53°37' / 28°58'
Translation of
Der hurben fun mayn shtetl un ire kedoyshim
Editor: A[braham] L[oeb] Schwartzburg
Published in New York, 1934
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Translated by
Dena Ressler & Ethan Parmet
Editing assistance by Tina Lunson
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Per the information of one of its former residents, Rose Kantorovitz Matz (1905-1995) and the yizkor book by Abraham Loeb Schwartzburg published in New York in 1934 – the translation of the book which follows – S[h]eliba was a dorf (small village) town approximately 40 miles from Bobroysk/Bobruisk composed almost entirely of Jews (per an 1897 census cited in Wikipedia, 91% of the 982 residents of the town were Jewish). It had successful fruit orchards, stores, one shul, daily morning and afternoon minyans (prayer quotas), and at least one sheykhet (ritual slaughter), Mrs. Matz's cousin. There were Jews of varying levels of religious observance – for instance, Mrs. Matz's girlfriend picked berries on Shabbos. Jews from surrounding settlements that were even smaller than Seliba came to hire religious teachers, to have wedding dresses made, and to bury their dead in the dorf. Through good fortune, Jews were allowed to legally own land, but later rulers did not allow them to acquire more of it, which created economic hardship for subsequent generations.Mrs. Matz reports that one year before Pesach, the banditn (bandits) set fire to the dorf. As the following book attests, there were multiple, brutal, ongoing murders by Polish soldiers. We speculate this was about 1920, although Kantorovitz reported that during the (Russian) Revolution, soldiers occupied the shul. “They killed us like chickens.” Per Wikipedia, the Belarusian Democratic Republic of Belarus was established in 1918 and significant violence occurred in the town between then and World War II perpetrated by soldiers of the second Polish Republic, also established in 1918. It appears that this was the violence the yizkor book reports.
Gentiles let the Kantorovitz family in when they fled their home. Then the family moved to Bobruisk and were sheltered by Simen and Basha Leah Matz (née Ulman), relatives by marriage, when they fled their home. Simen and Basha were the parents of the man she would later marry in the United States.
Dena Ressler
Yizkor Book Project
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