Kharkov City Collection Point

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Jewish History

Kharkov, today the second largest Ukrainian city, in the nineteenth century was a Russian community outside the Pale of Settlement. It was from that time until today, a major manufacturing center, and was one of the first cities of Russia to be a nineteenth century center of industry. Research to improve its industrial capacity was one of the motivating factors in the expansion of its renowned University which had been founded in 1805 and in the development of technical colleges for training engineers, and for teaching scientific agriculture from the mid nineteenth century.

Its geography, which by the 1860s made it the hub of the the famed Donets coal and steel resources in the Donets Basin, and later made it the the key point in a network of railroads, ensured that people would come from all over the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century to this entreprenurial zone of opportunity.

Fairs
Jews came to Kharkov fairs from the late eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great’s partitioning of Poland made millions of Jews Russian subjects for the first time. Kharkov, written in English earlier as Karkoff, Charkow, Kharkow, and other variants was a commercial center of interest to merchants moving raw goods and finished products from Poland into interior Russia, and raw goods the other way. Jews found important economic roles shoring up both ends of the trade. A book on Russian Fairs describes the January 6 Kharkov Epiphany Fair as the most important fair in the Russian Empire. The English writer of the 1883 volume noted that in recent years almost three million pounds sterling changed hands at the Epiphany Fair including woolens and textiles making up a third. Jewish travelers stayed in all of the lodging houses of the area; the communal buildings were filled with Jewish travellers willing to sleep on the floor; and every Jewish householder could take in paying lodgers in every nook and cranny of their homes. People paid extra to sleep closer to the big stove that was the centerpoint of each home.

“Fairs, Past and Present: A Chapter in the History of Commerce” by Cornelius Walford, published by Elliott Stock, London 1883  
Remember when reading older English materials what looks like a lower case f is a printed lower case s.
This book was found using what was then called GooglePrint in November 2005 which directed me to Princeton Library which provided the page copy.

The Jewish Community in 1870s and 1880s
Thousands of Jews (estimate 2800-3500 in 1860s) participated at the fairs within its borders and by 1870 the local Jewish community that was officially a permanent 35 family mixture of merchants, artisans, and craftsmen, were allowed to build a synagogue and vote for representatives. The gymnasia admitted Jewish students and the community served the needs of the Jewish soldiers billeted in the local regiment, approaching 100 Jewish soldiers during the 1870s. See the separate heading on Kharkov University to learn more about a Russian University in which in this 1880s time period, Jews formed almost thirty percent of the student body

The Kharkov Jewish community petitioned to build its first synagogue in 1867 on the street now named in honor of Pushkin. It stood until the community could afford to engage a nationally respected architect to put its replacement on the same spot in the 1910s, a building today called the Kharkov Grand Choral Synagogue. “Choral synagogue” is a term of synagogue architecture that refers to the construction including a balcony from which a choir performs. When I queried the members of the Rabbinical SIG of JewishGen on certain synagogue architectural references including choral synagogue, I got a variety of comments on the implied meaning of such a structure. But investigation seems to indicate that though those who spent the 150,000 rubles to construct the later building, saw themselves as “progressive” and “modern” and part of a larger European community with many avenues of opportunity opening for Jews, this was in no way a statement of infidelity to traditional Jewish values. Those who attended, observed all of the laws of kashrut and of keeping Shabbat that their compatriots did in smaller prayer-houses around the city. There were certainly differences in the level of observation from the most observant households in the city to those who attended a progressive synagogue. You were more likely to find heads of the synagogue community sporting a moustache and foregoing a beard, and you would note the women were more likely to have their hair uncovered on the street, or to choose stylish millinery over the older style of wigs. But while labels are tricky, it certainly would not be appropriate to label attendees of a Choral Synagogue – “Reform Jews” as I have seen some writers do.

Kharkov Choral Synagogue

During the fifty years that Kharkov went from its first synagogue on Pushkinskaya Street to its huge replacement structure, Kharkov Jews were allowed to establish houses of prayer in apartments, in storefronts, and in homes around the city. The requirement that you needed 30-80 registered heads of household and also a statement that the existing structures were insufficient to meet existing need, meant that it was almost 1900 before there were two formal “synagogues” in Kharkov. Restrictions on synagogue construction were loosened after the establishment of the national Duma 1905-1907 and by 1910 there were close to ten in Kharkov. Five, including the Grand Choral Synagogue, were considered of architectural merit by those who write of Kharkov's art history. The surge in population as Jews from the Western Pale were driven from the fronts of World War I by fiat and edict of the Emperor, meant that there was a population boom in Kharkov’s Jewish community between 1914 and 1917 and by 1917 there were eighteen synagogues, some of which were using the minhag [custom of service, liturgical music, and order of prayers] of communities to the Northwest in Belarus and Lithuania. In the Pale of Settlement, a community needed only the permission of the local authorities to build a synagogue, but outside the Pale, you also needed permission from the Ministry of the Interior, this may have kept the numbers down for that first fifty years, but obviously the difficulties were largely overcome by the early Twentieth Century.

Twentieth Century Jewish History

Lenin’s establishment of the Communist government, led to Kharkov serving as capital of the Ukraine from 1919-1934. This meant that Jews found it difficult to escape the attention of the authorities which had unfavorable views toward religion in general and additional strong anti-Jewish sentiments in particular, for both for the religion and the “nationality” of the Jews. Jews who had owned small businesses and trading establishments in Kharkov were disposessed and those who had managed factories were threatened for their un-proletariat leanings. Religion for all groups was forced to a very private observance but Jews took special cares not to make a public display of their religion, even the holiest days in the Jewish calendar were not noted by those who still had to make a living in this environment, circumcisions were largely omitted, and burials were made very secular in appearance. Absences for non-recognized religious activities were noted in the workbook that each person carried. We include some of the pages here from a workbook for a Kharkov Jewish resident, a civilian “pay book” comparable to that of the military forces of many countries, which recorded all of the jobs, and all of the training, and all of the awards and commendations that that resident had in many years in Kharkov.

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