I went to the 1st grade of a Ukrainian secondary school in our neighborhood in 1929. My sister Zina went to the same school two years later. There were many Jewish children in my class and school. It seems to me that the majority of my schoolmates were Jews. There were also Jewish teachers, but nobody cared the least bit about nationality at that time.
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Displaying 8251 - 8280 of 50826 results
Sophia Abidor
I didn't know Yiddish. Adults switched to Yiddish when they didn't want me to understand the subject of their discussion.
, Ukraine
My grandparents, however, observed all traditions strictly. They always celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. My grandmother followed the kashrut. She had special utensils and crockery for meat and dairy products. She also had special crockery and utensils that she only used for Pesach. It was stored in a big wooden box in the hallway for the rest of the year. Those were hard years, but my grandmother always tried to cook plenty of delicious food on holidays.
, Ukraine
My sister and I had water mixed with a little bit of wine. There was a glass of wine in the middle of the table that wasn't meant for anyone. My father told me that it was for Elijah the Prophet [14], who came to every Jewish house to bless the family on Pesach. My father sad a prayer, helped me to say my words and then spoke himself. I didn't understand a word since he spoke Yiddish and we only spoke Russian at home.
, Ukraine
I was 4 when they got divorced, but I remember a little how my father conducted the seder on Pesach. I can't remember preparations for Pesach, but I remember the seder. My father sat at the head of the table wearing a white shirt and his tallit. We moved the table to the sofa and sat on the sofa. There was delicious food on the table. My father said a prayer. Adults had some wine, which was poured into silver cups.
, Ukraine
He had a room in a communal apartment in the same street where we lived. He gave my mother some money to support his children, but it wasn't enough. My mother had to go to work to support us. She went to work at the confectionery factory. She was a smart woman.
, Ukraine
I was born in 1922. I was named Sophia and that name is written in all my documents. My sister Zina followed in 1925. My parents divorced six months after my sister was born; I don't know why. We stayed with my mother and my father left us.
My parents lived in neighboring houses and had known each other since their childhood. They got married in 1920. My father was religious. My parents had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah. A rabbi conducted the wedding ceremony. My mother didn't tell me any details about their wedding. After the wedding my parents lived in my mother's room. My father worked as a tailor and my mother was a housewife.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
Isaac moved to Moscow in the 1920s. He was a clerk in an office. He was single. Isaac was at the front during the Great Patriotic War and returned to Moscow after the war. He was wounded at the front and maybe that's why he came to an untimely end in Moscow in 1950.
My mother's older sister Ekaterina also studied somewhere. She worked as a clerk at the railroad department in Odessa. Ekaterina got married in her 40s but had no children. I didn't know her husband. Ekaterina died in Odessa in 1950.
Leonid married a Jewish woman called Anna, but they had no traditional wedding. They just had a civil ceremony in a registry office. Leonid's wife was a doctor. They had two children: a daughter called Anna and a son called Michael. Leonid died in Odessa in 1965.
My mother's brother Leonid finished the Higher Party School in Odessa. [Editors note: Party schools were established after the Revolution of 1917. Major subjects were social, economic and political disciplines. Those schools trained party activists from agitators and propagandists to party leadership] After finishing school Leonid got an assignment to work with the railroad. He was a party organizer at Odessa railroad until he retired in 1963.
, Ukraine
1932-33 was a period of famine in Ukraine [17]. The official press declared it was due to bad harvests. Today we know that it was a planned action in order to suppress villagers that were against the policy of forced collectivization [18]. At that time we believed the official propaganda, of course. Our family didn't suffer from the famine. The situation in towns wasn't as bad as in villages. Our family was poor, and we were used to living from hand-to-mouth.
There were no comforts in this house. We fetched water from the pump in the yard. The toilet was in the next yard and there were always people standing in line there. There were many small tables in the kitchen with a primus stove on each table. The room was heated with a Russian stove [13]. Wood was bought at the market. There was a long shed with many doors in the yard. Each family had a shed where they stored wood.
Marcus and his wife perished in Odessa in 1941 when Germans occupied the town There were shootings of Jews that lasted several days at that time. Marcus' daughter survived.
Only Marcus, the oldest, was religious. The rest of them were atheists. Marcus was a handsome man with slender features. He had a small beard, but no payes. Marcus wore dark suits and a dark hat. He had a beautiful voice and sang very well. He liked singing Jewish folk songs and Russian ballads. Marcus was married and had a daughter called Rosa. His wife Maria came from a merchant's family and finished the Russian grammar school in Odessa.
My mother didn't get any education. She was the older daughter and therefore had to help her mother about the house and with raising the younger children. Her father believed that education was of no use to girls. They had to learn how to be good housewives. My mother was illiterate. After the Revolution of 1917 she finished a likbez. [11.] My mother never told me whether they were raised religious.
