ONLINE
NEWSLETTER
(No. 3/2006
- March 2006)
Editor: Fran Bock
A
Journey to
Judd Rothstein and Zijana at Why go to I feel
that in many ways my journey to I knew only the
following: My great-grandfather, Yaakov
“Jacob” Rutstein was born in the small
Bessie
(daughter of Tzvi Hirsch) Poretsky Rutstein (1888-1947) and Jacob (son of Dov Behr) Rutstein
(1878-1946), I also knew two other pieces of information: First that
Jacob had five children and they were Bertha, Dora, Nathan, Milton my
grandfather, and Rita - all of whom went their separate ways in life. Like
the vast majority of American families none of the descendents of Jacob are
close to one another. Members of our small clan, especially of my generation,
only meet at funerals, if at all. The
second fact was that my great-grandmother, Bessie or Basha
Poretsky, was also born in Tolochin
and was a daughter of a Rabbi and great Torah scholar – Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Poretsky. Bessie’s voice, like many other
woman’s voices and narratives throughout history were mostly lost.
Rabbi Tzvi
Hirsch Poretzkyn (b.1857, d.1933) and wife Esther Dubrow Poretzkyn (b.1860, d.
1941) circa 1920. It was with this scant information that I began my
journey some six years ago. As a sophomore in high school I remember feeling
that by discovering my family roots and learning about my ancestors I would
somehow be paying homage to the people for whom I am a legacy. As a member of
the internet generation I immediately began my search on the internet and found
my way to www.jewishgen.org and
joined the Thanks to Jewishgen I found two long lost cousins, also children of
Tolochin, one from the Poretsky
side of the family and one from the Rutstein side
of my family - both of whom have been invaluable in my research. I would like
to thank my cousins Nancy Wexler (of the Rutstein
family) for spending hours showing me around the Preparing for the journey After beginning my research I
was able to gather scores of disjointed facts, stories from various cousins
and artifacts such as pictures and old Yiddish letters. All this information
became critical as it helped me reconstruct the larger family puzzle. I
decided that I wanted to visit the shtetls from
which my family came. I expressed the
idea on the However, for various reasons, it was not viable for me
to simply pick myself up and travel to I would like to point out that Yuri was even better able
to help me with the logistics in Belarus because I knew what I wanted and he
helped me fill in the details. For example, I didn’t want to hire a
personal driver from There
are things that, in hindsight, I wish I had done but I didn’t actually
do. I wish I had brought more small gifts such as general In
addition, Shelly Dardashti of Tel-Aviv was able to
direct me to a few key contacts within “At present 23 Jews live
in Tolochin. Most of them are elderly people and
live in mixed families. A functioning pre-war Jewish cemetery was preserved
in the town. The location is to the left from the road from Tolochin to village Slobodka. Unfortunately,
people began to make Christian burials at the cemetery. The building of a
synagogue was not preserved – it was destroyed during the war. During
the Holocaust in Tolochin 2000 Jews were murdered.
The place of execution is situated out of the town, not far from the village Raitsy. All the Jews were killed within a day on March
13, 1942. In 1960s a memorial was erected at this place. The details of
ghetto life and the facts of Jews execution one may find in the local museum
at I also went to local After spending several weeks in
the I
arrived on Sunday evening in
Some of the regions in which the At the center there are daily
prayer services in the adjacent synagogue and the center was able to provide
me with kosher food. Everyone I met there was friendly and curious and it was
very meaningful to receive an aliyah during shachris while being in After breakfast, I finally met
Yuri after having exchanged so many e-mails. He was friendly, compassionate
yet always to the point of business – just how I like things. Yuri
escorted me back to his office from the dining hall to fill me in on the rest
of the details of the trip which he arranged on my behalf. His office was
filled with photographs of great Belarusian Jewish leaders and Rabbis. It was
through the pictures and maps on the wall that I first slowly became
conscious of the fact that Byelorussian Jews were Litvaks
and were strongly associated with the Lithuanian tradition. I also learned a little bit about Yuri as
an individual. Yuri is a businessman and travels back and forth between Dmitry, my translator and new friend, along with Leonid took me to two memorial sites for Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Memorial sites to victims of the Holocaust in If my memory serves me correctly the site of this
memorial was one of the places where the Jewish population of Dmitry and I were also taken to the
local JDC building in Inna was very excited to meet and speak with me and I
gave her some information about my family history which she will add to her
database. For researchers hoping to learn more about their family history or
about a town or region she may be a good person to speak with. She has access
to Yiddish papers and archives going back to the turn of the century.
However, she does not speak English and one would only be able to communicate
with her only in Russian, Hebrew or Yiddish. We spoke mostly in Hebrew with Dmitry helping me when either of our knowledge of Hebrew
failed us. She is currently working on
various projects right now, including documenting Jewish participation in the
general resistance\partisan movement and Jewish resistance to being murdered
by the Nazis. She is trying to combat the myth that the Jews behaved
passively during World War-Two and wants to publish a book for the general
Byelorussian public but is unable to do so due to lack of funding. We decided
that we would meet again on the late evening on Wednesday, the day before I
left the country. She kept her word and days later we met in the evening and
she gave me a personal tour around the museum and we arranged for an elderly
Jew there to translate my Yiddish letters.
