Tag #114791 - Interview #95094 (Emilia Kotliar)

My mother and father gave up observing Jewish traditions and religion when they were young. This was the way it was at that time: the Revolution of 1917, when everything was breaking up and crashing, the routinely way of life was replaced with something different when new authorities were building up different ideology, propagating and forcing communism and atheism into people’s minds. Besides, I don’t think they would have found jobs had they remained religious. Soviet authorities did not appreciate religiosity and struggled against it [11] in every possible way. If my father had come to his plant with his kippah on and a beard and had begun to pray, can you imagine what it would have been like? Same with my mother. Although her grandfather was a Talmud scholar and she accompanied grandfather to the synagogue every day carrying his tallit for him she didn’t see anything beautiful in the life of her family regardless those traditional ceremonies. She didn’t see that it was a good life and therefore, she didn’t quite accept it. My parents and their brothers and sisters did not just nominally give up religion, they actually parted with it. Young people joined the revolution and began to study. They had nothing to lose. Most Jews were so poor that it could not be worse for them.  Many finished cheder, but few could afford to go to yeshivah. Not all of them were smart enough to go into theoretical studies of the Talmud.  Becoming a melamed? How many did a small town need? Two at the most. The rest of them had to take to trade or patching jackets or sewing? There were no vacancies in this little town and even skilled craftsmen earned little. Other towns also had their own coopers, tailors and tradesmen. Therefore, they rushed into revolution. A road to new life opened to them.