Lepel - Belarusian median. Lepel - Belarusian median The story of how Jewish children were taught
Lepel is located in the north of Belarus, 155 kilometers from the capital - Minsk - and 110 km from another large city - Vitebsk. Speaking about the road to Lepel from Moscow, St. Petersburg or another city in Russia, the most appropriate route is one that includes a flight to Minsk and further travel by bus or by rail. Lepel station has direct connections to 26 other cities in the Vitebsk region. The most popular service today is the Orsha-Lepel train. This commuter train runs regularly, with virtually no delays, and its tickets are affordable - ideal for many travelers. For those who like to travel by car, there are variations on how to get to Lepel: highways leading to Vitebsk, Minsk, Ulu and Orsha pass through the city. Is it possible to vacation in .
Prices for travelers to Lepel
The city itself as a tourist destination is not of an entertaining nature, but of an educational one. This is a place where you can perfectly relax your soul and body, learn something new and interesting from the history of the district, explore new territories, and visit places on the planet that you have never seen before. In this regard, in Lepel there is no policy of increasing prices and “knocking out” profits from tourists, which is usual for resort towns.
Arriving in Lepel, you have the opportunity to find a house for rent in the private sector of the city or take advantage of the hospitable offer from the owners of the local estate “Priozernaya” in the village of Stary Lepel not far from the city. Moreover, at the entrance to the city there is a cozy hotel complex, where you can not only have a snack or relax with a cup of coffee, but also visit a small museum of vintage cars. And for ardent fans of relaxation in the heart of nature, there is the opportunity to stay in comfortable houses directly on the territory of the Berezinsky Nature Reserve.
Organizing a holiday in Lepel
At first glance, it may seem that Lepel is an inaccessible wilderness, in which, with the onset of darkness, it will become completely boring and there is nothing to do. This is by no means the case: in the city there are restaurants and cafes that work until the last customer (“On the Moon”, “Volna”), a billiard room - establishments of this kind often host discos and other entertainment events that will not let you get bored.
City parks will helpfully provide their shady, uncomplicated corners on a hot day, and Lake Lepel will also offer refreshment - the city authorities have equipped comfortable beaches with gazebos, changing rooms and even wooden sculptures. An open-air dance floor, an arboretum with a wide variety of plants, including exotic ones, an open amphitheater - all these elements of civilized recreation are aimed at creating a full-fledged and non-boring place in which the pleasant pastime and comfort of vacationers is put at the forefront.
Sights of Lepel
In addition to relaxing in the reserve and on the lake, Lepel offers educational types of vacation. The Lepel Museum of Local Lore, founded back in 1954, will tell tourists about the history of the settlement, which later turned into an amazing prosperous city. The exhibition includes more than 14 thousand unique exhibits. There are objects of labor, everyday life and decoration created back in the 8th century AD, and documents of the revolutionary movement of the early 20th century, and materials relating to the Great Patriotic War. Of particular interest to tourists are traditional musical instruments and items of national clothing of the region's inhabitants.
The religious component of the city is represented in the beautiful churches and churches: if you are interested in such things, be sure to include the wooden Church of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa, the Chapel of St. George and the stunning Church of St. Casimir in your tourist route. Their majestic forms and ancient icons amaze not only believers, but also other lovers of beauty, aesthetics and historical values.
Those who are crazy about all kinds of masterclasses and workshops should definitely visit the House of Crafts in the city of Lepel. Here they not only engage in pottery making and sewing traditional costumes, but also provide visitors with the opportunity to try out craft technologies with their own hands under the strict guidance of local mentors. At the House of Crafts you can also rent tourist equipment: tents, sleeping bags, camping utensils.
Center of the Lepelsky district of the Vitebsk region. The city is located on the shores of Lake Lepel, 115 kilometers from Vitebsk. Connected by roads with Polotsk, Minsk, Vitebsk, Orsha and Ula. Here is the final station of the Orsha-Lepel railway line.
Lepel was first mentioned in written sources in 1439, in this year the Lepel land was given to the Vitebsk Church by Prince Mikhail Zhigimontovich. In 1541, Zhigimont I the Old transferred the Lepel Island to the Vilna Chapter.
During the Livonian War, a castle was built on the island. The castle burned down in 1563, and the “place” of Lepel arose next to the ashes in the same year. Today this is the village of Stary Lepel.
In 1568, Lepel was part of the possession of the Polotsk church priest Zenovich, and later it was owned by the Polotsk governor Dorogostaisky. In 1586, the Lepel lands were bought by Lev Sapega, who founded Bely (or New) Lepel, three kilometers from the “place,” a city that we know today. A shopping center was moved here, a castle, a church and a church were built.
In 1609, Old and New Lepel were donated by the Sapiehas to the Vilna Monastery of Bernandines.
On July 3, 1812, Lepel was captured by the French and burned. After 40 years, the city received its own coat of arms, reminiscent of the “Pursuit” - a silver horseman on a red field.
From July 7, 1941 to August 26, 1944, the city was occupied by German troops, who killed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. The day of Lepel's liberation from the Nazi invaders is celebrated as a city holiday.
Lepel residents and guests of the republic are invited to take part in the July folk festivals “Kupalye”, which regularly take place on lakes Lepelskoye and Svyatoe.
In modern Lepel there is a local history museum, founded in 1954. The exhibition area is 237 sq. meters, about 14 thousand exhibits of the main fund are presented. Six halls house exhibitions dedicated to the history of the Lepel region. Among the exhibits are objects of labor, jewelry from the 8th-12th centuries AD, found during excavations of ancient settlements in the region, documents and materials about the revolutionary movement of the 19th - early 20th centuries, civil war, industrialization, and repressions of the Soviet period. A special place is occupied by the exhibition dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. Work and household items, pottery, national clothing, and folk musical instruments are on display. In the nature section, stuffed animals and birds of the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve are exhibited.
There is also a House of Crafts in the city, specializing in pottery and sewing national costumes. Visitors are given the opportunity to craft under the guidance of experienced mentors.
Guests of Lepel can stay in the private sector of the city or take advantage of the offer of the hospitable hosts of the Priozernaya estate, located in the village of Stary Lepel. In addition, a few kilometers before Lepel, there is a hotel complex on the highway where you can not only drink coffee and have a snack, but also visit a small “museum” of old cars. In the Berezinsky Nature Reserve, which is also nearby, there are cozy houses for tourists.
Billiards, the Volna restaurant, and the Na Lune cafe, where discos are held, are open until late at night in Lepel. Roadside service is well developed, there are private cafes. Near the city there are specialized parking lots for heavy vehicles, parking lots for passenger cars, and service stations. Tourist equipment can be rented at the Community Center and the health and fitness center.
The city has several parks, and on the shores of lakes there are beaches - changing rooms, gazebos, wooden statues of animals. There is an open amphitheater and a dance floor. An arboretum with exotic trees and plants has been established.
LEPEL, a city (since 1802) in Belarus, the regional center of the Vitebsk region (see VITEBSK REGION), near Lake Lepel. Railroad station. Population 19.1 thousand people (2004). Mechanical engineering, food, woodworking, flax industries... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
City (since 1802) in Belarus, Vitebsk region, near lake. Lepel. Railroad station. 19.6 thousand inhabitants (1991). Food, wood processing industry. Museum of Local Lore. Known since 15th century... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
City, district center, Vitebsk region, Belarus. Known since the 15th century, it is located near Lake Lepel, after which it was named. Hydronym from Latvian. liepa linden from Balt. suffix el. Geographical names of the world: Toponymic dictionary. M: AST. Pospelov E.M. 2001... Geographical encyclopedia
- (Leppel) district. Vitebsk province, near the lake. Lepel and R. Essa and Ulyanka. Not far from present-day L. there is an ancient village called Old L.; L. was here before. In 1563, Russian troops burned L. In 1568, King Sigismund Augustus... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron
Lepel- Sp Lèpelis Ap Lepel/Lyepyel’, Lepel’ baltarusiškai (gudiškai), rusiškai L C Baltarusija … Pasaulio vietovardžiai. Internetinė duomenų bazė
Lepel- city, district center, Vitebsk region, Belarus. Known since the 15th century, it is located near Lake Lepel, after which it was named. Hydronym from Latvian. liepa linden from Balt. suffix el... Toponymic dictionary
Lake in the former Vitebsk. lips From other Russian *Lepl with l epentheticum. According to Bugi (RS 6, 30), from ltsh. *Lēрja; Wed ltsh. lẽpa water lily, water lily, Nupрhaea, lit. lėpis Calla palustris, marsh calla... Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language by Max Vasmer
A city in the Vitebsk region of the BSSR, near the lake. Lepelskoe. Railway station. 13.6 thousand inhabitants (1972). Milk canning, bread, industrial plants; repair, fish factory, excavator repair plant. Museum of Local Lore. L. for the first time... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Catholic Church Church of St. Casimir Kascel St. Casimir ... Wikipedia
Main article: Administrative division of the Republic of Belarus Contents 1 Cities in the BSSR 2 Cities in the Republic of Belarus ... Wikipedia
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- Partisans take the fight, V. E. Lobanok. This was one of the largest battles between the partisans and the Nazi invaders in the Great Patriotic War. For six months (from December 1943 to May 1944) front-line Vitebsk...
GINZBURG IN LEPELE
The Ginzburgs' interest in Belarus is not accidental. Barry's grandmother, Rivka-Genya Rebecca Borgak, was born in Lepel. In Ulla - grandfather Joseph Gutkovich. Relatives lived in the village of Gorodets - they rented an apple orchard located on the banks of the Ushacha River; in the town of Kublichi; in the surrounding villages and towns.
In the region, which at the end of the 19th century was densely populated by Jews, there lived many namesakes, and, most likely, relatives of the Gutkovichs. The surname Borgak was much less common.
The Ginzburgs, my father’s parents, lived in the Mogilev region in Shklov.
How did Barry Ginsburg's grandfather meet his grandmother? Who today will answer this question that makes historians smile? This happened, apparently, at the very beginning of the 20th century. Lepel was a kind of center of the surrounding small-town world. Both business people and young people from Chashniki, Lukoml, Beshenkovichi, Kamen, Ulla, Ushachi, Kublichi and other towns flocked here.
Large fairs were held in Lepel twice a year, according to established tradition on January 30 and August 29. They brought together buyers and sellers from cities, towns and villages. The fairs were noisy, beautiful, fun, and crowded. Perhaps it was at the fair that the Lepel and Ul parents met and agreed on the children’s engagement. Or maybe they knew each other a long time ago, because the Lepel Jews of Borgaki came from that same town of Ula. But, of course, we used the services of a Jewish matchmaker - Shatkhan, what would an engagement be without him. The same one, with cunning in his eyes, as in the famous portrait of Yudel Peng “Matchmaker. Menachem Mendl."
In 1904, a daughter, Esther, was born into the young Gutkovich family.
It was a very turbulent time in Russia. In 1905, two waves of Jewish pogroms swept across the country. The first - at the beginning of the year - as a response to the defeat in the war with Japan and the revolutionary upsurge, the second - in October - after the Tsar’s proclamation of the Manifesto on the granting of freedoms. They tried to make the Jews responsible for everything.
Jews had absolutely nothing to do with the defeat of the Russian army in the war with the Japanese. But the authorities had to find the culprit in order to deflect the blow from themselves. And then, as usually happened in history, they remembered the Jews.
Many Jews took part in the revolutionary movement in Russia, standing under banners on which were written the words: “Freedom, equality, brotherhood.” These people were imbued with the ideas of internationalism, and least of all stood up for personal well-being or benefits for their people.
Pogroms affected both large cities and small towns. The authorities not only did not stop the thugs, but on the contrary, they condoned them. Those who had the strength and opportunity to leave packed their bags.
Joseph Gutkovich was the first to leave for America. Many people did this: first the man left, settled in a new place, earned money so that the family had enough for the trip, rented a house, and only after that, if everything went well, the wife and children set off on a long journey. For two years, Joseph worked tirelessly as a painter, painted the facades of his home, and finally called his wife Rivka-Genya Rebecca and their daughter Esther to America.
In America, new emigrants from Belarus initially continued to work as painters, saved up some money, had excellent business acumen, and opened a small store that sold paints. This is where their family business began.
Rivka-Genya always dreamed of being a doctor. The dream came true partially. She learned and began to treat people, only as a pharmacist. The family opened a pharmacy.
Five generations of Ginsburgs live in New York. Now Merle and Barry have more than 30 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In 2005, the year of the centenary of Joseph Gutkovich’s departure from Belarus, they decided to show this country to their heirs and implement the project in the coming years. But they decided to come themselves first.
The meeting was to take place at Elizaveta Dekhtyar’s “Warm House” and promised to be interesting. The Lepel Jews wanted to look at their fellow countrymen, who had become people in distant America. The Ginzburgs are successfully engaged in business and generously donate to the needs of the Jews of Belarus.
Merle and Barry wanted to see, hear and understand what kind of Jews they are in Belarus. Are they really preserved?! We went through pogroms, revolutions, a terrible war, and Stalin's camps. They didn’t hide under other people’s names, they didn’t renounce their ancestors. And if you’re lucky, then maybe their relatives still live in Belarus. And they will be able to meet them.
They sat at the same table and looked at each other. These views contained both questions and answers.
Propagandists and ideologists of various stripes - some out of fear, some for money - have said so many absurdities about each other that it seems like a miracle to see normal eyes on your interlocutor.
They never found a common language, in the truest sense of the word. Jews remember Lepel, and older people speak Yiddish among themselves. The Ginsburgs are more accustomed to English. Their parents knew Yiddish. I had to communicate through a translator.
I arrived in Lepel early. This is how our routes developed. I traveled from Vitebsk, and cars with guests drove from Minsk, stopped in Khatyn, stopped to admire the forests and lakes. The places here are truly magnificent. It was as if nature itself was striving to get closer to the ideal of beauty.
Even in the names of settlements there is poetry. The city of Lepel is named after the lake of the same name, which translated from Latvian means “lake among linden forests.”
The town of Ulla also got its name from the river, and translated from Lithuanian it means “rock”. True, I didn’t see any rocks, but the area is hilly, forests from high hills constantly dive into ravines.
Ul landscapes can be seen in the paintings of a fellow countryman, the wonderful artist Ivan Fomich Khrutsky. He was born here in 1810. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts and received the title of Academician. He spent the last decades of his life not far from these places on the Zakharichi estate near Polotsk.
I had time to wander around Lepel and talk to people.
The city has a rich history dating back more than four centuries. In 2005, it was 200 years since Lepel was given city status by Decree of the Russian Emperor Alexander I. And there are many Jewish pages in this story. Moreover, the pages are bright and interesting.
The story of how Jewish children were taught
The very next year after Lepel became a city, in 1806, the issue of a Jewish school was resolved by decree of the governor's board of August 10.
The authorities did not want to accept the fact that Jewish children studied in cheders and yeshivas according to their own rules. Since they live in the Russian Empire, they should study like everyone else. (Although not everyone studied in Russia in those years, the goals and objectives of the authorities were clear). The Lepel mayor received an order to announce to the Jews, “that they, due to the lack of a public school in the city of Lepel, send their children to the public schools closest to Lepel - in Polotsk or Vitebsk, if they do not wish this, then, by the force of the Regulations on Jews (paragraph 6) took measures to build a school in Lepel.”
The Lepel Jews gathered in the synagogue and began to think. Of course, both cheders and yeshivas will continue to operate. But those who saw their children's future in commerce or science, or simply outside their shtetl, needed to receive a formal education. Leaving children without a future is not Jewish. And sending young children to study in Polotsk or Vitebsk is a pity for the children, and I’m scared for them. Not everyone had relatives in these cities.
They thought for ten days, and on August 20, the Lepel Jews signed a contract that they would build a Jewish school or public school in Lepel.