The American Joint
Distribution Committee center in Engaged in conversation with Dr. Inna Gerasimova, I foolishly lost track of the time on early
Monday morning. Her knowledge about the region, her ability to tell me
tidbits of information about what was contained in my family letters, some a
century old, captivated me. Dmitry kindly pointed
out that we better leave soon unless I was going to miss my
At the Orsha train station. From Orsha to We arrived at the mini train station and Dmitry tried to negotiate with one of the cashiers to
accept US dollars but she refused. Seeing the train pull into the station we
started running towards the train with our bags bouncing over our shoulders.
I was hoping that I could pay the more expensive fee by paying on the train
like they have in the I asked
Dmitry why and I don’t think I shall ever
forget his answer. He told me that “people work really really hard and they receive nothing in
return…people are poor and they are trying to figure out where their next
meal will come from.” As he spoke the train conductor stumbled past us,
“You see” he said, “look at her! She is drunk.” He
proceeded to tell me how someone like his mother, a university educated
women, works two jobs just to make ends meet. Yet this uneducated, drunken
conductor and his mother make the same salary. When I asked him about the
political situation or why things were the way they were he hushed me up. It
was not something he wanted to talk about and I gathered that was because we
were in a public place. I realized I had committed a significant fauxpas. In an unrelated topic of discussion, Dmitry also mentioned that because people are so poor,
out of compassion the conductors don’t always check everyone’s
ticket. Throughout the early
parts of the train ride various conductors walked through the cabin until one
finally stopped to ask us for our tickets.
Dmitry explained to her that we only had
dollars and not Byelorussian rubles. She said that we would have to ask some
of the other passengers to exchange the money for us. Dmitry
uncomfortably went to a few of the passengers and asked them if they were
willing but nobody would touch the dollars because they thought they were
counterfeit or that we were running some sort of scam. The conductor said she
would come back later in the journey to collect our fare. I instinctively
knew that the exchange between us was a charade. I knew that in the end we
would pay off the conductor to accept our dollars and that she would accept
what was essentially a bribe. Echoing my thoughts Dmitry
told me that the only reason she didn’t accept the money initially was
because she thought that we were members of the secret police, the KGB. I
sensed that she was thinking something along those lines from the way she looked
at us, trying to size us up and our story. In the end, hours later, she did
accept our dollars. In fact, her friend came in on the deal with her. They
first spoke amongst themselves as to what would be an appropriate
“deal.” The conductor then told Dmitry
that she wanted five dollars. My largest bill was ten dollars and so I just
gave that to her. They looked at each other and they looked at us stunned as
it was twice what they requested. They then quickly left the cabin all giddy
with their booty and they didn’t even give us any tickets. After they
left, I asked Dmitry how much ten dollars was in
terms of buying power and in proportion to daily wages. He told me that ten
dollars was about two days worth of wages. It probably wasn’t the most
intelligent thing to do by putting myself in that situation but it sure was
an interesting experience.
An artificial lake
in the Minsk City Center At some point during
the first half of the day it came up in conversation that Dimitry
did not know Hebrew and so I offered to teach him. And so it was that on the
train ride from We
arrived in the early evening into the city center of Orsha
after having crossed the
The The train station was one of the only buildings that was
not destroyed by the Germans in both World Wars and is a glimpse to the
official architecture that existed during the turn of the century.
Near the Orsha
train station at the turn of the 20th century. Waiting at the train station was Ilya
“Yehuda” Halfey
and Misha “Michael” Ginsberg who took
me to the home of one of the members of the Jewish community of Orsha - Lazar and Tamara Tavger.
I placed my things down in their home and we then went to one of the local
markets where we purchased, soviet style, some fruits, vegetables, milk and
other miscellaneous stuff that I could find to suit my dietary needs. We then
went back to their home and sat together, talking, while eating dinner. Lazar
and Tamara were generous enough to open up their home to other members of the
local Jewish community in
Ilya “Yehuda”
Halfey and Misha
“Michael” Ginsberg at the Orsha train-
station. Ilya related some of the oral
history he had received from his grandfather about how life once was in Orsha. Orsha was once a very
small town but over time grew to be a major center of Jewish life. Orsha was a well traveled transportation center with
major connecting points for trade and commerce. All this contributed to Orsha being a cultural center. In
The home of Lazar
and Tamara Tavger and the Religious center in At some point in the evening we went to the home of a
certain Boris, one of oldest members of the Jewish community in Orsha (1). I told him who I was and why I had come from
the
Boris and I at his home in Orsha, Boris spoke of life in the city before the Second World
War. Orsha was a center of Jewish culture and
contained two Jewish theaters and a tremendous amount of Jews. There were
four primary synagogues. The founder of the Lubavitch
Chasidic movement Shenur Zalman
of Liady lived not more then thirty kilometers from
the city. Thus there was some Chasidic influence on the city. Boris says that
before the wars people decided on which synagogue they would attend based on
class and or their professions. Boris
says there were three children in his family and the family worked in the
tiles business. His family “was taken to war fighting” and his
father was in the army. Before the Russian Revolution
Jews had the worst of jobs, working for the lowest wages and in the most
demeaning positions. Boris recalls that his mother and father would go to
synagogue but they didn’t pray at synagogue they “just went to
go.” However, everyone celebrated all the holidays and it was a big to
do in town as everyone came together.
