I know that grandfather had a grocery store and a pub, and that my grandmother was a housewife. There wasn’t much else they could do at that time, back then in the 1800s. I don’t know whether they were very religious Jews or not, my father never talked to me about that.
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Displaying 46381 - 46410 of 50826 results
Vladimir Khalfin
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Jewish men were taken to do road construction and repair work. They worked from 8 am till dark. They left the ghetto at 7 am and returned with convoy at 7 pm. The only food they had was what they could find in the fields around. Women worked inside the ghetto doing cleaning and work in the canteen. My mother also went to work.
Mother celebrated Jewish holidays even during the war. She prayed before each holiday. Of course, we didn’t have any special food, but mother didn’t eat bread at Pesach. She fasted at Yom Kippur. Older Jewish men got together for a minian at Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Women didn’t attend those gatherings.
In winter of 1942 mother’s parents Haim and Leya starved to death. Until March 1944 the population of the ghetto reduced dramatically. Inmates of the ghetto died of typhoid, exhaustion and hard work. There were anti sanitary conditions in the ghetto. Dirt and lice were a common problem. It’s hard to say how many inmates of the ghetto survived, but I know there weren’t many survivors. Fortunately, my mother, my brother and sister and I survived.
On 28 March 1944 Soviet troops came to Luchinets. Romanians left the village two days before, but no Jews left the ghetto since we were afraid to go anywhere. How happy we were when the Soviet troops came to the village! We kissed the armor of Soviet tanks and hugged soldiers. They gave us sugar and dried bread. Inmates of the ghetto who came from other places left for their hometowns and villages. We had nothing to live on and Ukrainian neighbors supported us at the beginning giving us food and clothes.
We heard news about our relatives. My mother’s brothers perished. When the war began they were working in another village. They never returned home from that village and we believed they were captured by Germans. Mother’s sister Hanna and her children perished in the ghetto in Shargorod. Her husband was shot there, too.
In summer 1944 we left for Mogilyov-Podolskiy. We sold our house in Luchinets just for peanuts. I had to support my family and became an apprentice for a shoemaker in Mogilyov-Podolskiy. My sister went to the 8th form and finished there the secondary lower school. My brother went to the 1st form of a Ukrainian school. Mother went to work in a shop that made working clothing: robes and gloves. We rented a room from a local woman.
Mother heard that there were many vacant apartments in Chernovtsy and we moved to the town in 1946. However, so many other Jews came to town before us that we couldn’t find a vacant apartment and we rented a room in a one-storied building in an old Jewish neighborhood. Our landlady, an old Jew, also was in the ghetto that was actually in the neighborhood during the war. There was no running water in the house, but there was a stove. This was the first time we were in a big town and we liked it. We liked the big old buildings with stucco moldings on the facades, big stores and wide streets. Almost 70% of the population was Jewish and one could hear people speaking Yiddish in the streets. We met new Jewish friends. There was a synagogue, a Jewish school and a Jewish theater in the town. My mother was very happy to live in a town with the majority of Jewish population. She was glad to speak Yiddish and go to the synagogue on Sabbath.
We couldn’t afford to go to the Jewish theater. Only once our mother gave us tickets to the performance of ‘Teviye, the milkman’ by Sholem Alechem. It was in Yiddish. The acting was beautiful, there was a storm of applause. This was the only time I went to the Jewish theater and I remembered it for the rest of my life.
We celebrated Jewish holidays at home. Before 1948 the synagogue sold matzah. Later we had to get it secretly. We were very poor and mother couldn’t afford to buy all necessary food for holidays, but she tried to make something special anyway. We didn’t celebrate Sabbath since Saturday was a working day and on Friday evening my mother came home too late to conduct the ceremony of lighting candles.
I became an apprentice of a worker at the shoe factory and then worked sometime at the mechanic plant. 1947-48 were hard years. Food sold at the market was far too expensive. After working I studied at the lower secondary evening school to get secondary education. After finishing this school I studied to make shoes. I couldn’t afford to continue education. I worked at a shoemaker shop for over 50 years. There were 10 other Jewish employees. I never faced any anti-Semitism at work. I was a skilled employee and my clients treated me with respect.
In March 1953 when Stalin died many people grieved after him. For me his death wasn’t something that made me sad. Of course, I was worried about the uncertain future.
