Jacob Shapiro of Lubny with Army buddies
by the generosity of Gale Schissel Riley
Lubny History
Lubny has a reputation as one of the oldest cities of the Ukraine, with a settlement date that preceeds 1000AD. It is situated on the Sula river and it was first represented there by a wooden fort, then by a series of more fortified buildings reflecting its position as a bulwark of Polish claims in the Ukraine. In the sixteenth century, ownership had passed to the Polish noble family Wisniowiecki ( its leaders in different time periods are written in some modern Ukrainian sources as "Prince
Vishnevetsky") family and Jerome Wisniowiecki (1612-1651) governed an estate larger than other European countries on the left bank of the Dnieper with Lubny as its "capital," with the full panoply of Polish officials and thousands of serf laborers. Lubny was his personal capital as well as the wowoide headquarters (the Polish unit of provincial government) until the Cossack Rebellion (and Khmelnitsky Massacres.)
Jerome Wisniowiecki (1612-1651)
Master of Lubny
The Cossack rebellions of the 1640s saw the Polish claims surrender the left bank to the force of Ukrainian Cossacks and the Cossack's Muscovite allies. From c.1650 to the end of the eighteenth century, Lubny was the headquarters of the Cossack forces including that unit called the Lubny Regiment. When the Russians established Poltava Gubernia, Poltava was the largest city and capital of the Gubernia and Lubny was the second largest.
Poltava Gubernia had over 400 annual fairs providing huge revenues to the Russian Empire including those at
Poltava, Lubny, and Romny. During the early part of the nineteenth century, it was those fairs that drew thousands of Jews from other parts of the Russian Pale of Settlement, many from as far away as
Kovno, and Grodno to the new opportunities here.
But the real revenues began flowing to the Russian crown when Lubny became part of the Russian railroad system at the end of the nineteenth century.
Vendors Carts in Lubny
Gayle Schissel Riley shares this picture with us and says the third cart from the left is her grandparents cart in 1910.
We are looking for articles on Lubny's Jewish history. We need people to write about all periods of time and special looks at the people and landmarks of the area, but especially - Lubny in the late Russian Empire; during the Civil Wars and the 1918-1920 pogroms; the early Soviet period; and the Holocaust. We know that there were an enumerated 5,341 Jews here in 1939, but almost nothing about daily life in that period. We know that
Sholom Aleichem, the noted Yiddish writer, most often tagged in English with the line - "the Yiddish Mark Twain," had lived here in the 1880s, being a state-appointed religious official for the Jewish community. Maybe your research can tell us of the synagogues that were here, the heads of the community with which Sholom Aleichem would have dealt, the stores and pushcarts where he would have shopped.
This emotionally moving picture of a mother sitting exhausted with her children at
Lubny, just moments before the executions would begin here, reaches out to touch us over the decades. The picture is part of the documentary archives from the Hessisches
Hauptstaatsarchiv. It is part of a series of pictures taken at Lubny October 15, 1941 and used as evidence in war crimes prosecution. Most of Lubny's young men were serving in the Soviet Army, many of the young adults who could flee had done so, but that day in October 1941, close to 4500 Jews were taken to a site outside the city and murdered. They were the young, the old, homemakers, and those who stayed to take care of them. This woman and her children were among them.
If you have filmed gravestones in the cemeteries here, let us know so we can link to your contribution to the International Cemetery Project sponsored by Jewish Gen. If you have found records in the archives that would illuminate Lubny life, we can publish them here and perhaps others will do that with records that will help you, in return. If you have identified books, internet sites, or other resources that you think would let us learn more about
Lubny, please contact us.
Please let us know about Lubny congregations and landsmanschaften, and recent Lubny emigres or residents who can assist in our researches. If you are among those who would like to join with others in a Lubny Birds of a Feather Group or currently have such an organization, please write. And finally, please send us the family photographs, the stories, and the records that your family has preserved of your family from
Lubny.
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Page created by Deborah Glassman,
copyright December 2005