Boris recalls that before the Second World War Jewish and non-Jewish
kids played together and that anti-Semitism was minimal. His mother
didn’t work and his father worked with roof tiles and metals. After the
war there was a great demand for someone proficient in metal and roof making.
Thus business was good for someone like his father. Boris’s father worked with the
highest quality metals including those that are used in a kitchen such as
metals for cooking and for pots. Boris grandparents worked in a small (home)
factory which was a family business. Children were all working full time by
the age of sixteen. All or most of the shops in Orsha
were owned by Jews and Jews dominated the metal working industry and
manufacturing. The Jews of Orsha were the primary
advocates of culture and arts in the town.
The great pogroms of During the cold war it was forbidden for Jews to
practice their religion. However, members of the community still wanted to
observe the Jewish holidays especially Passover. Many others were still
afraid because if they were caught celebrating Judaism the police would
arrest them and take them away. Boris and his brother, who now lives in
The above is the matzah
machine that Boris and his brother used to make matazot
secretly during the Soviet Era. The matza machine
is now located in the Jewish Museum in Minsk and is under the care of Dr.
Inna Gerasimova
The two pictures above represent the
location where Boris and his brother baked matzot
in secret After we left Boris’s
home, we didn’t really do anything else that evening. We did briefly
visit the cemetery but we decided to leave a more comprehensive visit for the
morning. I was told that it isn’t safe to travel, even for
Byelorussians, around Orsha in the evening. So
instead Dmitry and I spent the evening indoors,
read, learned some more Hebrew and got to know one another. I woke up early the next morning, the sixth of September, just towards the end of sunrise. There was this misty, cool and fresh feeling to the air which I haven’t experienced before. There was no heating in the home and I had only my covers to keep me warm from the chilly Byelorussian night. Waking up in such a home and walking out into the backyard with an open field, breathing the fresh air and heading towards the outhouse was a very surreal experience. It allowed me to place myself in the shoes of those that left this land a century ago, it triggered my imagination and it made me intimately aware of the living conditions in which they likely lived. During the night when I went to use the restroom there were no lights. I had to use my palm pilot light to direct me to where I need to go. I think it’s hard for people in our society to imagine not having light at night and the kind of feelings that brings. I am so glad that I didn’t stay in the local hotel.
Top: A washing station, a place for
winter wood storage and perhaps what is a workhouse. Bottom: The inside and
outside of the outhouse that we used I understand from discussions with people that indoor
plumbing is still rare. In the last few decades people have begun running
pipes from the main water network to their property in order to have running
water. Prior to that time people had their own private wells that they used
for water. Presumably one would use this running water from a well or from
the pipes outside their homes to cook and to draw a bath. The yard also
contained a large backyard, a fallow field and what looked like some fruit
trees. I got the impression that the backyard of the home was more or less
representative of other homes in the area. However, I would say that this
property seemed to be on the larger side.
Left: A stand filled with what looks like
squash near the garden in the backyard. To the right was a large field which
appears to be fallow After eating breakfast, we walked to the local cemetery
which wasn’t very far from where I was staying. The cemetery is located
on a top of a hill which has historically made it very difficult to bury
people during the winter months when there was heavy snow. I was told that
the Byelorussian government, beginning from Soviet times all way through the
present, has had a bad habit of building on top of and or destroying Jewish
cemeteries. The Orsha cemetery is one of the select
Jewish cemeteries that haven’t been built upon or destroyed. That is
because over the years the cemetery has become a mixed cemetery with both
Jews and non-Jews being buried there. Destroying the cemetery would create
tremendous opposition amongst the non-Jewish members of the city. However,
originally the cemetery was only Jewish.
A Randomly chosen grave site in the Orsha Jewish cemetery. The tomb stone reads “An old
man, simple and straight {with G-d} – Chaim Yitzchok the son of Tzion
PATZARSKI I took some random photographs
of grave sites because I knew they would be of some interest to some other
researchers. Most of the tombstones that date before the second war have been
destroyed by man and nature but mostly by man. However, there are a handful
of tombstones that weren’t destroyed by the Nazis or by local vandals
that date before the revolution. Most of these tombstones are faded and
it’s very hard to make what is written on them. One can see the remains
of many tombstones that jut out of the ground several inches.
Two Jewish gravesites, one partially
destroyed, which date from before the Russian Revolution. Towards the back of the cemetery
there is tall grass that has since grown on top of many of the grave sites.
There are tombstones buried amongst the thick shrubs. In some of the newer
sections of the cemetery one can see the introduction of non-Jewish burial
sites. On the outskirts of the cemetery there are some shepherds and
shepherdesses who graze their cattle. I wouldn’t be surprised if
occasionally some of their flock wandered off and entered the cemetery to
graze. There seems to be no clear designation of the grazing area of where
the cemetery begins or ends. This is mostly true in the most northeastern
part of the cemetery.
A shepherdess along with her flock
grazing on the border of the Orsha Jewish cemetery
A memorial to victims of the Nazi-Fascists
at the back of the Orsha cemetery. This memorial,
like many others in
Grave site of a former Orsha mob boss in the Jewish However, after he was buried there, people would come to
his grave site and desecrate his tombstone. Sometimes they would unbury his
grave and leave his body out in the open. So in order to prevent this, the
family built a booth directly across from his grave. The booth is capable of
housing a full time security guard in order to protect the grave site of this
mob boss from vandals.