After ХХ Congress of the Communist Party 9 I believed that life might turn to better if they took the risk of denunciation the cult of Stalin, but I was wrong again. Since then I never took any interest in politics. Somehow I didn’t quite like the institution of this state since it only created problems for people. I didn’t even try to find a better job or to get promotion since I didn’t believe anything. I didn’t believe that a decent person could have a decent life in this country and I knew that I couldn’t lie to take advantage of things, so why try? I lived a quiet life and I didn’t become rich, but I went to bed with clear conscience and didn’t trade my principles. Other people that had higher position were worried about it and had to face intrigues and lies, but since I was just a shoemaker there were no problems that I might possibly have in this respect.
My brother tried to make a career. This was the period of state anti-Semitism and Ukrainian authorities preferred to appoint Ukrainians to higher positions. My brother was an economist at a plant and wanted to get another job at a research institute, at the human resources department. He wasn’t rejected or accepted, but every time he went there they were telling him to come another time. He wasn’t told that he couldn’t be employed due to his Jewish nationality, but it was clear that the reason was there.
We got married in 1955. We had a civil ceremony and a small dinner for relatives and friends where we sang Jewish songs and danced, but we didn’t have a chuppah.
My wife and I observed Jewish traditions however difficult it was at different times. During the Soviet times there was an underground Jewish bakery where they made matzah for Pesach. We brought flour there at night and the following night we could pick bags with matzah. It was a problem to buy necessary food products for celebration. One had to stand in line for hours to buy chicken, but we celebrated our holidays anyway. We always gathered with the siblings and our mother. We also celebrated Soviet holidays and the happiest of them was Victory Day on 9 May 11. In the morning my wife and I went to the parade where we met our friends. We got together for a party on such holidays. My wife had prepared food for the party. We talked and sang Jewish songs, shared our memories about the wartime and were happy to have survived.
When Jews began to move to Israel in 1970s we couldn’t go: my wife was confined to bed. Of course, if it hadn’t been for my wife’s illness we would have gone to Israel. Our daughter wanted to go to Israel, but she was reluctant to leave us on our own.
I couldn’t leave my wife. She is a nice person and we’ve lived our life in love and consent. She has cancer in the last stage and all I can do now is just try to relieve her pain, if possible. Since she didn’t work due to her illnesses she received a pension of 35 rubles [Editor’s note: 35 rubles is less than $7]. Only in the last 3 years she has received allowances paid to former inmates of ghettos by Germany. We are grateful to those that remember people that suffered from fascism.
After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991 Jewish life began to revive. In 1993 Joint organized Hesed in Chernovtsy. Hesed takes good care of old people. We receive food packages. Hesed also delivers food home. We can ask them to do the laundry. Nurses are visiting us who help to do the shopping and cleaning. There are clubs and various classes in Hesed. Every Jew can find interesting things to do there regardless of age. I began to attend Hesed from the first days after it opened.
Soviet troops were retreating past Luchinets. It was hot and soldiers came into the town to ask for water. Nobody was going to evacuate from the village since we didn’t know anything about brutality of fascists and were not afraid of Germans.
In less than one month Germans came to the village. On the next day they shot over 100 Jewish men in the outskirts of the town. My father’s three brothers were among them. The central area of Luchinets where Jews resided was fenced with barbed wire. There were German posts along the fence. We were told that the area fenced with barbed wire was a Jewish ghetto and that we were not allowed to leave it. This happened in the first half of July 1941. We stayed in our house. Germans took groups of Jewish men to shoot in the vicinity of the village every day. They were forced to dig a long trench and then they were made to stand on its edge before they were shot. Some of them didn’t die at once and were buried still alive. One of them managed to crawl out of the trench and get back to the ghetto. He was hid in a basement for a long time until his wounds healed.
Germans left Luchinets leaving Romanians and local police to guard the ghetto. After Germans left the ghetto the shootings stopped, but Romanians didn’t provide inmates with any food or medications and people starved to death or died from diseases. There were doctors and nurses among inmates of the ghetto, but they didn’t have any medications to give treatment. There was no place to get medications in the ghetto and inmates were not allowed to leave the territory of the ghetto even to buy drugs in the village. Romanians told us that all villages in Vinnitsa region were turned into Jewish ghettos.
There were about 150 families in the town and over 50 were Jewish families. There was also a Ukrainian and Russian population in Luchenets. They were all good neighbors and helped each other. Ukrainian neighbors of Jewish families knew Yiddish and Jews spoke also Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian. There were no national conflicts, Luchenets was a distant town and gangs 1 did not usually get there. There was a wooden synagogue in the town. Women prayed in a separate room with a little window for them to hear the rabbi’s sermon. Jews from surrounding village also came to this synagogue on Jewish holidays. There was a cheder in the synagogue before the revolution of 1917 2. Jews bought chickens and geese to have them slaughtered by a shochet. There was a market in Luchenets on Mondays and Fridays. Local farmers sold their fruit, vegetables, dairy products and poultry. There were no scales at the market. Products were measured by containers: bowls or buckets. On other days of the week there was a big market in Kopaygorod in about 15 km from Luchenets. Farmers from the outskirts of the town supplied all food products. Jews were mainly craftsmen and tradesmen. Jewish families resided in the central part of the town. Land was more expensive there and they couldn’t afford to have big gardens or orchards. Jewish families lived in small wooden houses with thatched roofs and richer families had tiled roofs.
