Also, Father was never called up [for military service].
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Displaying 34291 - 34320 of 50826 results
Boris Lerman
We did not even consider going on vacations.
We usually met our relatives in synagogue and at market on Sundays.
Most of our neighbors were religious Jews.
Although Father was very religious, my parents never dressed according to Jewish tradition. Instead, they wore very modest secular clothes.
Father was very religious. He never missed the morning prayers and always put on tefillin. He always took tefillin with him when he went out of town. And God forbid if he got home late on a Friday evening and missed lighting the Shabbat candles! He was not educated but was still a very wise person. Many people asked his advice (for example when they wanted to buy a horse or a cow).
All of my siblings and I finished Jewish school and we all also studied in cheder – actually, all of them but me. By the time I started my education, the cheders were already closed. [In 1918 Soviet authorities permitted national minorities to teach their children at schools in their mother tongue. But in 1938 they issued an edict ordering to teach all schoolchildren in Russian.] To clarify, Cheder literally means ‘a room’ in Hebrew. In the context of education, a cheder is a room where children gather to study Hebrew and Torah.
My parents and uncles Isaya and Zalman were very religious. At home we spoke only Yiddish: it was our mother tongue and favorite language.
In our shtetl there were three synagogues and two Jewish cemeteries.
There were a lot of poor families. Some houses had dirt floors and windows at the ground level. Only tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, tradesmen, and office workers always had work and therefore managed to make ends meet. Wagoners lost their jobs when people started to have cars.
During the second half of the 1930s, the Sunday market in Uschachi was filled with people. It was possible to buy high-quality food there. You only had to have money.
During the second half of the 1930s, the Sunday market in Uschachi was filled with people. It was possible to buy high-quality food there. You only had to have money.
There were people in need everywhere. There was shortage of everything: copybooks, pens, pencils, ink, etc. At school they gave us one textbook every two or three pupils. From spring until autumn we went to school barefoot. Sometimes they gave out one or two boots, but the children without fathers always received these shoes.
The Jewish school was very small. There were small classrooms with school desks for pupils (three seats each). Our teachers were very strict, but fair. The teachers were also very competent and did their best to help us in our studies and to grow up to be worthy Jews. As such, we took examinations and did not cheat.
In Ushachi there were two schools: Belarus secondary school and Jewish junior school. Although we children had more opportunities for education, our parents had received only a religious education.
In Ushachi, each family had many children, but less than ten. Only our parents had ten children. Father and Mother were very proud of it and they did their best to send children to cheder and to Jewish school.
Mum had to take care not only of her children. In fact, at that time, we did not have gas, electric, water supply, or central heating. Mum had to get up early in the morning to start a fire (kerosene was in short supply).
She also had to bring and chop firewood, bring water from far distances, and ‘invent’ breakfast for the entire family. I say ‘invent’ because we always lacked food. However Mum managed to feed and do all of the washing for every member of our large family. She was an excellent cook, because before her wedding she had worked as a cook for a rich Jewish family.
She also had to bring and chop firewood, bring water from far distances, and ‘invent’ breakfast for the entire family. I say ‘invent’ because we always lacked food. However Mum managed to feed and do all of the washing for every member of our large family. She was an excellent cook, because before her wedding she had worked as a cook for a rich Jewish family.
And my Mum! I guess she deserves many awards, if we consider the fact that nowadays, mothers with only three children receive social services benefits. And my Mum (think about it!) gave birth to ten children and had no maternity leaves. She even knew nothing about maternity hospitals. And she spent so many days and sleepless nights beside the cradle, singing lullabies…
She washed many baby linens, worried about her children when they were sick (you understand that they were sick very often). She never received assistance from a nurse-maid. In Ushachi there were a lot of women who wanted to work as nurses, but my family could not afford such a service. Mum was pregnant almost all of the time, but she went on working till the very day of delivery. I remember my elder brothers joking: Leybe (the tenth child) was practically born in the vegetable garden near our cabbage plants.
She washed many baby linens, worried about her children when they were sick (you understand that they were sick very often). She never received assistance from a nurse-maid. In Ushachi there were a lot of women who wanted to work as nurses, but my family could not afford such a service. Mum was pregnant almost all of the time, but she went on working till the very day of delivery. I remember my elder brothers joking: Leybe (the tenth child) was practically born in the vegetable garden near our cabbage plants.
Father began his professional life as a smith, and later (in the beginning of 1920s) he trained to be a wagoner.
He earned money mainly conveying passengers and luggage from Ushachi to Polotsk and back. Besides that he had to take care of the horse and the cow and to chop firewood for winter, etc. To tell the truth, even when the elder sons started helping my father, the hardest part of work still rested on his shoulders.
To this day, I am haunted by the tune of a song my father used to sing while working (Michael Alexandrovich, a Soviet singer sang it and I still take care of his record). The song is called ‘Bin ich mir a Fuhrman.
He earned money mainly conveying passengers and luggage from Ushachi to Polotsk and back. Besides that he had to take care of the horse and the cow and to chop firewood for winter, etc. To tell the truth, even when the elder sons started helping my father, the hardest part of work still rested on his shoulders.