The security booth which is home to a
security officer hired to protect the grave site of one of Orsha’s former mob bosses. After we finished visiting the cemetery we went to the
JDC offices in Orsha. What was special about this
JDC center was that it seemed that it had both a strong institutional framework,
strong social bonds and at the same time managed to create the feeling that
this was a second home for many of its constituents. It had a very homey
feeling to it. The Inside there was a small crowd of people trying on
clothing. The JDC had recently sent a shipment of mostly new clothing to the
local members of the community and people were happily trying some of them
on, some suggesting clothing to their friends and replacing some of their old
tattered clothing. One of the people that I met at the center was said to be
very knowledgeable about the history of Jews in Orsha.
His name was Boris “Baruch” Reitsen.
Boris and I went outside to the backyard where I interviewed him. We would have
spoken longer but we needed enough time to drive out to Tolochin.
Boris told me that the town of
A monument or tombstone located in the Orsha Jewish cemetery possibly dating to the time of one
of the great pogroms from the beginning of the 20th century If I recall correctly, the above monument is in memory
of an entire family (or all the children of a family) that perished in these
pogroms. If you focus in on the above photograph you can see the names of
various people of one family; all appear to have been murdered in the
pogroms. It was these pogroms from the turn of the century through the
revolution that contributed to Jewish emigration to the West. Boris conveyed how during the days leading up the
revolution people were disappointed and disenfranchised with the Russian
Empire especially the Jews. In the Jewish community there was a large gap
between rich and poor. Sometimes the poor Jews would steal or raid from rich
Jews. The poor Jews were angry and alienated from the Jewish establishment
and were not satisfied with their lot. Boris believes that often poor Jews
would complain to poor non-Jews about their own rich Jews. Boris thinks that
could have influenced some of the poor non-Jews to engage in raids on Jews as
a whole. However, unlike the non-Jews, Jews would never murder or commit
violence against one another. Boris says that there were “middle
class” Jews but that really just meant making enough to have the most
“basic of necessities.” I should interject that “middle
class” in Orsha standards would probably be
considered way below the poverty line in the Boris told me that his uncles were in the Russian army
and that his Aunts went to study in
Boris Reitsen
at the JDC center in Orsha, Belarus. During the Second World War, Boris and his family left Orsha and fled to Like before the war, people after the war were afraid to
announce that they were Jews and lived their Jewish lives discretely. Like
before the war there was lots of bickering and fighting in the Jewish
community, “two Jews, three opinions” Boris said chuckling. People were afraid to celebrate their
Jewish identity in Orsha though many of them
continued to observe Jewish holidays, mitzvoth and other rites. Boris stated
that everyone was proud of the secret baking of matzah
which occurred during the Soviet era.
Dmitry standing outside what I have dubbed the
‘shtetle mobile’. We used this car to
drive around Orsha and from Orsha
to Tolochin. Tolochin,
The coat of arms of Tolochin
located in the town center On the way to Tolochin, Ilya Halfey began relating the
stories he knew about Tolochin. According to Ilya, during the “early” pogroms people would
run away from the village and hide in the forests. During the First World War
most of the pogroms were committed by Polish and Czechoslovakians. Pogroms up
until 1917 were mostly committed by the Polish. Jews were often harassed and
it wasn’t uncommon that a Jew with a beard or payis
would be attacked and have his beard and payis cut
off. Ilya’s great-grandfather had his beard
cut off by the Polish and Ilya recalls how
humiliating that was for him. During the First World War, most of the pogroms
against the Jews were committed by various Slavic groups – not by
Germans. I had also heard many stories about the pogroms and
about life in Tolochin from my various relatives.
My cousin Ruth Poretsky Hershkowitz
recalls her father, Aaron (Harry) Poretsky
(1890-1972) speaking about some of his early memories. Aaron spoke of the
time as a child when he was playing with his friends in the fields. When he
returned to town he saw the synagogue had been attacked and burned to the
ground. It was this experience which encouraged him to become a Zionist.
Historically, when the Cossacks attacked the Jews, the Poretsky
boys would hide the girls in barrels of apples and potatoes to hide them from
the Russian soldiers. They then put the potatoes and apples on top of the
girls in order to protect them. Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Poretskyn had a sister named Basha
who was married to Joseph Epstein that lived in Orsha.
Basha had a friendly Christian neighbor which would
hide her and her family during the pogroms. From the perspective of many Jews
there were pogroms occurring all the time. In eighteen ninety-seven, a few
years before the great migrations, there were about fifteen hundred Jews in Tolochin. By the First World War, all the sons of Tzvi Hirsch Poretsky, my
great-great grandfather, had already left Tolochin
and were working in the In Tolochin, Tzvi Hirsch and Esther ran a local inn which people
stopped at while traveling. They also owned a seltzer machine from which the
family made most of its money. The family had some sort of small farm with
animals which needed to be released during a pogrom when the barn was set
afire. Rabbi Poretsky also worked as a wheat
broker. When Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Poretsky
arrived in the According to Ilya, Tolochin was once famous for its kosher meat and beef. It
was good tasting and very cheap. Many Jews, including his grandmother
traveled to Tolochin from Orsha
to purchase meat. Young Yeshiva Bachurim would
first travel to Orsha and then go over to study in
Yeshivas like Mir, Volozhin and in Vilna. Education was greatly desired amongst the
Jews in the region and only some could read or write “but all knew how
to count money. If someone had a family of ten children there would usually
be at least one that could read and write.” Ilya continued to
impart stories to me as we trekked through the countryside on our way to Tolochin.