My grandfather on my father’s side Aron Khalfin was born in 1862. My grandfather was a shochet in Luchenets. He inherited this job from his father after his father died. Grandfather Aron died in 1920 – long before I was born. We didn’t have any of his photos. I remember my grandmother Hayka. She was born in 1867. She married Aron when she was very young. My grandmother was a housewife. It was customary in Jewish families that women kept the house and raised children. My grandmother was a short fat woman with a kind smile. She had pink complexion. She didn’t wear a wig. She wore a dark woolen shawl in winter and a white cotton kerchief in summer. This was common casual clothing worn by women in villages.
My father Ruvin was the youngest of brothers. He was born in 1900. All children got Jewish education. They studied in cheder. Grandfather trained the two older sons to be shochets. Since there was only one shochet needed in the town Haim studied a tailor’s profession. Moshe became an apprentice of a shoemaker. My father Ruvin became a locksmith.
My grandfather’s family was religious. Every day, my grandfather went to pray to the only synagogue in the neighborhood. Grandmother joined him on Jewish holidays and Sabbath. My grandparents observed all Jewish traditions. Grandmother followed the kashrut strictly. She had specific dishes and utensils for dairy and meat products. She even washed her kitchenware with separate cloth. There was no bakery in Luchenets and my grandmother baked bread for a week and made hala bread for Sabbath. The only place to buy matzah for Pesach was in Kopaygorod, in about 30 km from Luchenets. My grandmother and other Jewish women got together in my grandmother’s kitchen to make matzah for all families. It took them quite a while since Jewish families were traditionally big and they needed a lot of matzah. Each family needed at least 16 kg matzah since it wasn’t allowed to eat bread or have any at home at Pesach. Grandmother had boards for rolling out dough, rolling pins and bowls for making dough. There was also a special wheel for making holes in matzah. Women worked in a team: one group sieved flour, another group mixed it with water in strict proportion, some kneaded dough and others rolled out dough. This process had to be very prompt since dough couldn’t be exposed to air for long. All families had big white linen bags used specifically for matzah. Grandfather conducted Seder at Pesach. My father posed traditional questions, but he didn’t tell me any details about the Seder night. All sons had bar mitzvah ritual when they turned 13.
After the revolution of 1917 collectivization 3 began in Luchinets. A Jewish collective farm was formed that included Jewish families from surrounding villages. The management was in Luchinets. Farmers were not enthusiastic about joining the collective farm since they had to give their cattle and all tools to common use. Those that hesitated to join the collective farm were having problems they didn't get a horse to plough their field or a cart to go to Kopaygorod or Vinnitsa. Collective farmers received coupons to do shopping in the store and all goods were sold only to collective farmers. Those that did not join the collective farm couldn’t even buy a candle. My father and his brothers joined the collective farm. My father worked as a locksmith, Yankel made heavy coats in the collective farm shop and Moshe was a shoemaker.
My grandfather on my mother’s side Haim Bergheener was born in the 1860s. He was short, thin and wore a beard. He wore a yarmulka or a big black cap. He had several brothers and sisters, but they were all gone before I was born. Some died, some moved to other locations or emigrated to Argentina or Palestine. My grandmother on my mother’s side Leya (I don’t know her maiden name) was born in 1860s. She was of average height and had a very straight posture. She had wavy hair that she wore in a knot. She wore casual clothes like any other woman in the town. I remember that grandmother was duck-legged.
My mother Golda was born in 1902. I might have forgotten other children, if any. The boys studied at cheder. My mother and her sisters were taught at home. A melamed from cheder taught them Hebrew, Torah and Talmud. My mother could read and write in Yiddish and Hebrew. She had a book of prayers in Hebrew that she received from her father at bat mitzvah – 12 years old. The sons of the family had bar mitzvah conducted at the age of 13.
They spoke Yiddish in the family and Ukrainian to their neighbors. They were a religious family. On Saturdays and Jewish holidays grandparents went to synagogue. When children grew older they also attended the synagogue. They all had special fancy clothing that they wore when they went to the synagogue. My grandmother wore a black shawl to the synagogue and the girls didn’t need a headpiece. This is all my mother told me.