At this time, 1233 people lived in the city, 624 Jews, that is, they approximately made up half of the population.
Jewish education in Lepel was maintained at the proper level throughout the years that representatives of this people lived compactly here. In 1888, a primary male Jewish school (with a craft class) was opened, which moved here from Nevel. As of 1900, the honorary guardian of the school was the merchant of the First Guild, Ezek Rosenfeld, one of the richest people in Lepel, the head of the school was Mordukh Borukh Yunovich, Israel Yudov Miron served as an assistant teacher, and the preparatory class teacher was Osher Katz. All of them were graduates of the Vilna Jewish Teachers' Institute.
In 1898, a Jewish women's one-class folk school began to function in the city. On this occasion, the press wrote: “One cannot help but welcome the opening of a public Jewish women’s school in our country, for which an urgent need has long been felt. It was opened through the efforts of the head of the local elementary Jewish school, for whom this matter cost a lot of work. Through his efforts, the welfare of the school he headed greatly increased (we are talking about Mordukh Borukh Yunovich - A. Sh.). A craft class was opened, an annual allowance of 200 rubles was requested. from the sums of the box collection in favor of poor students, and recently a free tea house has been established at the school, in which children are given tea for breakfast every day. Local ladies participate in the distribution of tea, willingly performing their voluntary duty. Unfortunately, public interest in this lovely business is so insignificant that the maintenance of the said teahouse is completely unsecured. However, due justice should be given to the local pharmacist and his wife, who are keenly interested in the situation of the poor students and provide active assistance to the latter.”
(“Future” No. 3, 21/1/1900, p. 49)
This newspaper advertisement exudes regularity, calmness and some kind of special kindness that was characteristic of that time and people living in small towns. And, despite the fact that more than a hundred years have passed, we also decided to restore justice and pay tribute to the Lepel pharmacist and his wife, who took care of the poor students.
An elementary Jewish men's school (with a craft class) and a Jewish women's one-class folk school operated in Lepel until the 1917 revolution.
At first, the Soviet government did not prohibit the operation of Jewish schools. True, everything in the education of children was now subordinated to the ruling ideology. And any deviation from it was punishable by law. For example, in 1924, in Lepel, members of the Yevsektsiya* found an old melamed doing the usual Jewish thing - he was teaching a child Torah. But times outside were different - and a report was drawn up against the old Melamed and submitted to the court.
The Jewish seven-year school, in which instruction was conducted in Yiddish, still existed in Lepel until the end of the thirties. There were not enough textbooks in Hebrew, but the main reason for closing the school was different - parents understood that their children had no prospects of continuing their studies at institutes and technical schools, where teaching, naturally, was conducted in Russian. And the state pushed for the closure of Jewish schools. And soon new signs “Belarusian” and “Russian” school appeared on them. The teachers, for the most part, remained the same. But now, with a greater Jewish accent, they taught lessons in Russian or Belarusian.
The oldest burials (of those that I found) in the Lepel Jewish cemetery date back to the beginning of the 19th century. Most likely, there were older ones, but the matzeivas (gravestones) during this time were so buried in the ground that it is difficult to see them, let alone read the inscriptions on them.
The cemetery is located on the very shore of Lake Lepel. The Jewish community bought land in this picturesque place. On some monuments made from local stone, Jewish folk ornaments were preserved (there were skilled stonemasons in Lepel). From the inscriptions on matzeivas one can reconstruct the history of the Jewish community.
Merle and Barry Ginsburg on Lepelsky
Jewish cemetery. Photo 2006
The Lepel ancestors of Barry Ginzburg, the Borgakis and the Gutkoviches, found their eternal refuge in this cemetery.
The Borgaks lived in Lepel since 1874, in any case, it was here this year that Dov-Ber Borgak and his wife Esther had a daughter, who was named Rivka-Genya Rebecca (this is Barry Ginzburg’s grandmother).
We do not have the exact date when the Ul Gutkovichs moved to Lepel. We can only assume that this happened approximately in the same years. The first to move to Lepel was the son of Zalman-Yakov (Barry Ginzburg’s great-grandfather), Girsh. And numerous other relatives followed him.
When high water rises in the spring, it floods part of the Lepel Jewish cemetery, and a fantastic picture appears before your eyes - tombstones growing out of the water. Particularly striking is the matzeiva, which depicts an inverted jug with water pouring out of it. It seemed to me that a whole lake had poured out of this jug - a lake of tears. However, these are fantasies.
And the fact that some of the monuments are under water all year round is a reality. In 1953, builders began to build the Lepel hydroelectric power station. The facility was, and still is, extremely necessary for the life of the entire region. When they built it, they did not take into account that the water level in the lake would rise by several tens of centimeters and “catch” a couple of meters of coastal territory. They began to urgently strengthen the banks, but no one paid attention to the Jewish cemetery. Yes, and was it possible for the builders of a new life before him...
The cemetery is active. Burials are still being carried out. The new section of the cemetery has been inspected and the graves have been well maintained. Old burial sites exist on their own, no one is watching over them, but they are not being bulldozed, or areas in these places are being cleared for a kindergarten or stadium. On warm days, old burial places are visited by those who like to drink alcohol. For them, matzeivas serve as tables on which drinks and snacks are placed.
Among the thousands of Lepel residents buried here are Borukh Rabinder and Abel Abezgauz.
About how Lepel was rebuilt after the fire
The fires did not spare Lepel. Built mainly with wooden houses, it has been repeatedly attacked by the elements. Sometimes houses caught fire during a thunderstorm, sometimes someone carelessly knocked over a kerosene lamp, and arson also happened. The wind quickly spread the fire throughout the town. But one of the most terrible fires happened on the night of April 27-28, 1833. It began in the barn of the Lepel tradesman, the Jew Lurie. No one has ever found out what Lurie was doing in his barn at two o’clock. But they wrote down the reason - “from careless handling of fire.” Almost the entire city burned down: one Uniate church, one Catholic church, two Jewish schools, one public place, one almshouse, 102 residential buildings, 33 shops, 48 sheds, 56 barns, two baths, etc. 235 men and 318 women were recognized as victims. The total loss reached a huge figure of 950 thousand rubles.
No one accused the Jews of deliberately setting the fire. The commission that investigated this fact was objective and wrote that “the fire protection is comically weak.” The provincial solicitor officially asked the mayor: “How many and what kind of fire-fighting equipment were there in the city?” And the mayor answered in full form: “No more firefighting tools, except two hooks and two forks...”.
Strong winds quickly spread the fire to other buildings.
Lepel had to be urgently rebuilt and, naturally, business-minded and enterprising people got down to business. In 1837, the commission to help fire victims accepted, through the mayor and the mayor, 12 built brick shops. Seven of them were made by the contractor Boruch Rabinder, and another five by Abel Abezgauz.
In 1921, a fire of the same terrible magnitude hit Lepel. A large part of the city burned out again. The descendants of Rabinder and Abezgauz, like other wealthy people, still lived in Lepel, but during the years of the revolution they lost their fortune and were now unable to rebuild the city. The state provided all possible assistance to fire victims. On behalf of the City Council, appeals and appeals were drawn up to the population of the city, calling for help, which met with response and support, as they said then, “among the broad working masses.” In the same year, 1921, half of the fire victims began to build new wooden log houses. But for the next two years, not a single house was completed, there was not enough money, and boarded up doors could be seen everywhere.
Famine squeezed the city in its iron grip. People had no time for housewarming parties, no time for construction. If only the children did not die from dystrophy, and the old people did not swell from hunger. Of course, it was hardest for the poor, large families, who did not have reserves for a rainy day.
During this terrible time, American Jews sent 1,000 pounds of flour to Lepel, at the disposal of the Jewish community for distribution among the poor. Help in America was collected among all Jews, but the most active participation in this noble cause was taken by fellow countrymen of the starving people, those who had relatives overseas. Joseph Gutkovich was one of the most active figures in the community and, of course, took an active part in raising funds to help starving people.
True, the help did not reach the desired recipient. In any case, it was not the Lepel Jewish community that distributed American flour to the poor.
“Everywhere and everywhere the Evsektsiya is trying to lay its hand on the matter of help.
...The Jewish commissariat appeared and demanded that they give him flour. The Jews decided to submit a written statement to the “executive committee” - a protest against the actions of the Jewish commissariat and began collecting signatures for this purpose. Then the Jewish Commissariat announced that everyone who signed the statement would be immediately arrested. It worked. “Sedition” was suppressed, and the Jewish commissariat received flour.”
(“Dawn”, No. 16, 07/30/1922, p. 14)
Merle and Barry Ginsburg outside the former
Lepel Synagogue. Photo 2006
At the end of Volodarsky Street there is a house that once housed a synagogue. The building was built under Soviet power in 1924, when the street was not yet named in honor of the revolutionary and associate of V. Lenin, but bore the poetic name - Prudovaya. This is one of the last synagogues built in Belarus before the onset of the atheistic frenzy of the 1930s.
This was once one of the busiest places in Lepel. Nearby were the shopping arcades of the bazaar. The neighborhood, in today's opinion, is not the most suitable. It seems that somehow the spiritual and the material, the conversation between a believer and God, and a buyer and a seller, do not fit together. But let's remember how shtetls were traditionally built. The central square, which was usually located on a hill, housed market stalls, a synagogue, a church, and a cathedral.
The market was not just about buying and selling. The market provided work for artisans, tenants of gardens and vegetable gardens, millers, fishermen, surrounding peasants, “people of the air”, as Sholom Aleichem called them, who bought something, resold it, negotiated with someone - in general, a significant part local population. It was, in today's language, an information center, here they learned news, exchanged opinions, local philosophers and home-grown politicians argued “for life.” Public opinion was formed in the markets. The town often lived on rumors, used “word of mouth” and God forbid it got into the hands of the town gossips.
And the synagogue was engaged in education, supported traditions, and monitored (sorry, together with the market) morality. So the proximity, if you delve into the depth of the issue, is not at all accidental.
The Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg houses the funds of the Jewish section, formed in the same year to collect exhibits and study the situation of Jews under tsarism and Soviet power. This section was led by the famous ethnographer I.M. Pulver. His “Travel Notes” about his trip to Lepel in 1924 have been preserved: “The carpenters building the synagogue work on Saturdays, but previously hired goyim* could not work on this day. And everyone understands this and is not indignant, whereas if you walk along Lepel without a hat or carry something on Shabbat, you will sometimes hear sighs, or even curses and shouts of “goy.”
(REM, f. 2, op. 5, d. 1, pp. 28–29)
Much changed during these years in the traditional Jewish life of the shtetl. And this is especially noticeable in the attitude towards family and marriage. In Lepel, several mixed marriages took place in the seven post-revolutionary years. Jews began to feel more relaxed about this. In 1924, a Jewish woman from a respectable and wealthy family, with her mother’s blessing, married a Russian communist, and no one in the town was outraged by this. True, there were cases that today seem curious. A Jewish woman, the daughter of a rabbi, having married a Russian, persuaded him to undergo circumcision first, arguing that since he loved her, he should love her people and faith. (What can Jewish women do when they want to achieve their goal!). Jewish youth in Lepel increasingly began to recognize a trip to the registry office as a wedding, but rarely did anyone make a chuppah.
But let’s return to the synagogue, which in those years was called “new” in Lepel. It was made according to all the canons of wooden synagogues: a two-story building (so that women could pray on the balcony), with a high sloping roof.
They are looking for a new rabbi in Lepel. The community receives proposals from a dozen rabbis from surrounding towns and cities in Belarus.
And although the time is such that, as they say, “I don’t care if I’m alive,” the community carefully considers the candidates, sends its people to cities and towns to learn more about those who want to be rabbis, and then, of course, people argue (how can Jews do without arguing!) over who should take this place. The main criterion is comparison with previous rabbis. In Lepel they knew a lot about real rabbis.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Lepel community was headed by the brother of the founder of Chabad, Reb Shneur-Zalman, Rabbi Moshe ben Baruch. And although it was a long time ago, solid traditions were laid, the bar was raised high. And in the following years the rabbis of Berka Volosov and, of course, Joseph Bogatin kept it at such a height.
From a petition submitted by the Jews of Lepel to local authorities in 1934, we learn that at one time there were 11 synagogues in the town. Of these, 7 burned down during fires.
(Museum of the History of the Jewish People. Jerusalem, RU 183)
Merle Ginsburg. Photo 2006
At the end of the 19th century, there were four synagogues, and Joseph Bogatin was the rabbi of one of them.
He was born into a family of hereditary rabbis; thirteen generations devoted themselves to the cause of spiritual enlightenment. Joseph studied at the Vilna Yeshiva, then at the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Berlin. He receives a university diploma with honors and chooses the city of Lepel for his future activities.
Many Jews lived here who needed his support and his knowledge. For some time, the official public rabbi of Lepel was Wulf Itskovich Rabinovich. And then Joseph Bogatin began to combine the duties of a spiritual and official rabbi. His house was always full of people. Everyone had urgent matters for him, and he tried to lend a helping hand to everyone, help, including financially, although the money was barely enough for the needs of his own family.
“After the revolution, during the troubled time of civil war and pogroms, Rabbi Joseph saved many Jews from persecution. He succeeded in this thanks to the good and businesslike relations that had developed in “quiet times” with the heads of the Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the city, writes his grandson, academician, doctor of medicine and philosophy Boris Benkovich. “Once a rabbi persuaded the bandits not to touch a Jewish family. The officer commanding them bowed to the rabbi at the end of the conversation... Great was the power of the preacher inherent in the soul of Joseph Bogatin, if different people were subject to it.”**
In 1918, Bogatin left for Saratov, where he was invited by the local community to become a rabbi. Several Jewish families, deprived of their means of subsistence, left Lepel with him. Not only Jews, but also Belarusians, Poles, and Russians came to the station to see off Joseph Bogatin.
The invitation to Saratov was not accidental. In 1915, during the First World War, when the Russian army suffered defeats at the fronts, its command, supported by the royal court, blamed the Jews for all the troubles, as usual. They say they are spying for the German army and therefore they must be expelled from the front-line zone.
The lie was obvious. The royal entourage, and even military officials, knew the history of the country quite well. And, of course, we read that during all the wars, Jews were not only loyal, but also actively helped the country in which they lived. For example, during the years of the Napoleonic invasion, Jews assisted the Russian army everywhere, including in Lepel. When the French, having occupied the city, “threw out” the wounded Russian soldiers from the hospital, Jewish families took them in for treatment. The Jews saved one of the locks of the Berezina water system from fire, which allowed the Russian army to cross without major losses.
Barry Ginsburg. Photo 2006
And during other large and small wars, in which the 19th century was rich, Russian Jews showed themselves on the battlefield as patriots of the country.
But treachery and lies know no bounds. The Jews were evicted, and carts of refugees from the western provinces moved deep into Russia.
Two Yakerson (Avgustevich), who lived in Lepel until 1915, recalled such a convoy that stretched for many kilometers. Lepel Jews settled in Pokrovsk, a small town on the Volga near Saratov. Dvosia’s father, Moses Yakerson, owned a “factory” for the production of carbonated water in Lepel. He came to Pokrovsk with the equipment of this plant (some kind of boiler and a tank for gassing), which helped him at first open his own business and somehow get by. I put the word “factory” in quotation marks, because Moses and his wife fully provided for all production. Many Lepel Jews settled in Saratov and Pokrovsk. Including families bearing the surname Gutkovich.
The grandson of Dvosi Yakerson, associate professor at Saratov University, writer Semyon Augustevich, wrote to me about this.
Saratov rabbi Joseph Bogatin died in the late thirties in Stalin's camps.
Of course, it was not easy for the community to find a rabbi who would replace Joseph Bogatin, and in such years.