A field outside of Tolochin
and Kokhanova The road from Orsha to Tolochin is unbelievable. Imagine that you are in
A highway sign indicating the direction towards
Tolochin. Upon arriving in Tolochin we
went to pick up Tamara Abramovna Kahovich whom was somehow a relative of the Lipshitz family where we were going to have lunch. We
also drove through the center of town and what I observed reminded me of Gail
Haymowitz’s description of people in
Two Byelorussians traveling with a horse
and “carriage” near the outskirts of Tolochin We finally arrived at the home of the Lipshitz family. I don’t have the words to describe
the warmth, and the hospitality which was showered upon me by this family.
They didn’t have much but the little they had they offered entirely to
me. Their generosity towards a complete stranger made me realize that despite
our material abundance in the
Two of the last Jews of Leonid Lifshitz was born in Leonid went to work at the age of twelve in the fields
and in the transportation of bread. “Nobody thanked me, I worked really
hard and nobody thanked me and I got nothing in return –
nothing.” People would call Leonid ‘Zhid’
which is a derogatory word for a Jew. They would say the famous Russian
maxim, “bey Zhidov spacie Racieu” which
means “Beat (up the) Zhids, and save Leonid went to cheder for
three years. There was only one school in town but it was eventually closed
because of socialism. According to Leonid there were four synagogues in Tolochin. People would pray in the synagogue and wrap
themselves in Teffilin. As a child he would pray Shachris, Mincha and Maariv. Everyone went to shul
on Rosh Hashana and everyone tried to kiss the
Torah.
The police station in the Leonid had relatives who fled to
An old home in Tolochin. Leonid emphasizes how everyone in Tolochin
was really poor. He recalls how his grandparents, the patriarchs of his
family, had only dirty and worn-out clothing. Everyone thought about where
their next piece of bread would come. Yet in a certain extent it was good to
be Jewish because Jewish people always helped one another. In During the war Leonid’s uncle was killed by the
Nazis. When the Nazi’s entered Tolochin they
told all the Jews to move to a central location. Then they divided Jews and
non-Jews and lined up all the Jews and gypsies into a straight line. The
Nazis told all the Jews to step forward. However, Leonid’s uncle looked
Georgian and he didn’t step forward. A Russian neighbor then asked one
of the German soldiers why his neighbor, Leonid’s uncle, had not
stepped forward. Discovering his uncles’ Jewish identity the Nazis
subsequently shot his uncle. In the ghetto many were shot, killed, and raped
by their neighbors. The phenomena of non-Jewish neighbors turning on their
Jewish neighbors occurred everywhere. The remaining Jews, nearly two-thousand
were then taken to the ghetto in Kohanisk. While
many Jews were shot in the town most were brought by carriage to Raitsy. The Nazis used Crimean’s to assist them. In
Raitsy the Nazis stripped the remaining Jews of
their clothing and marched them to what would be their common grave on the
outskirts of town.
The road used on the Nazi death march.
This road leads towards the mass grave near Raitsy Leonid walked to Borisov where
his uncle had a horse. They then rode through the forest observing the tanks,
the bombings, soldiers killing people. They rode on horseback as far as the
town of When Leonid was a child and he had difficultly seeing
and his mother would always tell him to go to Epstein who was the eye
doctor. Before the war Tolochin was a classic shtetl
but after the war it became a town. As a child he heard lots of stories about
strong and big Jews that saved the day. Leonid had a relative that picked up
a horse on his shoulders. Nearly sixty
percent of the town was Jewish and it seemed as if Jews were everywhere. His
mother would always cook before Shabbas. They were
very poor growing up but they had their best food on Shabbas
even though there wasn’t much food. When people got together they
always spoke about wanting to marry off this guy with this girl and this girl
with that guy. There were three or four synagogues in Tolochin
and all believed in G-d before the war. Unlike in Orsha,
people just went to the closest synagogue. There was a huge wood industry and
all products related to wood such as carriages and home building. A lot of
people made their income through something related to lumber. His Lifshitz’s were carriage drivers*. I learned that the Lipshitz
family knew some members of the Rutstein clan that
lived in Tolochin. It turns out these Rutstein are distant cousins of mine whom never left
town. The last of the Rutstein clan eventually
moved out of Tolochin and now reside in Afterwards, we left the Lifshitz
home and Leonid accompanied us to the location where the Jewish population of
Tolochin was murdered by the Nazis. We drove outside of town towards the mass
grave in order to pay our respects to the dead. A large mound jutted out of
what was surrounded by flat earth.
Leonid at the mass grave where the Jews
of Tolochin were massacred While it may not be clear from the photographs below the
area where the Jews were executed was near family homes that existed at the
time of the Second World War. It would have been impossible for anyone not to
have noticed the Jews marching through the area. The ensuing gun shots would
have been heard very loudly and clearly by the locals.