To this day, I am haunted by the tune of a song my father used to sing while working (Michael Alexandrovich, a Soviet singer sang it and I still take care of his record). The song is called ‘Bin ich mir a Fuhrman.
Leybe was my parents’ last child. Despite the fact that he was the youngest, he was very talented. Nowadays we call such children prodigies. He did very well in school—so much so that his classmates gave him a nickname: a mathematician. He was the best in chess (we made chess-men of spool of thread and drew chess-board on a cardboard). But during the war he was executed by shooting together with my parents by fascists.
My Mum’s name was Hane-Seyne (many of us had two names). She was born in 1879 in the settlement Drissa, which is situated on the Zapadnaya Dvina River (Vitebsk province, Belarus). Her maiden name was Klet. She was very beautiful. Shadkhan arranged her marriage, bringing her from Drissa for my father. They got married in approximately 1903. Their wedding took place in a synagogue (with a chuppah, etc.) according to all of the Jewish rules. At that time there were no official wedding records. Rather, my parents just remembered that they got married in the winter, sometime before Chanukkah and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.
There is a saying that goes: ‘we all come from childhood.’ However, I like to be more specific: I come from the Jewish shtetl Ushachi in the Vitebsk province (now it is in Vitebsk region on the territory of Belarus - 40 kilometers far from the city of Polotsk). The city is situated on the bank of the Dvina River. It is also home to the picturesque Ushacha River, which is 70 kilometers long. In fact, the settlement was founded in the 17th century on the banks of the Ushacha River. The original settlers included Jews. It was a unique beautiful territory of lakes and woods full of fish and animals - gifts of nature. It did not take the citizens much time to reach a lake or a wood – the settlements were surrounded by nature.
Rosa Freisond
I finished school in 1934 at the age of almost 16. Once Buchatskiy, the tenant who rented a room from us, asked me whether I wanted to become a teacher. I laughed – teachers were like idols for me. He said there was a 2-week teachers’ training course in the village and after finishing it I could go to work. It goes without saying that I rushed to this course. After finishing it I obtained a certificate of a primary school teacher. The course sent me to work at the likbez school [13]. Of course, I felt awkward having to teach people of the same age as my parents, but they treated me with respect as they should treat their teacher, and they enjoyed studying. One of my adult students even became a teacher of mathematics later.
1932-33 was a period of famine [12] in Ukraine. People in Yaryshev were forced to give away all of their grain stocks for winter. There were searches and inspectors took away even bags with 1-2 kg flour or cereals, whatever they found. Our people picked berries and mushrooms in the woods, made soup of herbs, made flat bread from roots and managed to survive.
Pesach was a special holiday. There was a general clean up before Pesach. Furniture was removed from the rooms to whitewash the walls and the ceilings. The house was also whitewashed outside whatever the weather. About two weeks before Pesach a community representative collected contributions for the needy families for them to be able to buy flour for matzah, chicken, fish and vegetables.
My parents were religious. My father went to the synagogue on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. My mother went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur. We celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. On Friday morning my mother cleaned the house and baked brown bread for a week ahead and two white challah loaves for Sabbath. On Friday morning all housewives went to the market to buy food products. My mother made us chicken broth with homemade noodles or gefilte fish. In the evening the family got together.
My parents followed kashrut strictly. My mother had separate dishes, utensils and tableware for meat and dairy products. She kept them in separate cupboards in the kitchen and a separate spot for all of them on the table. Even dish wash sponges were separate.
There was another pogrom before this one. My father told me about it. The family took hiding in one place and my father went to a different place. This was safer. Bandits found my father and beat him. They hit him on his stomach and he had liver problems for the rest of his life. My father died young from liver cancer that must have resulted from this beating.
When gangs [6] came into the town, Jews hid away wherever they could find a place. My mother and the children took shelter in the basement of the only two-storied building in our neighborhood across the street from our house. My father was away from home. My brother studied to play the violin. When my mother saw that bandits were taking away his violin she ran out of the basement and ran to ask them to leave the violin. They beat her mercilessly and hit the violin on the ground and left.
The synagogue was called Shil [in Yiddish]. Men sat downstairs and women – on the upper gallery listening to the prayer through little openings. It is not there any longer. The synagogue was beautiful, and it’s a pity it’s not there any more. It wasn’t ruined in action during the Great Patriotic War, but the local Ukrainians took it apart using wood as construction material during the war. That was it. Men went to the synagogue regularly while women only attended it on Yom Kippur.
, Ukraine
My parents got married in the early 1900s. They had a traditional Jewish wedding, of course. People in Yaryshev were religious and observed all traditions. After the wedding my parents lived in their own house that as my mother’s dowry. Her father and brothers gave it to the newly weds.
, Ukraine
David Levin
Later she’s got the second high education: she graduated from Moscow Psychological University (she studied there, living here; she only had to go to Moscow once per half a year to pass exams). Now she working as a psychologist in private kindergarten, but before she tried quite a few of jobs.