Abram Ruvimovich Lubanov, who came to Lepel and took the post of rabbi, left a good memory of himself. We know, unfortunately, not much about his Lepel period of life. But even those facts that have reached us, bypassing the repressive “slingshots,” testify to the deep faith and courage of a person.
He was born in 1888 in the town of Sverzhen, Rogachev district, Mogilev province. He came from a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim. His youth and years of study in a Hasidic yeshiva occurred at a time when Hasidism was at its height and at the height of tolerance in the Jewish religious world.
In Lepel, the forty-year-old rabbi had to serve under much more difficult conditions than all his predecessors. Official propaganda, the ideology of the country, convinced people that religion was the opium of the people and that it served the oppressor class. These “loud” words brought results. Schoolchildren threw garbage into the open windows of the synagogue (they also behaved near churches), organized atheist marches, the state confiscated property, and considered the clergy themselves to be hostile elements.
Believing Jews of Lepel write a letter to the city authorities: “In 1923 (one in 1923, the other on Volodarsky Street - in 1924 - A. Sh.) believers built two synagogues with active support from abroad. In 1929, most of them were taken for the House of Culture. The remaining small ones were subject to huge taxes. Then they captured her. At the same time, religious scrolls and books were thrown into the street” (MIEN. Jerusalem, RU 183).
Probably, this “capture” was still temporary, because by 1934 the synagogue on Volodarsky Street was still operating. And Jewish believers write a new petition to the authorities asking them to leave the synagogue to them.
“We only have one small wooden synagogue left. They are going to take her too. There are more than a hundred believers in Lepel who come to the synagogue every day.” (MIEN. Jerusalem, RU 183).
In fact, there were much more Jewish believers in Lepel. But not everyone demonstrated their commitment to Judaism, fearing trouble for themselves or, more often, for their children and grandchildren.
Rabbi Abram Ruvimovich Lubanov, naturally, did not hide his convictions as best he could, resisted the atheistic frenzy, and, therefore, was a disgraced person.
On December 30, 1930, Lubanov Abram Ruvimovich, a minister of religious worship, was deprived of voting rights. Together with him, his wife Tsilya Mendelevna Lubanova was deprived of voting rights. In official documents confirming this fact, she is recorded not as the rabbi’s wife, but as “his kept woman.” The clerks of the new government tried their best to humiliate people. Another religious minister, Simon Movshevich Weiler, was deprived of voting rights. We can only assume that he held some kind of post in the synagogue.
These people were on the same list of “disenfranchised” along with former traders, smuggler Moisei Zalmanovich Rabinovich, a former policeman, a bailiff, a collegiate assessor, kulaks and the former owner of the plant Nohom Shteingard.
For some time, Rabbi Abram Lubanov “lost from sight” and we did not find documents about his fate in the late thirties and early forties. True, the time of “thirty-seven” suggested where the disgraced person could go “against his own will.”
Although indirectly, our assumptions were confirmed. During these same years, or even a little earlier, the authorities closed the Lepel synagogue, and a cinema was made in its building.
In 1943, a new rabbi, Abram Lubanov, appeared in besieged Leningrad. They tell this story. Shortly before the rabbi, a new commissioner for religious affairs arrived in Leningrad. He noticed that the synagogue was open, but there was no rabbi. Deciding that this was a mess, the commissioner remembered a rabbi who was serving a sentence in the camp of which he had once been the head. They say that this is how Abram Lubanov got to Leningrad.
At the end of the 40s, Abram Lubanov was arrested again and spent several months in the notorious Kresty prison. There he went on a hunger strike and achieved that he was allowed to receive kosher food parcels from home every day. In the 50-60s, persecution of religion and its ministers did not stop. And yet, wedding ceremonies and circumcisions were performed in Leningrad. The rabbi himself was a rare unmercenary and, content with a small salary from the community, he gave fees for performing rituals and donations to those in need. Abram Lubanov lived with his wife and two daughters in a small room in the synagogue building. The rabbi died in 1973 at the age of 85.
How the Jews occupied the best street in Lepel
On July 31, 1835, while in Alexandria near Peterhof, Russian autocrat Nicholas I approved Lepel’s plan, writing the following resolution diagonally on paper: “I consider it unnecessary to have Jewish quarters in the new city separately from others that exist in many cities, and it was not without reason that it was ordered in 1788, but probably forgotten or released."
Bureaucratic machines then and now were not much different from each other. Instructions go down the service ladder, and each official adds something to them (which is beneficial for him), and throws something out (if he doesn’t want to carry it out, or is not profitable).
In August of the same 1835, the Vitebsk Governor-General ordered the establishment of separate quarters for Jews in all cities of the province according to plans approved by Empress Catherine II on February 21, 1778.
In Lepel, 13 quarters were allotted to Jews (as of 1864, the city was divided into 30 quarters), which was immediately reported to the Governor-General. He approved the division and added the following: “It is prohibited for Jews to have houses in Christian quarters and for Christians in Jewish quarters. We must act according to the exact force of the last written order from the highest command. If the buildings turn out to be built before this commandment, they can be left there until they fall completely into disrepair, strictly prohibiting, however, any repairs or alterations.”
The Jews got Prudovaya Street, today, as you already know, Volodarsky Street. The place is not better, but not worse than others. In a small city, all the streets were both central and at the same time overlooking the outskirts. But on this street, probably, the number of Jews per square meter was greater than on others, and therefore in Lepel they decided not to organize a universal resettlement of peoples, but to legalize what they had.
Almost thirty years passed, and in 1863 the secretary of the Vitebsk provincial commission A.M. came to Lepel. Sementovsky left the following review about his visit to the city: “The best streets are populated by Jews...”
It looks like A.M. Sementovsky not only disliked Jews, but was completely hostile towards them. He writes that they are unkempt and careless.
“There are several Jewish houses called “visiting houses,” A.M. further reports. Sementovsky. – One of them claims to be a hotel, apparently because in one of the dirty rooms there is an old billiard table, and in the door there is a box with the so-called “pies” (Sementovsky is trying to convey the word “cakes” with a Jewish accent - A. Sh.).
After reading the review of the secretary of the provincial commission, a natural question arises: “How did the streets where “unkempt and careless” Jews live become the best in Lepel?” After all, these people didn’t get them the same way in the first place. Everyone began to live in equal conditions when the city was divided into neighborhoods based on ethnicity.
By the end of the 19th century, there was a rumor going around Lepel that in the old days, Jews were given the best parts of the city for bribes. And looking at the beautiful shop windows, at the bakeries and tea shops, at the brick houses with large windows, they said about this people, some with anger, some with envy, and some with admiration: “They will be able to settle in everywhere.”
The building of the “new” synagogue on Volodarsky Street survived the war, although it was rebuilt more than once after it. At first there was a dairy factory here. They probably decided that he would produce holy milk, which, thanks to the prayed place, would not turn sour.
And although after the war there was a minyan in Lepel, that is, the required number of Jews (ten people) to conduct services, and the believers elected Chaim Movshevich Slavin as their rabbi, and Ankhir Kastrinich went to all authorities on their behalf, the Jewish community never officially registered and, naturally, no one handed over the synagogue building to them.
After a more suitable building was found for the dairy plant, the two-story wooden house became residential.
We came to him with Barry and Merle Ginsburg.
Laundry was drying on the veranda, jazz music could be heard from the window on the second floor, and a ginger cat was sleeping near the door in the sun. The building of the old synagogue was touched by civilization, as evidenced by the dish antenna attached above the windows facing the courtyard.
Nearby, literally thirty meters away, is the Orthodox Church of St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa.
Once upon a time there was a law according to which in the Russian Empire it was impossible to build synagogues closer than 100 meters from Christian churches and the synagogue should not be higher... But the church was opened relatively recently, and the synagogue has not been operating for a long time. And only historians know the law today. Everything was mixed up on the street named after Volodarsky.
At the time when numerous Gutkoviches and Borgakis lived here, Lepel was a half-Jewish city. So that my words do not seem empty, I will cite statistics for 1897, which state that 3,379 Jews lived in Lepel, which amounted to 53.8 percent of the total population. Of these, 1,566 were men and 1,813 were women. According to the same data, 1,566 men and 1,813 women considered the Hebrew language to be their native language. That is, every single Jew considered Yiddish to be their native language. What else could they consider? For them, this question sounded simply strange and surprising. They spoke Yiddish with their parents, Yiddish with their children, and Yiddish with their neighbors. They simply did not know other languages or spoke them with a strong accent.
In the “List of those eligible to participate in elections to the State Duma at the 1st Congress of City Voters in the city of Lepel” in 1906, Avsei Borgak, son of Berka; Leiba Gutkovich, son of Israel; Elya-Dovid Gutkovich, son of Kopel; Abram Gutkovich, son of El-Dovid; Itska Gutkovich, son of Faivish; Sholom Gutkovich, son of Yankel; Berka Gutkovich, son of Eli; Zusya Gutkovich, son of Girsh; Yudel Gutkovich, son of Itzik.
Avsei Borgak is the brother of Barry Ginzburg’s grandmother, and Sholom Gutkovich is the brother of his grandfather. And the rest of the Gutkovichs, judging by the names that are often found in this family, are related to each other.
In a similar “List” only at the 2nd Congress of City Voters in 1907, Abram Borgak, Berka’s son, was listed; Itsko Gutkovich, son of Faivish; Sholom Gutkovich, son of Yankel; Zalman Gutkovich, son of Eli; Abram Gutkovich, son of Eli-Dovid; Zusya Gutkovich, son of Girsh; Berka Gutkovich, son of Dovid.
And although almost 650 people had the right to participate in elections to the State Duma at the congresses of city voters in Lepel, and more than half of them were Jews, only notable people were included in this list, who enjoyed authority among their neighbors, those with whom they worked nearby, and from the authorities.
Almost all the old houses in the city are related to Jews to one degree or another. I am convinced that few people know that once upon a time there was Dr. Gelfand’s hospital in the current House of Crafts and Children’s Art School. Even before the First World War, a doctor who had previously been engaged in forensic medical practice, Aron Fraimovich Gelfand, built a large wooden house on Dvoryanskaya Street and adapted it for treating patients, even equipping an inpatient department with several beds. For treatment, Aron Fraimovich widely used medicinal herbs and various minerals. Several generations of Lepel residents remembered his selfless, selfless work for almost two decades.
Now everything is overgrown with its former self. True, recently, thanks to local historian O. Janusz, Aron Fraimovich was remembered on the pages of the regional newspaper “Lepelsky Krai”.
Did the revolution solve the “Jewish question”?
On March 7, 1917, the provincial commission from Lepel telegraphed: “The troops and population of the city of Lepel and the district, having unanimously joined the newly established order and government, send greetings to the army and government.”
Among those who signed the telegram to the Provisional Government was the head of the Lepel city police, Alexander Iofe.
In Lepel, as well as throughout the country, many Jewish parties and various organizations operated at this turning point. And each member of these parties and organizations believed that he knew the only correct path that the country and its people should take. People gathered for rallies and gatherings, arguing until they were hoarse.
At the beginning of October 1917, on the initiative of the Zionists, a Jewish election committee was created for the elections to the City Duma, which united Jewish organizations and parties of the Zionists and Bundists. Wealthy homeowners left this committee and created their own List. The Jewish Joint Committee received 10 seats out of 22. Jewish homeowners received 3 seats. Among the members of the joint committee were 4 Zionists.
And very soon, at the end of the same month of 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in St. Petersburg, and the Lepel Military Revolutionary Committee included Heine, Dobrovolsky, Naumov and Fraiman.
There were many Jews among those who made the revolution in Russia (and other countries), who welcomed it. The Jews believed that the revolution would solve their “national” issue. Indeed, the Pale of Settlement was abolished, and interest rates for those entering universities and academies were (officially) eliminated. Jews entered the government, became generals and directors.
The Jewish language (Yiddish) became one of the four state languages of Belarus; court hearings were conducted in it, the inscription in it was on the national emblem of the republic, newspapers were published, and various official events were held.
Before me is the program for celebrating the seventh anniversary of the October Revolution in Lepel. 1924
19-00. Evening at the theater. Solemn meeting. Greetings from all organizations in Belarusian and Hebrew.
November 7. 12-00. Rally on Freedom Square. Procession to the grave of the fighters of the Revolution. In the evening at the theater there is a performance - a revolutionary one-act play, a revolutionary dramatization and a performance by pioneers.
November 8. In the afternoon there is a meeting of artisans. A report in Hebrew about the October Revolution, in the evening at the theater - a performance in Hebrew.
(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, o. 11, building 4)
By a strong-willed decision of the authorities in the country, Hebrew, the sphere of distribution of which was already very small, was withdrawn from circulation, and for the time being, Yiddish was allowed. Jewish parties were liquidated, which were considered “bourgeois”, “nationalist”, “Zionist” and “straightened their shoulders” by commissars from the Jewish sections of the Communist Party...
However, the country needed Yiddish, and Yevsections, and Jewish collective farms, and national village councils for the time being, until the dictatorship got stronger and took everyone and everyone into its “iron hand.”
In the late twenties and early thirties of the 20th century in Lepel, the surname Gutkovich was very common. I met with many pre-war residents of the city, asked if the Gutkovichs were among their acquaintances and received an affirmative answer.
Among the namesakes there were wealthy people (by Soviet standards), and poor people who followed the traditional Jewish way of life, and Komsomol members and communists.
I cannot say which of them was a relative of Joseph Gutkovich, who left for the USA. But I’ll tell you more about some bearers of this surname.
Zusya Girshevich Gutkovich was engaged in baking bread together with his wife Bunya and fifteen-year-old daughter Mirra. It will be said loudly, he had his own bakery, and, nevertheless, a day he baked two pounds of flour (rye and loop) for sale. He had a patent for personal industrial activity and has been engaged in it since 1903. The Gutkoviches’ bread was considered very tasty, and not only neighbors living on Ozernaya Street and residents of other areas of Lepel willingly bought it. A pound of black bread cost 5 kopecks, a pound of half-white bread cost 9 kopecks.
The state counted Zusya Gutkovich's annual income at 700 rubles.
(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, op. 12, no. 50)
David Mordukhovich Gutkovich took up shoemaking from a young age and sewed men's and women's shoes at home. He made a pair of boots in two days; the boots took the master a little more than half a day. He worked six days a week, and, as befits a devout Jew, he rested on Saturday.
Chrome boots from Gutkovich cost 3 - 3.50 rubles, chrome boots - 2.50 rubles.
And although Leitman Eto Borukhovna’s wife also did not sit idly by, but kept a store (shop) that sold iron goods, the family, which had six children, did not acquire wealth.
(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, op. 12, f. 49)
Gutkovich Israel Leibovich was engaged in leather dressing. The business was extremely profitable and brought in 36 percent of the profit. His son Samuel sewed horse harnesses from the leather that his father tanned.
Israel Leibovich wrote to the District Tax Inspectorate: “I have been a handicraftsman since my birth, in my former workshop there was no hired force, but I did it myself with my children.”
(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, op. 12, d. 51).
Of course, it is impossible to write a general description for all Lepel Gutkoviches. But it seems that hard work was a family trait of these people.
The Vitebsk charitable foundation “Hasdei David” helps 32 residents of Lepel, most of them elderly people. They lived a difficult life (and who had it easy). These people deserve attention, kindness, participation, help.
I have been to Lepel several times on behalf of a charitable organization. Came with program coordinator Roman Furman when he visited the wards.
Sara Abramovna Aronina is already over 90 years old. Lives alone. The son is a retired military man from Minsk. Sara Abramovna is one of the first pioneers and Komsomol members of Lepel. She still has photographs of the pioneer leader courses that took place in 1927.
“Not all children studied in schools back then.” Educational programs were organized. We identified the illiterate and poorly educated of all ages. Those who could not go to educational programs were taught at home.