Ilya removed his prayer book and
began to recite some prayers while Leonid walked around the area of the mass
grave, his face completely white. Before we left I told everyone that I
wanted to say the kaddish. Ilya
protested that we had no minyan but I felt that it
was the appropriate thing to do. It was likely that nobody had ever said kaddish over the dead of Tolochin
and any kaddish, even one without a minyan, was better than no kaddish
at all. After what was a moving kaddish for all, we
left the site. As we were leaving we were approached by a woman who came out
of a nearby house. She said that she recalled the screams of the dying Jews.
Her mother and father told her that she had seen the Jews climbing on top of
one another trying to escape the death pit, gasping for air. I won’t
write what my thoughts and feelings were. From there we traveled to the Jewish
Near the entrance to the Jewish cemetery
of Tolochin Most of the visible graves date from after the
nineteen-thirties and those are the ones which Leonid mostly tends. There is
a whole section of the cemetery with tall grasses, broken tombstones which
over the decades have turned into dense fields. I fought my way through the
fields and did find some old graves. I also found many graves encircled by
fences surrounded by trees and tall grasses.
A grave surrounded by a fence. At the
center of the grave a young tree grows on top of the burial site There are literally a handful of graves which date prior
to the revolution. After fighting my way through the deep shrubs I
encountered a well preserved tombstone which belongs to Issak
(Isser?) Moisivitch Merles
who was one of the wealthiest Jews of the town and whose home is now the
current location of the
However,
one of the most notable moments for me was finding the grave site of a
distant cousin of mine named Nachum Rutstein. This is where my knowledge of the Cyrillic
alphabet paid off and I was able to recognize my surname. I tried to clear
some of the shrubs away which surrounded his grave but there was little I
could do. I found a near by tomb which was worn and I could not read the name
inscribed in it despite tracing the inscription with the black magic marker I
brought.
The grave site of my cousin, Nachum Rutstein in the Tolochin Jewish cemetery We
couldn’t spend more time in the cemetery, as we needed to get to the
The separate grave mentioned above..
Leonid Lifshitz
leaving the Tolochin Jewish cemetery after locking
the gates. Many of the grasses and fields in the background grow on top of
old graves After we left the cemetery we dropped off Leonid at his
home and drove to the center of town to visit the museum. The museum is
located within what was once the home of one of the wealthiest Jews in town, Isser Merles. At the museum we paid the entrance fee and
a guide took us around the entire museum explaining the exhibits. Tolochin was once seventy percent Jewish and founded by
Jews but there is not so much as a footnote in the museum about displaying
what was once Jewish life. At the end of the tour I mentioned to the guide
who I was and why I had come to Tolochin. The guide
quickly went into the other room and brought out the director of the museum.
The director introduced herself as Irina Pikulik and I told her why I came to Tolochin.
I relayed to her the deep sense of curiosity, interest, and nostalgia that
many Jews have towards Tolochin. I told her that I
too was a child of Tolochin and I wanted to know
why there was no mention of the Jewish presence in the town. She told me that
she wanted to have an exhibit about the Jewish presence in the town but that
she didn’t have any information. Irina said
that if she had information and material she would surely put something
together. I then took the kippah off my head and
gave it to her, telling that this could be the first thing to exhibit about
Jewish life. I told her that I would send her Judaica
and I would try to get others to donate objects. She also began telling me a
bit about the Jewish history of the town. Jews were said to have founded the
town, which is named after a nearby river.
At one point Jews were over seventy percent and there were several waves
of Jewish immigration to the West. She informed me that Issak
Moisivitch Merles was a rich glass blower, founder
of a factory and that the home museum is in his home (5). Before I left she
gave me a gift, a thick book about Tolochin and
some of its martyrs.
The Museum of Tolochin
and the former home of Isser Merles of Tolochin Once I
left the museum Dmitry and the others expressed
their skepticism concerning the offer of the director to create an exhibit on
the historical Jewish presence in Tolochin. The
same sentiment was later expressed by other Jews in We then
walked into the center of town which is located a few meters from the museum.
As we were walking through the nearby park we bumped into Mrs. Lifshitz, Tamara and another Jew from Tolochin
named Luba Blechner. We
sat down at some nearby benches and spoke about the history of Jewish Tolochin, their current life challenges and those that
have left this little town. I realized that this little Jewish reunion could
be one of its last as it was likely that the Jewish presence in Tolochin would disappear within the next decade. It made
me realize that the window to the past is closing quickly and that all those
that wish to make the journey need to make it now. There is little time left.
We all said our goodbyes and exchanged contact information.
Front: Mrs. Lifshitz, Luba
Blechner, Tamara. Back: Ilya,
Yehuda, Dmitry in the On our way back to Orsha we
drove through the town of
The highway sign for Kochanova. I posit that my great-great grandfather may have moved
from Tolochin to Kochanova
in his old age because it would have been cheaper to live in Kochanova than in Tolochin and
that such an action may have been necessary after his entire family
emigrated. Kochanova may have had a poorer
population than of Tolochin and Orsha.