My grandfather and grandmother were very religious. I remember my grandfather praying at home every day wearing his tallit and tefillin. He never replied if someone addressed him during a prayer. My grandparents went to the synagogue. They went there on Jewish holidays, arm in arm and dressed up. My grandfather was a slim man of average height. He had a small gray beard, but no payes. He always wore a kippah and a hat outside.
My father's older brother Simkha went to Tashkent in the 1920s. He was single. He worked as a clerk in an office. Simkha died in 1946.
My father and his sister Riva stayed in Odessa when they grew up. Their brothers moved to other places and disappeared. Riva got married and had a daughter. I only have bits and pieces of information about Riva's family. Riva and her family were in evacuation in Tashkent [Uzbekistan] and stayed there after the war.
There were seven big synagogues and about 50 prayer houses and smaller synagogues in Odessa. There were several cheders in town. During the Soviet rule, when the authorities waged a struggle against religion [5], the synagogues were closed or destroyed. The same happened to the numerous churches, cathedrals and temples in Odessa.
, Ukraine
The different nationalities living in Odessa had no conflicts throughout the ages. Cultures and languages were mixed. Even today Odessa residents have a very specific dialect containing Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish words and accents. In any other place one would recognize someone from Odessa.
, Ukraine
My parents' families lived in Odessa. Odessa is my favorite town, the place where I spent my childhood and youth. Odessa is a big port on the Black Sea in the south of Ukraine. Odessa was founded in the 18th century on the grounds of the Tatar settlement of Khadzhi-Bei. [Editor's note: In the 14th century, the site where Odessa is today became a Crimean Tatar fortress and trade center called Khadzhi-Bei. In 1764 it passed to the Turks, who built a fortress to protect the harbor. It was taken by the Russians in 1789.] In the 19th century Odessa became the second biggest port in Russia after Saint-Petersburg and a big resort town. Its population constituted over 400,000 people. Odessa was also a cultural center in tsarist Russia. Novorossiysk University, one of the first universities in the south of Russia, opened in Odessa. The building of the Odessa Opera Theater is still one of the most beautiful in Europe. There were Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Italians and people of other nations in Odessa. Jews constituted a large part of the population.
, Ukraine
Faina Khorunzhenko
There are two synagogues in Kiev these days, and a lot is being done for the revival of the Jewish nation. I believe our Jewish organizations are doing the right thing when they don't separate purely Jewish families from mixed marriages.
Now, I receive great moral and material aid from the Jewish community of Kiev and from the Hesed charity center.
When the State of Israel was formed, my husband and I expressed full support of it. My husband realized that those were the Jewish lands, and that Jews needed a strong state of their own.
By the way, there was a most wonderful synagogue in Budapest, where we bought matzah for Passover. We celebrated both Jewish and Christian holidays, and of course the Soviet ones, with the same kind of joy. On Soviet Army Day [9], 1st of May and October Revolution Day we invited my husband's friends for the family party, sharing meals, singing and dancing together.
When anti-Semitic campaigns blossomed, the following situation took place in Moscow during the Doctors' Plot [8]. An officer approached my husband and asked him, 'Dmytry, why do you need a Jewish wife? It isn't good timing for that...' To this, my husband replied that he had married a person rather than a nationality, and would appreciate it if no one interfered with his private life. There was another case, when the director of a school in the Komintern district of Moscow, where I was sent to work, looked at my documents and said, 'Oh, but you're an alien!' In his presence, I called the secretary of the party district committee, Yekaterina Furtseva, who later became the Minister of Culture in the Soviet Union. She asked me to pass him the phone, and when she began to talk to him, he turned pale, murmuring, 'I didn't mean quite that.
In 1947, following the decision of the bureau of the district party committee, I was transferred to work as a senior teacher at the Sumy Medical College. It was there that I met the teacher Dmytry Khorunzhenko. We married in 1949. My husband was Ukrainian and had deep respect and love for all my relatives, and Jews in general. When his mother, a simple woman, introduced me to her brother, she told him, 'Tisha, do you see that she happens to be a Jew?' Tisha Makarych, her brother, hugged me in reply and said, 'Motya, this is God's chosen people, from whom the Lord God gave us His Son'.
Our family lost my uncle, the husband of my father's younger sister - he perished in the battle of the Dneper River. At the Leningrad front my favorite cousin Moiseika Shakhnovsky was killed. My cousin's husband, Leonid Savitsky, was killed outside Moscow, and the fascists shot my cousin's youngest son in Kirovograd. He was 12 years old, and was sent there for vacation with his grandparents; he died with them.
,
During WW2
See text in interview