Sara Abramovna has been in the Communist Party for almost seventy years. Apparently, in her youth she was a determined girl. And although now she can hardly move around the apartment, leaning on a stick, there is still a sense of firmness in her character.
Since 1940, in party work, she was in charge of a sector of the district committee both in the Lepel region and in evacuation in the Penza region. And in 1948, when Stalin’s anti-Semitic affairs swept across the country, Sara Abramovna was transferred to the social security department of the district executive committee.
...These people are from her generation. Sara Abramovna knew many of them well personally.
Boris Fidelman (1870–1941) and his son Rafail (1904–1984). Photo chroniclers of the Lepel region. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Fidelman family took hundreds of photographs of the city, canals, locks, bridges of the Berezina water system, and the people of Lepel. These photographs were included in catalogs and preserved on museum stands.
– Has the photo archive of the Fidelman family survived? – I asked the director of the Lepel Regional Museum of Local Lore, Alina Stelmakh.
– After the war, the Fidelman family lived in Leningrad. In the early nineties we wrote to them, but received no answer. Either they moved out of their old apartment, or left the country altogether. Maybe with your help we can find out where the descendants of Boris and Raphael live, and whether their family archive has been preserved.
Lepel has always been considered a cultural city. This was facilitated by representatives of all the peoples who lived here. Jews also contributed. For example, there were two Jewish orchestras functioning at once, competing with each other. Until 1917, there were two bookstores (they were also libraries) of Mordukh Itskov Kapilman and Leiba Leizerov Shulman. In the twenties there was a Jewish theater group and a literary studio.
In 1927, the famous film director, Honored Artist of Russia Vladimir Motyl was born here. His film “White Sun of the Desert” is one of the most famous works of Soviet cinema. Vladimir’s father, Yakov, is an emigrant from Poland. In the thirties, he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Solovki, where he died. The authorities deported the entire Motyl family to the north. One of Vladimir Yakovlevich’s aunts went crazy there.
Vladimir Motyl’s mother, Berta, is a graduate of the Pedagogical Institute. Her parents were shot by the Nazis as prisoners of the Lepel ghetto.
Another, perhaps the most famous actress of Soviet cinema, Faina Ranevskaya, also has Lepel roots. Her mother is a Lepel bourgeois. This is recorded in the “Book for recording marriages between Jews for 1889” by Taganrog rabbi Hirsh Zeltser: “A marriage was registered on October 26, 1889 (January 19, 1890 - according to the new style) between a tradesman of the town of Smilovichi, Igumensky district, Minsk province, Hirsh Khaimovich Feldman (26 years old) and a girl from Lepel, Vitebsk province, Milka Rafailovna Zagovalova (17 years old). In 1895, their daughter Faina Feldman was born, who later became an actress and took a pseudonym after the heroine of Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard.”
True, neither Faina Ranevskaya nor Vladimir Motyl ever came to Lepel in their mature years. In a television interview, Vladimir Yakovlevich recalled his hometown, but after the war, as he said, he “had no one to come to.”
Lepel “roots” also come from one of the largest Pushkin scholars, Boris Solomonovich Meilakh.
However, its famous fellow countrymen did not have an impact on the culture of the city itself.
The repressions of the late 30s affected the entire country, and there was no Jewish background at that time. It will appear later, in the late 40s and early 50s.
Here is a list of repressed Jews from Lepel. Not so big, unless you consider that each life is a whole Universe.
Israel Aizikovich Levitan is the director of the plant. Stalin changed leadership cadres in Stalin's style. Through death sentences.
I just can’t understand how Leiba Samuilovich Levin interfered with the regime. When he was repressed, he was 82 years old. I don’t know if he understood what was happening... And, nevertheless, execution.
All conveniences were created for the Lepel NKVD officers - there was no need to transport prisoners far. The sentences were carried out in the courtyard of the local prison.
Forty-year-old industrial plant storekeeper Samuil Tabiashevich Rosenberg was arrested on June 23, 1941. The Great Patriotic War was already underway, the Germans were rushing into the interior of the country, and the “authorities” were still carrying out the plan for arrests.
Let's return to the “Warm House” to Elizaveta Meerovna Dekhtyar. Let's introduce you to the hostess. Moreover, the guests are already at the table...
Elizaveta Meerovna was born in the village of Krasnoluki, Chashniksky district. Her father Meer Simonovich Farbman was a shoemaker. At Lenin’s call, that is, after the death of the leader of the revolution, he joined the party and soon became a nominee. (This was the name given to people who did not have sufficient education, but who proved their loyalty to the new government. They began to be promoted to leadership positions). Meer Simonovich was appointed director of the local dairy plant.
There were 11 children in the Farbman family. It seems now - what a large family... And then no one was particularly surprised by such a number of children.
Mom - Ekha Mikhelevna from the village of Shashki. In the pre-war years, many Jews lived in villages. In the Lepel district - in Gorki, Domzheritsy, Gorodets, and other settlements.
When the war began, two Jewish families managed to leave Krasnoluki to the east: the Farbmanovs and Shuba, the chairman of the village council. Firstly, they had, albeit horse-drawn, transport. Other fellow villagers did not want, and could not, leave the Germans. They said: “What will they do to us?”
After the war, Elizaveta Meerovna returned to her native place and worked as a salesman and accountant. She married Semyon Moiseevich Dekhtyar and moved to Lepel with him.
Semyon Moiseevich, or Sholom Movshevich by birth, had golden hands. He comes from a family of craftsmen. His father, Movsha Sholomovich, was a painter. And this profession was inherited by his son. But before that there was a war that he went through without hiding behind other people’s backs. Awarded orders and medals. At the end of the forties, he joined the repair and construction department and worked there for almost 40 years until his retirement. Painter of the highest category, awarded the title “Honored Builder of the BSSR.”
Semyon Moiseevich and Elizaveta Meerovna have three children. The eldest son devoted himself to military service, the other lives in Israel. Daughter – Klavdia Semyonovna – is from Minsk, teaches at a vocational school, “Excellent student in public education of the Republic of Belarus.” That day she was in Lepel - she visits her mother every weekend, and often comes with her grandson.
When I was traveling by bus to Lepel, I got into a conversation with a neighbor. He talked about his trip, about the “Warm House”.
He did not hide his admiration for the fact that someone cares about elderly and unsettled people and comes to their aid. But at the same time I was surprised:
– You don’t have unsettled old people. I have never seen Jews collecting bottles or digging through food waste.
I do not have statistical data on how many people, of what nationality, live below the subsistence level. I think there are no such statistics at all. Of course, everyone should strive to help. But if it is impossible to benefit all of humanity, extend a helping hand at least to your family, friends, neighbors.
Lena Isaakovna Lyubina came to Elizaveta Meerovna’s house earlier than the others. Helped her with housework. She is a sympathetic person by nature.
As a little girl during the war, she was able to go east with her parents. I ended up in Samarkand. Father Isaac Vulfovich made pottery. The family had three children. Mom and children were selling dishes. There were good ceramicists in Lepelshchyna. Isaac Vulfovich is one of them. The researcher of Belarusian history and folklore D.I. Davgyallo wrote back in 1905 in the essay “Lepel, a district town of the Vitebsk province”: “Pots and pottery are made in Lepel, Beshenkovichi and Chashniki. It’s wonderful that the dishes are sold not for money, but for grain - how much will fit into the vessel.”
In Central Asia, the Libins often sold dishes not for money, but for bread, or rather, flat cakes. In 1946, the family returned to Lepel. Everything is destroyed. No stake, no yard. We need to build. Where can I get money? There was no time for studying. And Lena, with two years of education, went to work as a laborer in the regional procurement office. Loaded and unloaded wagons in the wind and cold. Her husband Ivan Koroban was a submariner and died early at the age of 59. Military service affected my health. Ivan Koroban wanted to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
Now Lena Isaakovna is retired. She is not one of those who will walk around with her hand outstretched or cry for her life. But I would still really like for my retirement years to be more prosperous and calm, so that I have confidence in the future.
Both Lena Isaakovna and her sister Raisa Yukhnovets, who worked all her life as a salesman in Lepel, did not accumulate wealth, did not make provisions for a rainy day, and today are grateful to “Hasdei David” for their help: medicines, food rations, firewood.
Naturally, on Victory Day, the first person at the table to congratulate on the holiday was a gray-haired, still strong man in an officer’s uniform with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel and a chest full of orders and medals. When he was given the floor, he said, addressing the Ginsburgs:
– I first met Americans more than 60 years ago. It was in Germany, on the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, when Soviet and American troops closed the encirclement around the Nazis.
Isaac Emmanuilovich Pritzker is from a military family. His father Emmanuel Abramovich served in the Kiev Military District before the war, was a commander and shared the fate that I. Stalin prepared for many commanders of the Red Army.
Isaac ended up in a special school, then in the Suvorov Military School. From the first days of the war, the 17-year-old boy, having “attributed” himself an extra year, found himself at the front. Then he studied at the Ryazan Artillery School and again went to the front. Liberated Mogilev, Minsk, ended the war in Berlin.
And after 1945, Isaac Pritzker gave another 18 years to the army - he commanded an artillery division.
And then life took, at first glance, a strange zigzag. An officer and city man Isaac Emmanuilovich became the chairman of the Zarya collective farm in the Chashniksky district.
True, before that they gave me six months of internship in a strong farm. Isaac Pritzker took over a lagging collective farm and made it a millionaire. Almost like in the film “The Chairman”, where Mikhail Ulyanov played the main role. True, the prototype of the film chairman was Kirill Orlovsky. But the farms of Pritzker and Orlovsky at the first stage were not much different from each other.
Then Isaac Emmanuilovich worked in the Chashniksky district executive committee as a state inspector for the quality of agricultural products.
– Why did you move to Lepel? – he repeated my question. – My wife is from Lepel, and the town is beautiful, calm, I liked it.
Pritzker has both a son and two grandsons in the military - lieutenant colonels. Officer family.
After “Warm House” we went to the village of Chernoruchye. Here, not far from the highway in the forest, there is a monument.
I went to Chernoruchye for the second time. Six months ago I was at this place with Serafima Lynko and her husband. Serafima is a foreman at a home-working plant. Her maiden name is Aksentseva.
During the first meeting, I told Serafima Moiseevna that I had read in one of the newspapers: “On September 17, 1941, in the town of Kamen, Vitebsk region, ghetto prisoners resisted the fascists and policemen. The performance was led by Moisey Aksentsev.”
“Moisey Aksentsev is my father,” said Seraphima. “But I haven’t heard anything about it.”
Moses Yakovlevich did not talk about his past at home. There was a time when it was better not to think about the ghetto again. And he didn’t remember, so as not to complicate his daughter’s life.
Aksentsev was born in the town of Kamen, twenty kilometers from Lepel, in 1900. He got married here and had a son and daughter. Moisey Yakovlevich worked as a procurer in the district.
Of the small settlements located far from railways or highways, few managed to escape to the east.
The residents of Kamen continued to work, make hay, and harvest potatoes even after the war began.
I learned the terrible details of the summer and autumn of 1941 from Girsh Raikhelson, who now lives in the USA. His grandfather, the stove maker Borukh, lived in the town of Kamen before the war, and Girsh himself visited here in the summer months.
At the end of the forties, the Raikhelsons met Moisei Aksentsev, the only survivor of 178 shtetl Jews.
He told them that on September 17, 1941, all Jews were herded to the market square and it was announced that they were being sent to Lepel, where they would live in a place specially designated for them.
“When the Jews gathered in the market square were lined up in a column, many began to scream and refused to go, because Lepel is more than 20 km away, and it is clear that old people and children will not make it. This means they are being led not far...,” writes Girsh Raikhelson in his memoirs. – The cordon consisted of Germans and policemen. They put decrepit old people and small children on several carts. My grandmother was not herself, she was clearly crazy, and my grandfather held her hands tightly. I don’t remember what Moses said, whether the pit was prepared in advance, but I remember for sure that he was with a shovel in his hands. When the carts began to turn to the right, and the column was driven after them, there was an opportune moment for escape - the lake was nearby. But he still hoped for a miracle, although a plan for how to escape was immediately formed - to dive into the lake if he managed to get there.
A few minutes later it became clear that they would shoot. Moses, a strong 40-year-old man, did not wait for the execution to begin. “Run up, save yourself!” He hit a policeman standing nearby on the head with a shovel, rushed at another, panic was created, and teenage boys, and there were many of them, ran in different directions. This came as a surprise to the killers; a few seconds - and Moses dived into the water; he did not feel the burning cold. He tore off the reed, a few strokes, and now he was already at the bottom, shallow, and the reed was sticking out among the thickets. They started shooting into the water almost immediately. The bullets knocked on the water, one of them touched his ear. A scream and the sound of gunfire were heard. He didn't remember how long this hell lasted. When everything calmed down, he heard them approach the water and shoot several times. The punishers were sure that he was killed; no one began to dive and search.
Moisey Aksentsev hid in the village for some time. The Nazis found out about this and shot the peasant who saved him (unfortunately, it was not possible to establish his last name), and the peasant’s wife was taken to Lepel and subjected to public flogging.
Moses managed to cheat fate again and went into the forest. He ended up in the partisan brigade of Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Eliseevich Lobank, whom he knew before the war, when he was the first secretary of the Lepel district party committee. Moses fought with weapons in his hands. Then, knowing the skills of Moisei Yakovlevich, the brigade commander assigned him to be a partisan cook.
When Belarus was liberated from the Nazis, Aksentsev continued to fight in the ranks of the Soviet Army. After demobilization he came to Lepel. Here he found a new family. Sofya Markovna, she now lives with her daughter Serafima, like her husband, she worked as a procurer in a general store.
Serafima Moiseevna recalls that in the fifties, Vladimir Eliseevich Lobanok, a major party leader of Belarus, while in Lepel, came to visit them at home.
...We stopped on the highway and went to the monument. The memorial complex in Chernoruchye is well maintained, it is regularly painted, renovated, and flowers are planted.
More than 2,000 people were shot here during the war.
This is how Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman, a prisoner of the Lepel ghetto, recalls the terrible days of the beginning of the war. In 1941 he was fifteen years old.
“My father worked on the railroad, and my family and I could evacuate. However, my father believed that the Germans would not be able to advance so quickly into the interior of the country through the defenses of the Soviet troops. Our family, therefore, went first to our friends in the village of Kazinshchina, and then to the village of Chernoruchye. They hoped that we would wait there for a week or two, and the war would end or would be fought on enemy territory. Meanwhile, at the end of June 1941, the Nazis occupied Lepel and we were forced, in order not to endanger the people with whom we lived, to return to Lepel.
The traitors began to stir... Based on a denunciation, the Beilin family was captured, who were soon shot... People were often hanged and beaten in the market square. In early July, they gathered all the Jews in the city center and, under pain of execution, forced them to paint large yellow stars on their houses. They were required to wear a green bandage on their left arm with the inscription “Jude”. Afterwards they demanded that I sew yellow six-pointed stars on the front and back of my clothes, that I only walk on the roadway, not on the sidewalk, and that I was driven to work every day. For disobedience - execution."
The memoirs of S. K. Feigelman are quoted from the book “Bitterness and Pain” by Gennady Vinnitsa. (Gennady Vinnitsa, “Bitterness and Pain”, Orsha, 1998, pp. 45-46). An Orsha teacher, in the nineties he published several books about the tragedy of the Jews of Belarus during the Holocaust. He was the first to write a detailed essay about the destruction of the Lepel ghetto. Currently, Gennady Vinnitsa lives in Israel.
At the end of July - early August, a ghetto was created in Lepel. It was located within Leninskaya, Volodarskogo and Banny Lane streets. 30-40 people were forced into houses.
A prisoner of the Lepel ghetto, Rosa Solomonovna Fishkina, was not only an eyewitness to all the events. Many times she was on the verge of life and death. She recorded her evidence “hot on the heels” in 1944.