The road through Kochanova.. After leaving Tolochin we
drove back to Orsha and spent the night. Early the
next morning Dmitry and I returned to Thinking about her words I began to understand a driving
force behind Jewish emigration to the West in the last century. In fact I
believe that this may be one of the fundamental driving forces behind many
migrations of the twentieth century, freedom. Jews and non-Jews in I believe that one of the most important human needs is
the feeling of personal satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from the things in
our lives in which we take pride and define our own sense of what is best in
us. Satisfaction often comes from an accomplishment, a situation, a project
that we may have taken responsibility for and which we achieved success.
Other elements affect our deep and lasting satisfactions such as the degree
of effort we put into something. If I work really hard in university I will
have good grades. If I study for my LSAT’s I
will do well on them. However, what happens when
individuals put in tremendous effort and get nothing in return? What happens
when an entire society does not see the fruits of its labours? What does the
ambitious individual do in order maximize their personal satisfaction and
potential? Some stay in order to change their environment while most others
decide to emigrate. Putting these ideas together, I am restating a principle
of Aristotle. Satisfaction in life comes from exercising our abilities and
thereby realizing our potential. The more complex and demanding the exercise
of our realized capacities are, the greater the satisfaction. Opportunities
to exercise our realized capacities depend on freedom. In a communist or
totalitarian state our ability to maximize our satisfaction and potential is
stifled. We cannot take responsibility for our destinies because our
destinies are not our own but that of our rulers. Without controlling our
destinies we cannot truly reach our potential as human beings. Places such as
the
The Byelorussians KGB headquarters in
Minsk, Belarus The
next morning I woke up before dawn. Waiting for Leonid to drive me to the
airport, I read a description of my great-grandfather Yaakov
Rutstein written by my grandfather Milton Rothstein.
“In the beginning my
father was a great “maven”, a genius who far exceeded his
father’s business prowess. At the age of six he was taken to the (Tolochin?)
market (farmers and commodities) he dealt with the Russian peasant buying various
things, horse hair (bristles), produce, furs and pelts. At
the end of the day he earned more then my grandfather who was a giant of a man called
“Dov Behr” in Hebrew or Yiddish? He was over 6’4
weighing 270 pounds with powerful muscles. He was a
“gibbur” and was reputed to have killed
many Cossacks who had massacred poor
defenseless Jews in pogroms. Yankov went to Heder (school) until the age of twelve. During his school days he was engaged in
many activities such as waldsacher {lumber
merchant in Yiddish}. He could estimate the output of an orchard for trade and
anticipated accompanying his father to market. He was hired by a German company to export
seafood from which later was deposited in Russian army during the Russo-Sino
(Japanese) war. He was stricken with
rheumatic fever in route to the hospitalization and
using up all his money he landed in N.Y. practically
penniless…” My thoughts turned to my great-grandparents. After
experiencing Tolochin, a place that has barely
changed, my imagination took me back to the small shtetl of yore. I realized that exactly a hundred years
earlier in the summer of nineteen hundred and five my great-grand father Yaakov Rutstein left his small
village in search for a better life. There most have been a certain naiveté
to him a young country boy leaving to
Dov Behr and Riva Shpitzgluz Rutstein of
The Tolochin train station. My cousin Jimmy Kaplan (from the Rutstein
clan) once wrote, “I was talking with my wife last night, after reading
her some selections from Milton’s story, and
we contemplated what it must have been like to come over here from Russia
under conditions that are so foreign to us. It must have taken enormous
determination and vision to want to travel so far to start a new life. This
past year, we were able to see a touring production of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
which starred Theodore Bikel. Despite his age (over
80!) he is still full of enormous energy and power…When I think of all
the villagers leaving at the end, it’s not hard to imagine a young
Jacob being one of them, whose family sent him to Addendum History of Jewish
life. The Assistant Director of the
Religious Communities of Orsha was founded in 1067 and the
first Jewish presence in the city is recorded in the sixteenth century.
Historically Orsha was a very small town but by the
turn of the century that began to change and the city grew drastically. It
was the largest city in the region and a rail road center. By the mid 19th century there
was a revolution in manufacturing especially in the lumber industry which
originated in Yiddish was once one of the four official languages of The pogroms triggered the massive wave of Jewish
emigration to the West but poverty also played a lesser role. Jews went to During the First World War the
Germans were very polite to the Jews. During World War Two many Jews expected
the same thing. Most Byelorussians were indifferent to the Nazi persecution
of the Jews and many actively assisted them. In Dubrovna,
where his family is from, the town population actively assisted the Nazis in
removing the Jewish population. Dubrovna was a
small shtetl just like Tolochin.
In soviet times there were
quotas against Jews in higher education. Stalin died on Purim which many
Byelorussian Jews felt was symbolic. Various Photographs
Random Jewish grave site in the
A photograph of a man who may have been
Adolph “Eydola” Lipshitz
of Tolochin and the grandfather of Leonid Lipshitz.
A home being built on the outskirts of Tolochin.
A memorial for the Jews of Tolochin at the
site of the mass grave near the Other personalities: Bertha (Breina) Poretzkyn (1900-1983)
Bertha
was the youngest sister of Basha Poretzky (daughter of Tzvi
Hirsch) my great-grandmother. According to Professor Zvi Gitelman,
Bertha is dressed in a Russian peasant dress and is playing a native guitar.
