Sefer Stryj

Memories from the Old Home

Stryy was my birth town. There I lived with my parents and with the entire Hauptman family. There in Stryy I spent my childhood years. There I dreamed and fantasized of a brighter, greater world – childish dreams from a time happily spent.

I remember yet well that big Zionist Folk-Fest in the park, "Olshina." The sensations from the Fest were 12 cutters from the Land of Israel fields. I was one of them. In white clothes, white head-scarves, white-blue sandals on our feet, scythes in our hands and grasses gathered up in our aprons, we went around the great park, raising our scythes high and sang in Hebrew: "How loved and dear you are to us, our earth in Zion."

In the avenues of the park were standing small tables, where we sold various things and onzikhts - kortlakh [?] from the Land of Israel. People called these avenues "Jerusalem Avenues." The money went for the K. K. L.

The initiators of the Folk-Fest were Berl Stern, Aron Hauptman, Benyamin Klein, Chaim Dovid Korn, M. Wagner, of blessed memory.

A second event from that time:

A well known woman from Stryy came to my father and recounted to him the following:

A Ukrainian neighbor had accused her husband in court, of spitting on him and his sacred pictures in his home, for not punctually paying his apartment rent. The Christian lived by them [were renters] and didn’t want to pay for the apartment. He had devised a frame-up lie on them. His 8 year old boy testified that the "Zshid" had expressed to his father: "I spit on you and your god." The second day a home-agent came and arrested her husband for insulting the Christian religion. The woman cried before my father and asked him to help her.

My father was out to the Jewish Court Counsel, Yanas, whom he personally knew and asked him to be personally interested with the matter.

"It's bad," said the Court Counsel, Yanas, 'here we're dealing with problems of people who are religious feeling offended, when it comes to this, some of our Christians are inventive, especially when it's a matter of a Jew. But I am sure and believe that it is a frame-up lie, and I will see about something to do about this thing.

[More coming – Translation in process]

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