(State Archives of the Russian Federation, f. 7021, op. 84, l. 104).
“All Jews were expelled from their own homes. Only two hours were given for this... The houses in the ghetto had no doors, there was no floor... They were not allowed to turn on the lights in the houses, to go to the well or to the river for water, and in winter they were ordered to heat the water from the snow. Every day they took me to work with a two-word song: “Jude kaput.”
The cold came early in 1941.
Hungry, naked in 25-degree frost, the prisoners walked and sang.”
In the evening or at night, the Nazis burst into apartments screaming, beat and raped women, set dogs on children, and took away everything they had. And they said: “Give Judas everything you have, you don’t need it, one of these days you will be shot.”
Every day, the commandant, burgomaster, former physical education teacher Nedelko, and police chief Voitekhovich collected valuables as a ransom from the Jews of the city. The collection was entrusted to the Jewish Committee (Judenrat), at the head of which the Jew Gordon was forced to be. Failure to comply will result in execution. When there was nothing more to give, the Nazis themselves began to go from house to house and demand expensive things. Failure to comply with demands resulted in execution. So after three hours of bullying, Jeruchim Katz was killed.
Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman recalls.
“A special article was systematic checks of the presence of Jews in the ghetto. It was announced that not only the family, but also everyone living in this house would be immediately shot if at least one person was missing. I remember how, during one of the checks, an SS man came into our house. You had to immediately stand up and take off your hats. I felt very bad from constant malnutrition and could not get up. The SS man ordered me to go with him. Everyone started crying and begging, but it had no effect on him. The SS man took me out of the house and walked towards the exit of the ghetto. Having passed several houses, he stopped and began beating me with a rubber truncheon, and when I lost consciousness, he left... From that day on, I began to think about escaping.”
The Nazis set Russians and Belarusians against the Jews and wanted to deal with the ghetto prisoners with their own hands. They announced to the residents of the city that if anyone was angry with the Jews, they could come to the German authorities and tell them about it. Shiveko, who was repeatedly convicted under the Soviet regime for theft and hooliganism, reported to the commandant's office that Lyusya Levitan testified against him at the trial. She was summoned to the commandant's office, the woman was mocked, and then taken out of town and shot. The corpse was ordered not to be buried. Next, the entire family of Lucy Levitan and her neighbors were shot.
Those who were younger and stronger made attempts to escape from the ghetto as a family. But rarely did anyone manage to escape persecution.
Resident of Lepel Maria Makarovna Buynitskaya recalls.
“Once I went into my barn, I discovered the Gitlin family hiding there. They asked to be transported across the lake by boat to the village of Stary Lepel. That same night I transported them. It's all in vain. I don’t know how the Germans captured this family later, but they shot everyone.”
The prisoners of the Lepel ghetto knew that in the surrounding cities and towns the fascists and police were destroying the ghetto. There were even rumors about what date the execution would take place. This news was sometimes reported to the Jews by the police themselves, demanding special payment for this.
But where to run? Into the frosty forest, not knowing where the partisans are, whether you will meet them, and whether they will be accepted into the detachment. To the villages, but everyone knew that harboring Jews would result in execution, and rarely did anyone stay with them for even one night. The ghetto fugitives could not survive without help.
We will turn more than once to the memories of Rosa Solomonovna Fishkina. But first we’ll tell you how she managed to escape herself. Her daughter Raisa Ivanovna Titarovich spoke about this:
“My father is Belarusian by nationality, and therefore he was not a prisoner of the ghetto. About a week before the execution, my dad persuaded my grandfather Solomon Abramovich that it was necessary to save my mother and me. They had to persuade because if the escape was discovered, all the remaining relatives of those hiding were shot. Having received consent, my mother and I secretly left the ghetto at night.”
R.S.’s father, mother, brother, sister, and another daughter died in the ghetto. Fishkina. Rosa Solomonovna fought in the Chekist partisan brigade and took part in twelve battles.
After the war R.S. Fishkina worked as a teacher at the Lepel school.
... “February 28, 1942. The morning is brisk and frosty. There is dead silence. The gendarmerie with dogs walked through the streets of the city. They are setting up posts of German soldiers and traitors.”
The population of the city was afraid to leave their homes...
8 am. Cars with fascists appeared on Volodarsky Street, they stopped...
“The traitors began to drive everyone out of the houses with rifle butts and boots into the street. Here they were picked up and put on cars. There was a noise, children and women crying. A shot rang out, followed by bursts of machine guns and machine guns. Everyone started running in all directions. Those running out of houses were shot, and the troupes were thrown into cars. The cars were guarded by 8-10 armed people from the populists and police. Then the cars sped off along Volodarskaya - Lenin - M. Gorky streets to the southwestern outskirts of the city. During the movement, shouts were heard: “Bandits, executioners will avenge you for our blood.”
When the raid began, Semyon Feigelman hurriedly, without even having time to get dressed, ran out of the house. His father shouted to him: “Run away.”
Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman recalls: “I saw five more people running. The punishers began to shoot... Either from fright, or instinctively, I fell. He lay there and tried not to move. The punishers considered me apparently dead and walked towards the lake, where another group of fugitives appeared. I crawled down towards the river and ran along the bank... Having reached Matyushino, I came to the house of our friend Alexander. Here they rubbed my frostbitten legs with goose fat, fed me well and advised me to move towards the front line. My wanderings began. People fed me, I had to spend the night in barns, haystacks and bathhouses if no one noticed. It was not possible to leave the front line. Turned back. Somewhere near the village, Luchaika met with the underground communist Khromy Vasily, who contacted his friend Nikita Vasilyevich Grits, who lived on a farm near the village of Uglyane, Glubokoe district. I owe my life to Nikita Vasilyevich Grits, his wife Evgenia Andreevna and seven-year-old son Vladimir. The whole village knew about me, but no one gave me away. I lived at Grits’s until my liberation.”
I would like to believe that justice will prevail, and the Grits family will be awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Lepel Jews were taken seven kilometers from the city, to the village of Chernoruchye, where there were already ready-made silos.
The doomed people were forced to strip naked, placed on the edge of a pit and shot at with machine guns and machine guns.
More than 1,000 people were shot during the day. Small children were thrown into pits alive; they could not get out from under the mountain of corpses and suffocated.
The last to be shot was the head of the Judenrat, Gordon.
“The graves in which the corpses lay remained unburied for about 1.5 months. The corpses were carried away by dogs and wolves.
The massacre of the Jews was so terrible that the population who saw this atrocity fainted,” these testimonies were recorded from the words of Efim Yudovin.
(Yad Vashem, O 41/258, p. 18)
The fascist Einsatzkommandos 8 and 9 of Group “B” left a bloody trail on Lepel soil.
They were actively helped by bandits from the 17th Latvian battalion. This formation arrived in Lepel on January 1, 1942 and stayed there until mid-March of the same year. No notable military operations took place during the 17th Battalion's deployment to Lepel. The Latvian battalion participated in the extermination of Jews in surrounding cities and towns.
Many Lepel Jews, along with representatives of all other nationalities, fought in the ranks of the active army, avenging their dead relatives and friends.
Those who were able, joined partisan detachments, and, fighting for their native land, brought Victory closer.
Mikhail Aizikovich Tkach was the commissar of the 4th detachment of the Lepel brigade named after Stalin.
In the partisan unit of Hero of the Soviet Union Anton Brinsky, there was a partisan detachment in which there were many Jews who fled from the ghettos of Lepel, Mstislavl, and Baranovichi.
In a mass grave in the village of Chernoruchye, the descendants of everyone we wrote about in this essay found their last refuge: the Levitans, the Abezgauzes, the Levins, the Gelfands.
The following were shot and buried here:
Gutkovich Zyama, 70 years old, son of Leiba, and grandson of Shmuyla. Grandfather lived in Ula;
Gutkovich Bunya, 50 years old;
Gutkovich Zlata, 58 years old;
Gutkovich Velka, 60 years old.
These are namesakes, and most likely relatives, of Barry Ginsburg.
Then in this place they shot gypsies, underground fighters, and partisans.
Ulla - an ancient town
From Lepel we went to Ulla. Distance - forty-five kilometers through the most beautiful places. The American guests looked out the car windows and admired the forests and lakes. This region is rich in reservoirs. The road passed through the villages of Staroye Lyadno, Sokorovo, and Poluozerye.
Just seventy or eighty years ago, Jews lived compactly in these places. And local old-timers recall stories about Burke, who traveled through villages and exchanged products for textiles. The inn not far from Poluozerye was kept by Jews, but memory has erased their names. They say that the owner’s daughter was very beautiful, and the local landowner hit on her. Because of this, a big scandal broke out, and the owner of the inn sent his daughter to relatives in Poland.
Jews traveled daily along this road, along neighboring dirt roads and country roads: balagols, delivering cargo; traveling salesmen hurrying on business; wandering preachers-magids, who traveled from town to town, whatever God sent, tenants of gardens, transporting their goods to bazaars and fairs. The Jews were with sidelocks and without them, with beards and clean-shaven, in yarmulkes, hats, caps, in traditional Jewish clothing and linen belted caftans. And no one pointed a finger at them, looked after them, or was surprised. They were an organic part of the landscape of the Belarusian Lake District.
Several years ago, I was returning from Minsk in the same car with three young Hasidim who were traveling to Vitebsk to help local Jews celebrate Passover. Naturally, the Hasidim were dressed in traditional Jewish clothing. We drove along the Lepel road. Since dry closets are rare here, we stopped at the edge of the forest out of necessity. The Hasidim relieved themselves and left the forest. At this time, five or six cars were driving along the road. Passengers began to look out the windows, and drivers began to honk their horns. The Hasidim emerging from the Belarusian forest seemed no less exotic to them than aliens arriving on earth.
It would be interesting and, I think, economically profitable to open a Museum of the Jewish shtetl in Belarus. Make this an open-air museum: several streets built in the traditional Jewish architectural style. Shops and taverns should be open for tourists, but costumed Jews walking along the streets of the town are not needed at all. All the inhabitants of the Jewish town have long lived in heaven. There is a similar museum in Israel. But the memory of the shtetl should be perpetuated on Belarusian soil, and I’m sure there will be no end to tourists.
Today there are no Jews in any of the villages on the road from Lepel to Ulla. And in Ulla itself, the regional center and urban settlement of the 50s, there are only two wards of the Jewish charitable organization “Hasdei David” left - Mira Davidovna Melnikova and Anna Mikhailovna Vinokurova.
Mira Davidovna is over 75 years old. She worked as a veterinarian. Anna Mikhailovna is a little younger, and she also worked tirelessly all her life.
Ulla is an ancient town on the banks of the Western Dvina. On its coat of arms, on a red field, there is a castle with towers and loopholes, as a reminder of medieval history. Twenty years earlier than Vitebsk, at the end of the 16th century, Ulla received Magdeburg Law, that is, the right to self-government.
Jews have lived here since ancient times. The “Inventory Book” for 1764 records that Ulla has 10 main parts of the city, of which there are 187 courtyards, up to 600 residents, and up to 20 Jews.
The 19th century was golden for Ulla. At the very beginning, the construction of the Berezina water system was completed and the Berezina and Ullu rivers were connected. We began rafting timber from the Minsk province to Riga. Barges with leather and grain floated. In Ulla, in the place where the river of the same name flows into the Western Dvina, a pier was built, honey, hemp, wax were loaded onto barges - what these places are rich in and what was in demand in Europe.
One of the most notable figures was the merchant of the 1st guild Berka Itskovich Rapoport. His business plans went far beyond the boundaries of the Lepel district and the entire Vitebsk province. “Military-statistical description of the Vitebsk province” in 1852 (apparently without information that Berka Rapoport died in 1848) indicates that “... The main items of foreign trade in the Vitebsk province consist of sending timber and flax. Among the traders of forest materials, the largest trade is carried out by the Lepel 1st guild merchant Rapoport, ... buying commercial and raw materials trees in the provinces of Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk and rallying them into rafts in the spring along the river. [Western] Dvina is sent to the city of Riga and abroad. His sons trade in flax and flaxseed...
Dmitry Lvovich Shirochin, a professor at the Mining University and Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, lives in Moscow and is interested in his family tree, ancestors, including the Rapoport merchants. In his research based on archival materials, Dmitry Shirochin writes: “The trade in timber, flaxseed, hemp, various types of bread, tobacco and lard, delivered along the Western Dvina to the port of Riga, sets in motion large capital purchases for free sale abroad and for supplies to the treasury. Goods purchased in the fall and brought in winter are loaded onto rafts, barges and plows in the spring; the logs are tied into rafts, 4-logs of firewood are stacked on horse-drawn horses and floated with water during the spring flood. The main places for the supply and storage of goods for shipment along the Dvina to Riga are located in the cities of the Smolensk province Beloye and Porechye. In the Vitebsk province - in Velizh, Vitebsk, the towns of Beshenkovichi, Ulla, in the city of Polotsk, the towns of Druya and Kraslavka. Since the fall, merchants, through their clerks, have been trying to purchase these goods from the landowners of the provinces of Vilna, Courland, Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk and Smolensk.”
At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, during the liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II and the widespread rise of the Russian economy, the Gutkovichs, the ancestors of Barry Ginzburg, settled in Ulla.
Zalman-Yakov, Barry's great-grandfather, moved here with his family; from the village of Balbinovo, the family of tailor Yudel Gutkovich moved from the Augustberg estate; in 1860 - the large family of Faivish Gutkovich from the village of Dobreika; in the same year, the no less numerous family of Girsha Gutkovich.
At this time, the population of Ulla grew significantly, and Jews began to play a significant role in the life of the town. The townspeople were engaged in trade, timber rafting, were good potters, fishermen, and made beautiful boats. People from surrounding towns and cities came here specifically to buy comfortable multi-oared vessels.
In 1867, over 2.5 thousand cubic meters worth of 700 thousand rubles were sent from Ulla to the Baltic states in large and small rafts of commercial timber.
The Zalman-Yakov Gutkovich family lived in their house on the banks of the Western Dvina. And since almost the entire Jewish population of the city was in one way or another connected with “water” professions, this fate did not escape the Gutkoviches.
When I talked about this, Barry Ginsburg remembered: “Some of my ancestors caulked boats and made a living doing it.”
Working in the archives, I found the first and last name of the tarr - the man who tarred river ships - Girsh Gutkovich - the brother of Barry Ginzburg's grandfather.
But still, the profession of a pilot, or in today’s language, a pilot, was considered the most scarce. They specially studied to become a pilot at courses that operated in the Smolensk province. For guiding one barge from Ulla to Riga, the pilot received 25 silver rubles, and the oarsman - 8–15 rubles. A lot of money in those days. It took 11–12 days to reach Riga.
In the article about Ulla, placed in the Great Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus F.A. and Efron I.A., a separate line is highlighted: “There are pilots among the residents who guide ships through the Dvina rapids.” This was one of the main advantages or attractions of the place.
The Western Dvina has fed Jews since ancient times. Back in the 17th century, Jewish merchants sailed along the river and traded in Vitebsk, Surazh, and other cities and towns. Among the Dvina fishermen, Hasidic stories tell about this, there were many Jews. As indeed among raftsmen. And even the Dvina barge haulers were most often Jews. Someone made it into the public, became the owner of a barge or steamship, and already in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century there were many Jews among the captains of Dvina steamships.
In 1881, the steamship "Vitebsk" made its first voyage on the route Vitebsk - Ulla. Downstream he swam at a speed of 20 versts per hour, and against the current - 8 versts per hour slower.
The steamship “Vitebsk”, like the steamships “Dvina”, “Toropa”, “Dvinsk”, “Kasplya”, “Mezha”, sailing along the route Vitebsk - the village of Ustya, belonged to R. Eman. His competitors Z. Gindlin and L. Rakhmilevich, whose ships sailed from Vitebsk to Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils), had a more artistic or circus nature, which was reflected in the names of their ships: “Giant”, “Athlete”, “Nadezhda”, “Hero”, “Strongman”, “Fighter”.