This photo, circa 1915, illustrates the extent of her russification
in contrast to some of her other siblings. All of the eight Poretsky children reacted to the tumultuous ideological
climate in different ways. Some became Zionists, Socialists, and Capitalists
while others remained traditionalists. Zalman Kalatin - The Last
“Rabbi” of Tolochin
The Last “Rabbi” of Tolochin, Zalman Kalatin. According to Ilya Halfey, Zalman Kalatin was the last spiritual leader of Tolochin. In 1960, Zalman had a
“golden” fifty year wedding anniversary in Tolochin.
Ilya remembers people playing the violin and
dancing. Everything was kosher about the wedding including the food and chuppah. Ilya remembers people
praying, wearing teffilin and tallaisim.
When Judaism was not permitted during the soviet era the Jews prayed secretly
in the rabbis house even thought it was illegal. There was no room in the
house because so many people wanted to pray so they put the children outside.
Ilya remembers trying to untie the knots on the tallaism as a child. Jews worked in the market and in
making clothing. Lots of Jews worked in the lumber industry. Mrs. (Tamara?) Lifshitz Mrs. Lifshitz was born in the She eventually found herself walking alone in the forest
(for three months?) with another girl named Bella (Kroyck).
She remembers being hungry and eating grass in order to survive. Throughout
telling her story she was crying and Dmitry, my
translator, was having trouble understanding some of the details. On July 8th
they were found by the partisans and they took her and she joined the
resistance. In the resistance she worked in the kitchen. She would defend the
kitchen with her gun. She was only eleven years old. Sometimes she would take her gun and shoot things and
eat them and sometimes she didn’t eat at all. Sometimes they would
attack Germans and kill them and she would retrieve their guns and food. She
was doing all this at the age of eleven. She spent nearly four years with the
partisans. At the end of the war she found herself in a village near Tolochin called Slavc and it
was there that the partisans connected with the soviet army. She was not
drafted into the army because she was so young but instead was sent to an
orphanage. At 16 she started working at a cement factory and excelled at her
work. She received many medals. Mrs. Lipshitz was
so proud of her medals that she ran to her room to show me them. She
eventually came to settle in Tolochin because she
had an aunt who lived there.
Mrs. Lipshitz
with her medals. Tamara Abramovna Kahovich Before the war, most of Tolochin was farm land. Her father was the director of
the farms owned by Abraham Kravashay who owned
three farms. Most of the houses that exist now were farmland before the war.
There was a local farm named “Karkali”
which was a Jewish name and so during the soviet era they changed it to
Victory farm but it has since ben changed back. It
was easier and cheaper to live in the outskirts of town when they lived in Tolochin it was harder and more expensive. Her (grand?)mother’s surname was Furmann
and her father was Mendel and he worked in “metalwork.” Her
grandmother, Basya Furhman,
was involved in local conflict resolution. Because of her grandmother’s
local stature, her mother was taken in by a Russian family and saved. Her
mother had watched the Nazis kill her brother and grandmother. The
neighbors’ agreed to hide her mother in their house. Eventually the
Russians came and they were evacuated and the family only came back after
1946. Tamara was born in 1944. Tamara was somehow related to the Lipshitz
family. I believe this is how: There where two Furhman
sisters. One was Basyia and the other was Bracha. Basiya granddaughter was Tamara. Bracha
Furhman married into the Lipshitz
family and was the mother of Leonid.
Basya and Bracha Furhman of Luba Blechner Blackman I met Luba randomly in the center of Tolochin. Her father was Benyamin
and was a roofmaker. She had a brother that went to
the Misha Ginsberg Misha was born in 1946 in Misha had an uncle that married
Russian women and had five children. The uncle went to the Russian and the
kids went to another village to hide. Someone ratted
them to the authorities and subsequently the children were taken and killed.
After the war some wanted revenge for the killings and subsequently killed
the tattler. Link to more photographs of my trip to Footnotes 1. I
must mention that some of my notes were damaged and that I am not able to
one-hundred percent confirm whether the following autobiographical statements
contained in the immediate following interview are that of this same Boris
that secretly baked matzah in his home or of the
other Boris I interview later in this piece. However, I am about
eighty-percent certain that the Boris I interview later is Boris Reitsen and that I never wrote down the surname of the
Boris mentioned in the immediate following interview the one who secretly
baked matzos. I have two different dates of births for the two different
Boris’s one is 1937 and the other is 1930. 2. In the Orsha Jewish school his brothers learned Yiddish as a language and that’s mostly what made it Jewish. 3. “14, 15,
16,17 – then ghetto during the war.” 4. ]
He had a brother that lived from 1925-1943 whom died in the war. *See below for other interviews
conducted at the Lifshitz home. 5. Irina Pikulik referred to him as “Issak
Merles” while his tombstone read “Yisrael
Merles.” I think that I may have misheard or miswrote his name when
speaking to the director. She likely meant to say, “Isser
Merles.” 6. I met a man in Orsha who was anti-Chabad. He
didn’t know the Aleph-Bet, but he knew that he was a Litvak. He was proud and resented the Chabad
encroachment in what was historically Litvak
territory. A lot of people complained about the Chabad presence in Orsha. The
most common complain was the Rabbi lives in a luxurious apartment and
doesn’t share his wealth with the people and wont provides service to
members who are not part of his community.
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