as did his brothers. At first he worked as a ‘boy’ at the ‘Brichken & Robinson’ confectionary. At the age of eleven he became an apprentice at his father’s handicraft shop.
He mastered the high school course on his own, with the help of Grandfather, Great-grandfather and a large number of books, which he read and ordered later on. He was even allowed to indicate in formal papers that he obtained high school education, though he never took any exams anywhere.
When World War I broke out in 1914, the Tolstoyans arranged a Petrograd Municipal Medical-Nutrition Detachment, which set up nutrition stations for starving people and a mobile surgery hospital at the Western frontline. My father was a member of that detachment and worked as a corpsman at that hospital, which was situated in the village of Voleyka near the town of Molodechno in Belarus. Father was an employee of the Russian Red Cross Society, which was headed by Yekaterina Peshkova, the wife of the famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky [16].
They ordered him to go to the Polotsk Military Affairs Management, where the issue about the extension of his release from military service was to be considered. But it was an excuse, not the reason. He was to go to Polotsk because he, as all Jews, was ascribed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement and was considered a petty bourgeois of the Polotsk District.
My parents got married in 1918 in Leningrad. They had a traditional Jewish wedding and a lot of guests came. When they started to live together, Mother read a lot and Father selected books especially for her, in order to fill the gaps in her knowledge. They lived in a separate apartment, but always close to Grandfather Chaim and Grandmother Riva.
Father was deprived of the universal suffrage for five years and exiled to Turukhtansky territory in Siberia. He was convicted based on Article 59 – ‘economic counter-revolution.’ At first he lived in the village of Vereschagino, later in Baklanikha and worked as an accountant in the ‘Soyuzpushnina’ Department [enterprise specialized in growing fur animals and procuring fur]. There was a big Jewish colony and a Tolstoyan commune in Siberia. Jewish Tolstoyans met my father with warm clothes when they found out that he was to arrive. Later, when he had to be examined by a commission which reconsidered his case, and he was kept at the transit prison in Krasnoyarsk, the Tolstoyans sent for my mother and she managed to see Father for a whole week, living at these Jews’ place.
When my father was arrested, Mother had to find a job, so we had a day nanny, a Russian called Manya. Those who needed registration [17] in Leningrad gladly went to work as nannies. Since a nanny couldn’t manage both Ada, and me I had to go to a kindergarten. Mother worked as an ice-cream vender and at the Club of Sovtorgsluzhaschikh [Soviet Commercial Workers]. When there was no nanny, she worked at home, sewed gloves on a sewing machine; she also knitted mittens, as we had a knitting machine at home.
Mother with us, children, was exiled to Novgorod at the beginning of 1935. We were called ‘the family of the deprived’; we were unreliable.
When Father was arrested in 1931, we had six rooms in Smolninsky district in the center of Leningrad: Father’s office, a dining room, a children’s room, a bedroom, a servants’ room and a room where Mother’s sister Braina lived. The Militia department, located across the street, claimed that apartment, but they didn’t succeed. In 1935 our living space was a matter of interest to the house manager, that is, the administrator of the building. He came from Don and he needed rooms for his relatives.
When Father was exiled to Novgorod, he got assistance from Molochnikov, the person closest to Tolstoy, who created the museum of the writer in Novgorod. Molochnikov provided Father with a place in his shed, where Father immediately started a chemical shop. When we came to Novgorod, Father worked at ‘Vkuskhimprom’ [gustatory chemical industry] enterprise. He also helped needy people.