According to data for 1924 among the Ul Gutkovichs, in the town by this time this was one of the most common surnames; several families were associated with timber rafting along the Western Dvina. Moreover, apparently, this difficult profession is passed on from generation to generation. The raftsman was Sholom Yankelevich Gutkovich, who lived to a ripe old age, his son Mendel. Yesel Girshevich Gutkovich and his sons Elya, Faivish and David were involved in the same business.
When Joseph Gutkovich and Rivka-Genya Borgak celebrated the wedding of all relatives: both close and distant, and even those who are called “the seventh water on jelly” were invited to the celebrations. This was the way it was, the whole place celebrated the wedding, and the celebration lasted for several days. Parents gave their all so that no one would say that their children had it worse than others.
The Gutkoviches knew how to live in peace with people and were respected, valued for their responsiveness, for coming to the aid of those in need, and for being wise and God-fearing people.
Chuppah was made for young people in the Ul synagogue. According to the old tradition, the bride was taken to the groom. But whether they sailed from Lepel to Ulla by steamship along the Berezinskaya water system or the carriage was drawn by three horses and drove along the highway, one can only guess.
The wedding tables were placed in the courtyard of the house. The fresh breeze from the Dvina gave the guests strength, and they sang, danced, drank and ate, wished the young people health and many children...
In 1905, 2,975 people permanently lived in Ulla, of which 2,050 were Jews. Jewish speech could be heard everywhere: on the pier, in workshops, among children, and among those who looked into the wine shop. Jews, Belarusians, and Poles spoke Yiddish. In the fifties and sixties, old residents who understood the Hebrew language well still lived in Ulla. True, they heard him very rarely; sometimes in the summer one of the Jews came to relax or fish on the Dvina.
What else was the place famous for at the beginning of the 20th century?
There were 4 Jewish prayer schools (as synagogues were officially listed), 2 Orthodox churches, and a Catholic church.
Every spring a large horse fair was held in Ulla. Merchants and buyers came from different provinces. At the fair, a herd of horses up to 100 heads was sold for 2-3 thousand rubles.
In the town there were three tanneries, small workshops and a water mill, 2 wine shops, 6 shops, a pharmacy and a post and telegraph office.
In Ulla there were 30 brick and 200 wooden houses, the total length of the streets paved with stone was 340 fathoms. These are the statistics of those years.
Well, of course, the place knew its celebrities.
The children were told about the artist Ivan Fomich Khrutsky. And although, among the small-town public, drawing was not considered a profession, but a whim of not quite normal people, and the artists themselves were often considered drunkards, they spoke about Khrutsky differently: “Of course, with his money you can paint. He has an estate,” and the Ul intelligentsia always emphasized that he was an academician.
Religious Jews spoke with reverence of the Talmudist and Hasidic figure Elijah Joseph of Dribin. His father, a God-fearing man and an expert in the holy books, Reb Leib lived in Ulla.
Elijah Joseph was close to the Lubavitcher Rebbe Dov Ber. He served for some time as a rabbi in Polotsk, and then moved to Jerusalem. This was back at the beginning of the 19th century. They said with respect about Elijah Joseph that he was a great scholar, he wrote books on Kabbalah, Halakha, and Hasidism. And the halakhic work “Ohobe-Joseph” was considered one of the pinnacles of Jewish thought.
Shtetl youth, among those who believed in the ideas of Zionism, certainly remembered the name of Menachem Sheinkin. By this time, their fellow countryman managed to create Bnei Zion, a Zionist organization in Odessa, participated in the second Zionist congress in Basel, actively promoted Hebrew, and visited Eretz Israel. And during rare visits to his parents in Ulla, young people gathered around Menachem. Since 1906, Sheinkin lived in Eretz Israel, headed the Palestine Bureau of Hovevei Zion, and was involved in the aliyah of Russian Jews.
By the early twenties of the 20th century, the Ginzburg-Gutkovich family had already firmly established itself in America, as eloquently evidenced by many facts, including a family photograph taken overseas during these years. It depicts people who have already achieved something in life and are satisfied with their position.
However, in America the surname Gutkovich sounded in the local manner - Gudovits, or even Goodwin. The young family had two sons here - Frima and Abram.
How did their relatives who remained in Ulla live and what did they do?
The State Archive of the Vitebsk Region stores documents of the Ulsky District Executive Committee. After the trip with the Ginzburgs, I became interested in the history of the family and came to the archive. They brought me several dozen folders. Almost all pre-war paperwork was carried out by hand, and today reading words written in faded ink and not entirely legible handwriting is sometimes an extremely difficult task.
You experience strange feelings when you sort through dilapidated archival documents, yellowed from age, and read people’s names. They have been gone for a long time, many do not even have graves; roads have been laid and houses have been built in their place. But on pieces of paper, people who have disappeared into oblivion still live, submit tax documents, justify themselves to the authorities, sign money statements...
The fates of the Ul Gutkovichs developed so dramatically and were so different from each other that it was time to write a novel. Or maybe it was like this: post-revolutionary, a turning point, when everyone was tested for survival, for humanity.
Dobba Girshevna and her sister ran a shop. Dobba, as an alien element, was deprived of the right to vote by the new government.
Faya Itskovich was engaged in lime burning.
Borokh Rafailovich was a laborer and by the sweat of his brow he earned food for himself and his family.
Brothers Isaac and Leiba Movshevich were tailors. There was little work, but there was no competition between relatives, and they lived in peace.
Leizer Abramovich was a shoemaker and spent his days repairing old shoes.
Rokha Zalmanovna-Yankelevna, Joseph Gutkovich’s sister, was a beggar and lived in someone else’s house on the Western Dvina embankment. She was allowed to live for free, and in return she heated someone else’s house.
Sholom and Faya Gutkovich, together with S. Sheveko and F. Kozik, opened a tar factory on the Shostaki farm and registered their industrial cooperative artel.
And another Faya Gutkovich, as in former times, was a cab driver, transporting goods from Ulla to Lepel, Bocheikovo, Kamen, sometimes even to Polotsk. More than anyone in the world, he loved his horse, and in the evenings, after a hard day, he silently drank a decanter of vodka and looked thoughtfully out the window.
Archival documents preserved the tax report of the store owner Elya Sholomovich Gutkovich. Today you look with interest and curiosity at the figures from ninety years ago. And you understand that Eli Sholomovich’s life consisted of these numbers:
“Renting an apartment – 3 rubles per month; heating and lighting – 9 rubles per six months; servants - no; family expenses – 15 rubles per month; children's education - no; insurance – no; donations – 2 rubles per half-year; entertainment and cultural purposes - no; treatment - no. Total personal expenses – 119 rubles per month.
Expenses for the enterprise - 48 rubles per six months; heating, lighting - no. Taxes: patents – 32 rubles; collection fee – 68 rubles; basic income – 25, 50 rubles; additional income tax – 10.50 rubles; target – 1.80 rubles. Small household expenses - 7 rubles for weights; travel expenses for goods – 17 rubles per six months; costs for delivery of goods - 50 rubles. Total expenses for the enterprise are 259.80 rubles.
Availability of goods at sales price – 400 rubles; what cash capital was invested in the enterprise - 300 rubles; turnover of available goods per month – 300.
The average percentage of gross profitability on trade is 18%. The average percentage of net profitability on trading is 7%.”
Eli Sholomovich Gutkovich was one of the wealthiest people in Ulla during the NEP (New Economic Policy) of the Soviet state, or one of the most honest, reporting the actual figures of his business to the tax authorities. He forgot about the Jewish tradition of donating a tenth to the needs of the community, or to charity, and allocated only 2 rubles per six months for these purposes.
Anna Mikhailovna Vinokurova met us in Ulla. Together with her, we continued our acquaintance with the urban village.
The day turned out to be cloudy, it was drizzling, and this made the mood a little sad. The rickety fences, the market square with a large puddle and an empty long counter made of long unpainted boards seemed to come from black and white films about the post-war years.
A few days later I learned that my mood was somewhat justified. In those days, Ulla lost its city status, and instead of “village committee,” the sign of the local administration already read “village council.”
Anna Mikhailovna worked as a paramedic at an ambulance for more than 50 years, and was repeatedly elected as a deputy of the village council and chairman of the Ulla Veterans Council. An honored person, highly respected.
“In 2005, one child was born in Ulla, and six war and labor veterans died,” she cited sad statistics.
Vinokurova came to Ulla in 1949 after graduating from the Kyiv Medical School. Parents are from Ukraine. Father Mikhail Efimovich Dimentman was repressed during Stalin's times as an “enemy of the people.” Served 17 years. In 1954, he was released from the camp, and he came to his daughter in Ulla. I worked as an accountant for a couple of years. The camps undermined my health. Mikhail Efimovich soon died. They were buried first in Ulla in the old Jewish cemetery, and then reburied in Vitebsk.
We arrived at a vacant lot located not far from the farms. Someone's goats were grazing nearby. Interspersed with pieces of reinforcement, broken bricks, household rubbish and pieces of rusty iron, the monuments of the old Jewish cemetery were forlornly hidden in the grass, potholes, and bushes.
It became clear why the children of Mikhail Dimentman decided to rebury their father, although this is done extremely rarely among Jews, and religious Jews can only rebury their loved ones in the land of Israel.
“The cemetery should be fenced off and cleaned up,” Anna Mikhailovna said guiltily.
But it was clear to everyone that no one in Ulla would do this. There is no money in the local budget for such actions.
A nationwide program for the preservation of old cemeteries located in small towns and villages should be adopted. No one is going to demolish them, and they will look at people with silent reproach for centuries. Representatives of all faiths, including Jewish organizations, should take care of the preservation of these cemeteries: find sponsors so that they will not be ashamed either in front of their ancestors or in front of their descendants.
“Now everyone is buried in a common cemetery,” said Anna Mikhailovna. - There is order there.
We walked around the cemetery, trying to read the inscriptions on the matzeivas. Barry Ginsburg's ancestors may have been buried here. Our searches yielded no results. Many monuments have grown into the ground, and it is necessary to carry out excavations to discover the inscriptions; other gravestones are overgrown with a thick layer of moss, because of which it is impossible to read a single letter; in some places the letters have been erased from time to time and you can only determine by touch what they were when -they were carved on stone.
...Archival documents helped to recreate the lost world. True, the folders smelled not of antiquity, but of dampness. And this prose brought me back to reality.
According to the 1923 census, 1,970 people lived in Ulla, of which 1,068 were Jews. 34 Jewish families were engaged in agriculture. There was a Jewish primary school and a seven-year school with 5 groups of students. For an elementary school, one of the rooms was rented out by Vera Borisovna Hotyanova. And her duties included heating the stoves, bringing water, cleaning the premises, and the district executive committee paid her 35 rubles a month.
There were 36 people studying in the two-class school - all Jews. Compared to the four-year Ul school, where teaching was conducted in Belarusian and Russian, it was a very small educational institution. By the way, more and more Jewish parents sent their children to study in regular schools. Here is the national composition of the four-year school: Belarusians - 148, Jews - 114, Russians - 2, Poles - 2.
And I would certainly like to mention one more interesting fact from that time. Little Ulla had her own theater. True, the district executive committee in 1926 gave the residential building of Genya Zelikovna Khaikina for it. And despite her complaints, he did not return it, since the house was already listed in the Book of Communal Buildings.
In 1930, there was one Orthodox church, one Catholic church, one Evangelical Christian church and two synagogues operating in Ulla. The rabbi of Ul was Gdalia Movshevich Asman. Since there are no other names of rabbis in the list of clergy, compiled by the regional police department in 1927, it turns out that there was no rabbi in the second synagogue, there was only an elder - and a gabe. Apparently, the old rabbi died, or left, or was exiled (today we can only guess about this), and in those years they could not find a new one for such a position. The small Ul community had nothing to pay (at least for bread and water) for the rabbi’s service, and I’m sure there were few brave souls who agreed to such an act. But two butchers, as in previous years, remained in Ulla. This is Berka Davidovich Manusov and Izak Movsha Berkovich. There was also a butcher in the neighboring town of Kublichi - Elya Simonovich Fischer.
The local government body in Ulla was the national Jewish shtetl council.
I often write about Jewish shtetls in Belarus, but this is the first time I have encountered such a state of affairs. Not a single photograph of the old pre-war Ulla has survived: neither from collectors, nor in museums, nor in archives. No one compiled a list of the Jews of Ulla who died during the Holocaust. Often, such a noble and very necessary work for posterity was carried out by people who themselves experienced the tragedy of the Holocaust and miraculously survived. Or the children of those who died did it in memory of their parents. There are no such lists in Jerusalem in the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum, they are not published in the “Memory” books, which were published in Belarus for each district, they are not found either in the Beshenkovichi Regional Museum or among local historians. And I found only two pre-war residents of Ulla, those who remember the history of the town and were familiar with Jewish families. I understand that a lot of time has passed since then, and yet I was haunted by the feeling that, in retaliation for our collective indifference, some unknown force decided to erase the memory of the past of this place.
Sofya Lipovna Rabukhina lives in Vitebsk, she is 82 years old. To my questions related to surnames, first names, dates, they answered: “I don’t remember, you know, it was a long time ago.” But she spoke in detail about the events that seemed to her the most significant in life. About how a thin nineteen-year-old girl, an accountant with seven years of education, was called to the military registration and enlistment office and assigned to a six-month driver course. This was in the winter of 1945. The Rabukhins lived in a village in the Mongol-Buryat Autonomous Republic, where they managed to reach during the war. And then she was a driver and, when the war with Japan began, she transported the wounded and dead from the battlefield to the rear in a truck. And after the end of the war, she had to turn the steering wheel of the car for several more years.
Sofia Lipovna told how after the war they returned to Ulla. My father built a house on a high bank. She went to work. And one day, returning home and crossing the Dvina, she fell through the ice. She was saved with difficulty, and then lung diseases began. They couldn’t help in Ulla and they sent an air ambulance plane from Vitebsk to pick her up. “Now no one would send a special plane for me,” she said.
I kept trying to turn the conversation to a topic of interest. Sofia Lipovna answered my questions and could not understand what was interesting in her pre-war life.
– Born in August 1925 in Ulla. Lipa Erukhimovich's father was a carpenter. And his brother was a carpenter. They are from a working family. They had good hands. Everyone did it.
My father had a sister and seven brothers. Two of them went to America when their father was still young.
I interrupted the conversation that had been established with such difficulty and began to ask clarifying questions.
– What year did you leave? Who went with them to America? Did she hear the names Borgak and Gutkovich at home?
Sofia Lipovna remembered for a long time, and then said:
“Father said that they didn’t want to live here and left.” They traveled by boat to Riga, and from there they went to America... I don’t know whether their parents corresponded with them or not. When I became independent, there came times when they were afraid to tell even their children about it.
– Which of your father’s relatives remained in Ulla? – I asked.
– Two brothers, their families. We lived next door to one of them on a street near the Western Dvina. The Ulla River was nearby, and often in the spring, during a flood, a whole lake formed in this place. We moved out of our house during a flood. The water sometimes reached the windows. They lived with their uncle or other relatives. No one ever broke into our house and stole anything, although the house was sometimes empty for two weeks. There was no theft in the towns. Mom could go milk the cow and not close the door.
The customs in the town were different, and the morals were different. We bought the house in the late twenties from people who were leaving Ulla. Relatives, neighbors, and my father’s colleagues lent us money. And no one wrote any receipts, and no one took interest. They were confident that they would give the money on time.
Our mother is from a very poor family,” Sofia Lipovna continued the story. -Her name was Chaya. She is also from Ul. My grandfather died young of consumption. They did not have money for treatment, and he “burned out” quickly. Five daughters survived. One moved to Latvia. Many people from Ul went to live in Daugavpils and Riga. The second sister and her family left for America.
