Tag #108495 - Interview #88474 (Jakub Bromberg)

There was one incident. I was maybe five years old then, I don’t remember exactly. A Polish woman, Malareska was her name, lived several houses from the prayer house. She didn’t have a husband, but she had two sons. This happened during Simchat Torah. [Editor’s note: the festival described below is partly Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets, partly Simchat Torah: the interviewee probably confused the rituals.] The rebbe, the tzaddik and other Jewish guests came to receive the Torah into the prayer house. I was there as well, as a little boy. Jews dressed up as riders on horses, they put on skits symbolizing the arrival of the Messiah, trumpets were played, and the horn [shofar]. We walked to the prayer house on wet snow – I was with this rabbi, a whole crowd of us. I was very pious then, religious, I was studying, so I wanted to be close to the rabbi, but there were some other Jews from Bodzentyn walking next to me and Father was in that crowd. So when we were passing this Malareska’s house, she was standing in the hall, she made a snowball, she threw one, then another and the rabbi cursed her. I heard it, because I was next to the rabbi. She had cows and I think she had goats as well. She stored hay for them up in the attic. One day she got on a ladder to get that hay, the ladder slipped, she fell. The first time she was just a bit bruised. But then one or two weeks later, not much time passed, she had a second accident like that, she fell and she killed herself.