Tag #141315 - Interview #94042 (Isabella Karanchuk)

I know very little about my father’s family. My paternal grandfather and grandmother Gershl and Revekka Lerman were born in the 1880s. Gershl was born in Mogilyov, and grandmother Revekka, whose maiden name was Manevich, came from the small Byelorussian town of Chausy. Grandmother and grandfather Lerman were religious. They went to the synagogue, followed kashrut and celebrated Saturday and Jewish holidays. However, I don’t know any details of my father’s childhood. I don’t remember my grandfather or grandmother either since I only saw them in my early childhood. I know that grandmother Revekka died in 1934 and grandfather Gershl lived till the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Believing that Germans were cultured people like many other Jews in Mogilyov he stayed in the town and perished in 1941.
Lerman, the stove setter, had four children: three sons, born two years one after another, and a daughter, born when grandmother Revekka was over 40 and did not expect more children. The boys finished cheder and went to study vocations. Aron, the oldest, born in 1903, became a barber. During the Great Patriotic War Aron was at the front and was awarded many orders and medals.  His wife Mary and daughter Yeva failed to evacuate and perished with grandfather Gershl. Aron remarried after the war. He lived in Mogilyov with his wife. They had no children. He was a skilled barber. In the late 1980s Aron and his family moved to Israel where he died shortly before turning 90.