This topic interested me and asked me to tell you more.
– The bazaar in Ulla was open every day, but the best was on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Peasants from many villages came to the market; there were so many people that you couldn’t squeeze through. And you could buy whatever your heart desired. If my mother bought meat, she usually took the hind quarter of the calf. She took it home, cut it up and put it in the cellar. We had a deep cellar, my father lined it with brick, and food could be stored there for a long time.
In 1932, Sofia Lipovna went to study at a Jewish elementary school. It was located next to the Church of the Holy Spirit, and during the big break, girls from the Jewish school sometimes ran into the church. They were interested to see how the candles burned and how people prayed. Moreover, there was talk around Ulla about the local priest Stanislav Tsybulevich. He was an independent person, did not bow to the authorities, and people assured that he would soon be arrested. They were right, however, at that time such predictions most often came true. Stanislav Tsybulevich was arrested as “the leader of an anti-revolutionary nationalist group that organized mass protests of the Polish population.” The accusation was far-fetched, but the sentence was real - the death penalty - execution.
-Did you go to the synagogue? - I ask.
– I remember a wooden synagogue that stood opposite the pharmacy. We also went there with the girls out of curiosity. My father began every morning with prayer, went to the synagogue, tried to be there every day, but my mother did not even go there on holidays.
On Passover they baked matzah at home. They prepared for the holiday ahead of time, from the beginning of spring. My father whitewashed, painted, and repaired something, especially after the next flood. Mom prepared flour, sifted it so that not even a crumb of bread would get in there. She invited two or three poor women. They rolled out the dough, and then mom put the matzo in the oven. We baked only for ourselves. It seems to me that at that time in Ulla every family baked their own matzo. Dad was getting Easter dishes from the attic. We had guests over for lunch.
Just before the war, Sofia Rabukhina managed to complete seven classes at a Belarusian school. After four Jewish classes they were transferred to Belarusian, and then, in 1937-38, Jewish schools were closed altogether.
Until September 1939, Ulla was located in close proximity to the western border of the Soviet Union. And, naturally, strategically important facilities were built here and military units were stationed. During these years, a new bridge was built across the Western Dvina, a small cement plant was opened, a military airfield was built behind the bridge, hangars for aircraft and houses for pilots were built. This place in Ulla is still called “The Town”.
But to the nearest railway station, Lovzha, you had to walk 17 kilometers if you didn’t have a horse or a passing car.
On June 22, 1941, the Rabukhins were in a village near Ulla. The family of one of the leaders of the village council was also here. Sofia Lipovna recalls that he came to his people and said that they needed to pack the essentials and leave. He also said the same to Khaya Rabukhina. But she answered: “We have such a house, such trees in the garden, such a vegetable garden, everything was done with our own hands, how can it be left unattended.” She was sorry to leave the new chandelier, which they bought shortly before the war. Lipa Rabukhin did not take part in this conversation. He, as usual, spent his free time in the fire room. Lipa Rabukhin was a member of the local voluntary fire brigade and was very proud of this activity. As soon as the firefighters learned about the war, they immediately gathered and declared readiness No. 1. They expected fires to start in Ulla. They could not even imagine that the fire of war could not be extinguished with the help of a local voluntary fire brigade.
The Rabukhins left Ulla a few days later. They began to wait behind the bridge for the truck that would take them to the railway station. But there was no car. And they decided to spend the night with a woman they knew. They were allowed in and even given tea in the morning, and then the woman said: “The Germans will come, they will see that I am keeping Jews, and it will not be good for me. Go away and don’t hold a grudge against me.” People, even those far from politics and government structures, probably knew from Polish refugees that the Nazis were exterminating Jews and everyone who helped them.
The Rabukhins walked on foot to Orsha, and only there, with the efforts and will of Khaya, did they board a train moving east.
A pre-war resident of Ulla, Boris Liberman, now lives in the Israeli city of Ashdod. And he, unfortunately, after suffering illnesses, cannot remember everything, and often his wife answered questions instead of him, who knows about Ulla only from family stories.
Boris Mendelevich's grandfather was a rabbi in Ulla. His name was Girsh Farbman. But Hirsch died relatively young and Boris, born in 1929, does not remember him.
The Liebermans were informed about the beginning of the war by their eldest son, Itzik. He was 25 years old. He also worked on the village council.
The head of the family, Mendel, who worked as a procurer and was probably not in poverty, did not want to leave Ulla. He said that the Germans were here during the First World War and did nothing bad to anyone. He is not a communist, not an activist, which is why they are afraid of him.
But Samuel, who had recently turned 18, firmly said: “We must go.” And they listened to him.
The Liebermans moved to the opposite bank of the Western Dvina by boat. Then we went to the village. There was a group from the Ul kindergarten with teachers there. They also said: “We must leave.” And the Liebermans went east. They were bombed. We reached Vitebsk on foot, and then boarded the train.
“Few people managed to leave Ulla.” There are no more than twenty families,” says Boris Lieberman.
His older brother Itzik died at the front. Yasha, Samuel and Joseph fought and returned home with wounds.
By the beginning of the war, 516 Jews lived in the town. Men of military age were drafted into the active army. More than 200 Ulshev residents died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, and among them Alshevsky Monas Abramovich, Gitlin Zelik Davidovich, Liberman Itzik Mendelevich and other Jews.
A lot was said about patriotism and internationalism of Soviet citizens in the pre-war years. But in reality, these words often did not stand the test of strength. Ulla stands apart: during the war years, none of the residents of the urban village became a policeman. Of course, the German occupiers could not do without traitors, but in the village these vile duties were not performed by local residents.
As with many issues, there are no established and documented dates for the creation of the Ul ghetto. Or rather, the dates appear in the documents, but they are different. And you have to compare, analyze, and sometimes speculate.
Of the Ul Jews who remained in the occupied territory, only a few survived.
They want rumors that some woman paid off and saved her children by giving the Nazis the gold she inherited from her parents. I don’t believe this, there are many similar examples when the Nazis took gold and, when they were convinced that people had no more wealth, they killed them. And who should they be ashamed of, to whom should they keep their word? They did not consider Jews as people, and, therefore, what kind of treaties could be made with them.
Boris Liberman told me that the Russian husband Ivan Alekseev, who was a bridge guard, somehow managed to save his wife Sonya. In 1941 she was 22 years old. In a place where everyone had nicknames, they called her “Sonka the Redhead.”
Sofya Alekseeva lived in Ulla after the war. A short interview with her is published in Gennady Vinnitsa’s book “Bitterness and Pain”:
“The ghetto was created in December 1941 on the site where vocational school No. 3 is now located. There was a wooden building of the district executive committee, where all the Jews were herded. They were guarded by policemen. Jews wore yellow stars...
The ghetto was not fenced with barbed wire. Jews were released in search of food. They went to neighboring villages. We had to return by evening.”
The first mass executions took place on a frosty and clear day on December 5, 1941. The Nazis selected those who could resist them, those whom people could follow. These were representatives of the local intelligentsia, young girls and women, men who, for some reason, were not drafted into the army. They were sent to work in the area of the military camp and did not return back. The Nazis were good psychologists. They shot those who could become leaders, and deprived the rest of the will to resist. Bullying, hunger, illness, and death of loved ones completed this picture. Old people, women, the sick - prisoners of the Ul ghetto - were waiting for death as deliverance. They stopped dreaming about freedom.
The Ul ghetto existed until the autumn of 1942.
From the protocol of interrogation of Franz Silvestrovich Kozik, born in 1921, a native of the village. Bortniks. The interrogation was carried out by an investigator of the Extraordinary State Commission for the identification and investigation of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices on temporarily occupied Soviet territory on March 31, 1945. Only three years had passed, and all the details of the terrible tragedy were still fresh in my memory.
“When German troops occupied our territory, I, as a person not liable for military service, remained under occupation. Not far from our village there was a camp of the Jewish population. In 1942, on this very day I was at home, from a Jewish camp where there were 365 people, the Germans began to drive people out into the fields to the “fox holes,” as this place was popularly called. When the entire Jewish population: children, old people, women and men, was driven by the Germans to the “fox holes,” shots were soon heard. The shots lasted for about six hours, after which they began to blow up the pit in which many corpses lay.”
The pit was blown up because there was not enough space for them in the shell crater where they initially decided to dump the troupes. And then they called the sappers for help.
From the protocol of interrogation of Shevyako Adam Bonifatovich, born in 1903.
“When the Germans occupied our territory, I was captured by the Germans, from where I escaped and lived at my place of residence (the town of Ulla). The Germans forced nine of us to guard the property of the military camp. This was in 1942. Somehow the Germans did not let us go home, they gathered everyone in a designated place and ordered us not to disperse. After a little time, the Germans brought in a column of the Jewish population, among whom were children and old people who could not walk themselves and were brought on carts. We were not allowed outside. When the entire Jewish population from the camp was driven to the military camp, volleys of shots were heard. The population was screaming and we were very sad. The executions lasted for about two hours, after which we were driven out with shovels and forced to bury the troupes. When we came to the pit, it was six meters long and five meters wide, the pit was already a little covered with earth, but human legs and heads were still visible - all bloodied. As ordered, we dug a hole. The Germans also shot a lot of Soviet citizens; for example, they shot the entire Sinkevich family because one of them was a commissar of a partisan brigade. There were also frequent mass executions of Russian prisoners of war.”
There were many old and weak people who could not walk themselves among the prisoners, because it took seven carts to bring them to the place of execution. Garelik Ivan Vasilyevich, born in 1894, who lived in the town of Ulla, reported this to the investigators.
“Once the road master Yushkevich gave me orders to bring a horse to him at seven o’clock in the morning. When I brought my horse, a German came up to me and ordered me to go to the Jewish camp. I had six more carts with me. Having arrived at the camp, they put the old men on our carts and ordered them to lead us to a military camp, which is located not far from the town of Ulla. They brought them to a wooden house, the Germans ordered the Jews to go into the house, and they sent us back... In the camp, they put three suitcases on my cart and ordered me to take them there. When I arrived at the appointed place, citizen Ulla Chekan told me that all the Jews had been shot.”
The Jews were first driven into a canteen on the territory of a military camp. Then they were taken out in batches and shot at the vegetable store.
The occupiers were practical down to the last detail. They didn’t even forget about the three suitcases with the prisoners’ belongings, and they specially sent a driver to fetch them.
Then these things were given or sold to the local population, calling it an act of charity and triumphant justice. It is difficult to imagine greater cynicism.
Relatives of Barry Ginzburg were among those residents of Ulla who were shot by the Nazi invaders on the territory of the military camp.
On the monument, which was erected at the site of the execution of prisoners of the Ul ghetto, it is written:
“Comrade, bare your head to the memory of the dead. At this place lie 320 residents of Ulla: children, women, old people, brutally tortured and buried alive by the Nazi executioners...”
Local residents believed that more than 360 people were buried here.
The monument at the site of the death of ghetto prisoners was opened in 1974.
There was a pioneer camp “Eaglet” around. Pioneer parades and all-Union “Memory Watches” were held at the monument.
In the 90s, after perestroika, fellow countrymen who had lived in Israel for many years came to Ulla. They placed a black granite slab at the monument, on which it was written in Hebrew that Yakov Sholom was buried here. Most likely, this is one of the ghetto prisoners.
When we arrived at the town, there was construction going on all around. A recreation park was built on the site of the children's camp. The monument was well maintained, the fence was painted, flowers were planted.
...When Vinokurova arrived in Ulla in the late forties, about a dozen Jewish families lived here. These were those who returned to their homeland after demobilization and evacuation. Yudasin worked as the chairman of the district executive committee.
Sofia Lipovna Rabukhina said that old believers, including her father, gathered at someone’s house and prayed. There was a minyan, that is, ten adult men required to perform public worship. By the way, Sofia’s father, Lipa Erukhimovich Rabukhin, lived for 102 years, and while he had enough strength, he was an exemplary parishioner of the Vitebsk synagogue.
Mikhail Rutkin, an old friend of mine, told me about those times. In Ulla there was an orphanage where, during the difficult and hungry post-war years, they warmed and fed orphans as best they could. Among them was little Misha Rutkin. Anything could happen in the orphanage, especially among children who were angry with life. But Mikhail Rutkin always remembered with gratitude the people who worked here.
According to the 1970 census, 12 residents of the village of Ulla identified themselves as Jews.
Do Jews know how to work the land?
By the beginning of the 20th century, the Gutkoviches and Borgakis lived mainly in cities and towns. They mastered various crafts and tried to find happiness in commerce. Some families remained to live in villages and engage in agriculture. Their parents lived here, their children were born here.
Literally a few kilometers from Ulla is the village of Bortniki. I was not able to go there with my American guests, although the landscapes in Bortniki are beautiful and there would be a lot to tell about.
In the early autumn of 2000, I came to this village. I have long wanted to go to the place where there once was a Jewish collective farm, meet the old-timers, talk to them, find out their opinion about Jewish farmers. I've heard so many jokes on this topic. They were told not by pathological anti-Semites, but by the Jews themselves. Willy-nilly you begin to think: maybe we are a people unsuitable for agricultural work. (Where did highly developed agriculture come from in Israel?).
In Bortniki and in the neighboring village of Sloboda, Jews lived and worked long before the founding of collective farms, before the revolution.
Sloboda was the native place for the family of farmer Leib Berkovich Gutkovich. In Tsuruki, not far from here, in the Sokorovsky village council, Joseph Abramovich Gutkovich was considered a strong owner. He had 6 acres of arable land, a horse, livestock, and poultry. In addition to him, the family included two able-bodied men and two able-bodied women.
In the thirties of the 19th century, Sloboda became one of the first Jewish agricultural settlements in the Western Territory. In 1831, Jewish families bought (rather than rented) 223 acres of land and settled here. Probably, these were not poor people and until that moment they lived somewhere nearby in the towns of Ulla, Ushachi, Kublichi, Lepel.
In those years, the Russian autocrat made many decisions concerning the fate of the Jews. Sometimes they contradicted each other, sometimes they were simply impossible to implement. Some of the decrees concerned the employment of Jews and their agricultural work. They wanted to establish Jewish agricultural colonies in the Astrakhan province, Novorossiysk region, Tavria and even Siberia. People rose from their homes, set off on a long journey, and then came a decree suspending resettlement.
Attempts were made to secure the Jews on earth and in the Western Region. In 1847, the state even adopted a special Regulation. They threatened to conscript those Jews who did not develop their farms to a sufficient level within six years. What was meant by the word “sufficient”, and who was the judge in this case, I never found out.
In the very first years, the Jewish settlers of Sloboda managed to become strong owners and independent people.
In 1898, there lived 28 families of what they called the “native Jewish population.” The families were quite large. Population – 185 people.
The Jews of the agricultural settlement greeted the revolution without much enthusiasm, but also without unrest. They believed that since they earned their bread through hard work, their political passions would not be affected.
But when the time came for general collectivization, the national collective farm “Rotfeld” (“Red Field” - Yiddish) arose on the site of the Jewish agricultural settlement. It simply couldn’t be any other way, whether the residents of Sloboda wanted it or not.
Among the old-timers of these places who remember pre-war life, I met Evdokia Lavrenovna Sapego (Sadovskaya).
– There was a Jewish collective farm here. Jews also lived in the neighboring village of Tsuruki. The collective farm had a flax spinning mill, an oil mill, a pig farm, and a brick factory. They made brooms and took them to Gorodok to sell. Jews are business people. They lived richly. The entire population of Sloboda, young and old, worked at Rotfeld.
In 1933, a cattle yard for 100 cows and a granary were built in Rotfeld.
The chairman of the collective farm was Matvey Timkin.
Evdokia Lavrenovna named the names of her pre-war friends: Haika, Dora, Bentya... And then, as if apologizing, she said:
– There’s something wrong with my memory, I don’t remember names. You will talk to Fruza Gritskevich, she is from 1926, she must remember the Jews.
Fruza Nikolaevna Gritskevich was harvesting potatoes not far from her house.
– Why are you suddenly interested in Jews? – she asked.
And having learned that we were writing a book and were not going to demand or ask for anything, she began to tell:
– I lived among Jews since childhood. The village was Jewish. Before the war, Belarusians lived only in a few houses near the highway. Our family lived in these houses. Now only one pre-war hut has survived. It’s clear that after the war other people live there. I worked at the Rotfeld collective farm every summer. They paid us well and gave us one liter of milk a day.
– Who else can tell you about the Jewish collective farm? – I asked.
“Dobrovolsky,” answered Fruza Nikolaevna. - He is at home now.
We entered the bright and spacious house of Arkady Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky. He was sitting at the table, wearing felt boots.
“My legs hurt,” he said. “Maybe due to bad weather, or maybe due to old age,” and he laughed. “Before the war, I lived not in Sloboda, but in the village of Bagretsy.” It is not far from here. There was a Komsomol organization in Rotfeld, and we often gathered here. I was friends with Borey Timkin.
I found interesting facts about the Sloboda Jewish School in the State Archive of the Vitebsk Region. It was a four-year school, opened in 1924. Classes, naturally, were held in Yiddish.
School reports indicate that there was 1.3 square meters of floor and 2.6 cubic meters of air per student. The educational institution had 10 three-seater benches, one blackboard, one table and one chair. Not rich, but at that time not the worst option for a rural school. In 1924, the Sloboda Jewish school was headed (she was the only teacher) by Sonya Peisakhovich. The young teacher was 20 years old, and it is also known that she was the daughter of a handicraftsman.
There were 23 Jews and 4 Belarusians studying at the Jewish school - all children of primary school age who lived in Sloboda. Please note that Belarusian parents did not write letters of complaint about why their children were studying in a Jewish school; no one found out what the titular nation was and in what language it should be taught. Everything was natural and did not give rise to conflict.
In her annual report, Sonya Peysakhovich writes: “When I started work, the lack of Jewish books affected me. The first half of the year passed without books. In the second half of the year I went to Polotsk and brought the necessary books. But the school does not have a children's library, which greatly affects the development of children... The school, together with the pioneer detachment, publishes a wall newspaper (once every two months). Children learn a lot of hygiene skills. The school carries out social work, staging performances for revolutionary holidays...”
I don’t know for what reasons, but teachers at the Slobodskaya school often changed. Probably, in those days, as now, young people, especially those who have received special education, are drawn to big cities.
In 1926, Etka Solomonovna Asovskaya was already working at the school, and the next year, Mikhail Yalov. The school rented the newly built house of Mendel Kagan for classes.
...At the end of June 1941, fascist troops came to Bortniki, Sloboda, and neighboring villages. Or rather, German troops passed through these villages, and the new government was represented by their assistants: elders, policemen.
We had to collect the terrible chronicle of 1941-42 literally bit by bit, talking with residents of Sloboda, Bortnikov, Sokorovo.
At the beginning of August 1941, the Germans and their henchmen drove Jews from all the surrounding villages to Sloboda.
“My school teacher Anna Arkina was among them,” recalls Evdokia Sapego.
Old-timers remember that a Jewish family lived in a large house near the forest. The parents and their sons (for some reason they were afraid for them) went east, and left the house, cow and the rest of the household to their daughter Haiku. Like, the Germans won’t do anything to the girl...
People lived in inhumane conditions for almost a year. They were bullied and forced into the most difficult and sometimes useless jobs. Food was a little easier than in other ghettos. Small reserves of potatoes and vegetables remained in the basements. They didn’t eat well, but they still didn’t die of hunger.
...It was in the fall of 1942, no one could remember the exact date. 12 Sonderkommando men from the town of Kamen arrived in Sloboda. Along with them were policemen and the headman.
“The headman was a nasty guy,” recalls Fruza Gritskevich. – He spoke German well, and kept trying to curry favor with the Nazis.
The Sonderkommando gathered all the Jews of Sloboda in Mushka’s house - there was a Jewish woman living in the village. Those who did not fit into the hut awaited their fate in the courtyard of the house.
First, the men were led into the forest under escort. There weren't many of them. They ordered us to take shovels. They said they would build a road. People had a presentiment of evil, but they had no idea that they were being led to execution.
The men dug two trenches in the forest. And at that time he fired up the machine gun. People fell into freshly dug ground, the wounded were finished off and immediately buried.
Among those who were driven to Mushka’s house was Frida Gritskevich.
- I was dark-haired. They took me for a Jew. I was standing in the yard with my friend Dora. After the men were shot, they began to take women and children into the forest. Ten people were taken away. There were usually four policemen escorting us. They brought us to the trench, and at this time the machine gun began to fire. When it was my turn to go, the headman said that I was Belarusian, and they let me go.
Only a few were saved that day. They say that the doctor Zarogatskaya and Anna Gurevich were hidden by Ivan Semenovich and Anastasia Stepanovna Zhernoseki. A boy and a girl hid from reprisals. But we didn’t find out their names.
At the site of the execution, the ground moved for several days. Dogs ran into the forest for that most terrible place for a long time, and people avoided it.
Now at the site of the execution there is a modest and unkempt monument. Rarely does a person find himself in the forest approach it... There is no plaque on the monument with the names of the people shot here. But we know from archival documents the names of the pre-war students of the Sloboda Jewish School. Many of them lie in this land.
Kogan Rokha, Timkin Zislya, Aksentseva Braina, Dubman Khava, Khaikina Mira, Kogan Isaac, Gershanskaya Freina, Aronson Riva, Kogan Busha, Rappoport Sholom, Timkina Braina, Akishman Manya, Kogan Riva, Natarevich Fantya, Gershansky Gersh, Khaikina Khanya, Natarevich Sholom , Gershanskaya Galya, Natarevich Mulya...
Using the biographies of the Borgaks - Gutkoviches - Ginzburgs, one can study the history of the Litvaks - Jews who lived in Lithuania, Belarus, and eastern Poland. Their family chronicle can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century, and not a single significant historical event has bypassed this family.
Dov Ber Borgak was born in Polotsk in 1819 into the family of a tradesman, Ovsey Borgak.
In his youth he served in the Russian army. Under autocrat Nicholas I, conscription was introduced for Jews in 1827. Its goal is not so much to strengthen the army, but to convert as many Jews as possible to Orthodoxy, and thereby contribute to the solution of the “Jewish question.” During 25 years of barracks life, where naturally there were no conditions for observing religious laws, the Jew had to move away from his faith. They were recruited from the age of 18. Each Jewish community was given a mandatory plan for recruits. It is possible that 15-year-old Dov Ber was sent to the recruits before his required age, having been assigned three years in the documents so that the community could fulfill the plan and not remain in debt. Or was Dov Ber sent to serve in place of the son of a rich neighbor, who managed to buy himself off?
But the most terrible fate was the fate of underage 12-year-old Jewish boys, who were also taken into the Russian army under Nicholas I. Many simply did not survive in the very first years, others were bullied by “guys” - educators. Until the age of 18, young conscripts were in battalions or cantonist schools “to prepare for military service,” and then – 25 years of recruiting. Children were forced to convert to Christianity, change their surnames, and rarely did any of the cantonists, having gone through all the circles of this hell, return home without losing their faith.
If Dov Ber Borgak ended up in the army, it means he was from a low-income family, unable to pay his way and far from the leadership of the Polotsk Jewish community.
Forty-year-old soldier Dov Ber Borgak returned to his native place in 1859 and settled in the village of Gorodets. How did Dov Ber, or Berka, as he was called at home, end up in this village forgotten by God and people?
Maybe he didn’t want to return to Polotsk because his resentment towards those who tore him away from his home, from his usual life, for many years did not go away?
Or no one in Polotsk was waiting for him, and life had to start from scratch. Dov Beru betrothed a twenty-year-old girl, Esther. Her father Abram rented an apple orchard located in the village of Gorodets on the banks of the Ushacha River and transferred this business to his son-in-law.
A year later, the first-born appeared in the family. The boy was named Ovsey, in honor of his Polotsk grandfather. Most likely, by this time Dov-Ber's father was no longer alive, and according to Jewish tradition, his name went to the baby.
Seven years later, a son, Abram, named after his maternal grandfather, appeared in the family, then a daughter, Pesya.
For some time the family moves to Lepel. Rivka-Genya, Barry Ginzuburg's grandmother, is born there. And then there are girls in a row: Genya, Nechama, Ida.
The first wife dies. Dov Ber was apparently a strong man. Not only did he outlive his first wife, who was twenty years younger than him, but he also married Kayla, Leib’s daughter.
It is difficult to find out all the nuances of his life. But in old age in 1894, Dov Ber again finds himself in the village of Gorodets. He not only, as in previous years, rents an apple orchard, but also engages in tailoring.
The family tree of the Borgak-Gutkovich-Ginzburg family is so strong and branchy that its crown hangs over many cities and towns of Belarus. Here are the already mentioned Lepel, Ulla, settlements of the Ulskaya volost, the village of Balbino, the estates of Augustberg, Borovka, Dobreika, the towns of Kublichi, Shklov, Golovchinsk, Knyazhin. cities of Polotsk, Mogilev, Gomel.
But in family memories, in home conversations at the Ginzburgs’ holiday table, the name of the village of Gorodets was first mentioned. This settlement has become for the American family a symbol of distant Russian antiquity, an image of a serene and calm century.
And during any conversations, negotiations, discussions of upcoming trips to Belarus, Barry always said that he wanted to visit Gorodets.
What did I know about this village? On the map of the Lepelsky district I found several settlements with the same name. And if we add neighboring areas to the search, then Gorodtsov will become as many as six. The names of the villages Sloboda, Mezha, Gorodets are among the most common in Belarus.
I asked for clarification, for some additional information, and finally received it: Barry Ginzburg retained the words “Gutovskaya volost” in his memory.
I breathed a sigh of relief, although this did not bring complete clarity. The Gutovskaya volost was liquidated in February 1923 and its territory was included in the Ushachi volost of the Bocheykovsky district.
Studying old books and maps in the archives, I got to three small villages called 1st Gorodets, 2nd Gorodets and 3rd Gorodets. In fact, these were three farms of one village.
In 1st Gorodets at the beginning of the 20th century there were 5 households and 41 inhabitants; The 2nd Gorodets was the largest - it had 16 households, 55 men and 42 women lived, and the 3rd Gorodets had only 4 households, and 27 people lived here.
But it was in the 3rd Gorodets that Jews lived. In 1926, these were the families of Zlata Moiseevna Sverdlova - 5 souls, Bentsa Khaimovna Sverdlova - 5 souls, David Berkovich Reles - 4 souls and Yankel Berkovich Rivman - 2 souls.
During Barry and Merle Ginzburg's next visit to Belarus, we went to Gorodets. Loit Westerman traveled with us to places connected with the past of their family.
He also lives in New York, is engaged in the construction business, and came to Belarus for the first time.
I asked the Ginsburgs:
– How is Loyt related to you?
And Barry and Loit began to find out the degree of relationship. I have long noticed that in shtetl Jewish families this is always a difficult issue to resolve. And not at all because we are “Abrams who do not remember kinship.” It’s just that among the Jews who lived in towns in Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland, intra-clan marriages were accepted, that is, cousins or more distant relatives could become husband and wife. And the branches of the family tree were so intertwined that it was very difficult to make out who was who and who was related to whom.
In the end, after many minutes of conversation, we found out one of the family lines: Loit’s grandmother is Barry’s cousin.
Barry and Loit's ancestors emigrated to the United States at the same time, but, judging by their memories, they took different routes to get there. Some traveled along the Western Dvina by steamship to Riga, others arrived in Europe on transfer ships and sailed from Hamburg by steamship to the USA.
And now we are going to the village of Gorodets, but not to the archive or book village, but to the real one, today.
The road goes up and then we roll down, which our mobile phones instantly feel; they stop communicating in the lowlands. Either to the left or to the right of us are the most beautiful places. We drive past the Lesnye Ozera holiday home. Once upon a time, pilgrims from many provinces of Russia gathered in these areas; they walked tens and hundreds of kilometers. Rumors spread everywhere about the local healing mud, which cures almost all diseases.
And finally, there is a road sign “Zvonsk - 1 km”. I take out a notebook and read the extracts made in the archive: “Gorodets belongs to the Zvon rural society.” So we are at our goal.
Barry Ginzburg recalls that his relatives lived in the town of Kublichi. At the beginning of the 20th century, the postal and telegraph office closest to Gorodets was in the town of Kublichi. Everything fits together.
We drive along the gravel road for a couple of kilometers and read “Gorodets” on the road sign.
Barry and Merle Ginsburg, Loit Westerman exclaim joyfully. The goal they have been striving for for many years has been achieved.
We got out of the car. A small village surrounded by pine forest. In summer, on a sunny day, it is, without a doubt, a very beautiful place, when even old rickety fences and houses living out their days seem picturesque and attractive. But on a gray November day, when wet snow is falling and dirty slurry is squelching under your feet, it looks dull and joyless.
We took pictures against the backdrop of village houses, with a crane well in the background. The American guests asked: “What is this?” Barry asked: “Where was the apple orchard that the Borgak family rented?” According to family legends, one of his relatives worked in a water mill in Gorodets.
I asked a local woman about the mill. She shook her head. In her lifetime, and she’s about sixty years old, she doesn’t remember anything like this.
We went down the mountain, and in front of us was the Ushacha River. A hanging bridge swinging like a clock pendulum, old car tires thrown into the water. Perhaps the mill stood here. And somewhere nearby on the shore there was an apple orchard.
The village of Gorodets is living out its life. Houses that are more reminiscent of “movie” sets and are afraid of any wind, fences that are kept “on your word of honor” and sheds that are built like houses of cards. As our driver Ilya said: “The road through Gorodets leads to a dead end.”
Barry Ginsburg did not see what he expected and commanded: “Let's go back.”
We asked a passerby how best to get to Ushachi. He looked at our comfortable cars and decided that we were just another metropolitan summer resident who was buying up the local dilapidated houses, demolishing them and in their place building completely modern cottages in which to live for a couple of summer months.
We were leaving Gorodets. There was silence in the car, and I said: “Dreams are always more beautiful than reality.”
The next day, Barry and Merle, at the opening of the reconstructed Hasdei David charity center, had a meeting with members of the Vitebsk Jewish city community. The Ginsburgs made generous donations; thanks to their help, the charity center increased its space, changed its architectural appearance, purchased modern equipment, and was able to open new programs. As they removed the white canvas from the plaque containing the names of the benefactors, Barry said, “I’m from your community, too. My ancestors are from here, from Vitebsk land. Therefore, I donated money with understanding. Today I listened with admiration to how your artists sang Jewish folk songs. We are with you."
There was, of course, festive pathos in these words, but they touched everyone who came to the opening of the charity center.
Barry and Merle Ginsburg wholeheartedly help the Jews of Belarus. They established personal scholarships for those who decided to receive higher or second higher education. They provide financial assistance to a Jewish kindergarten in Minsk. Funds are allocated for additional nutrition, treatment and health promotion for people in need.
Another surprise awaited the Ginzburgs ahead. Among those who receive a personal scholarship appointed by them is Nastya Batenko. Studying in Minsk, future designer. Her grandmother's maiden name is Gutkovich. She is from the Beshenkovichi district, that is, from the places where Barry Ginzburg’s ancestors lived, and, possibly, their relative.
When the scholarship was awarded on a competitive basis, the grandmother’s name did not appear anywhere. This is a coincidence. But there is a lot of symbolism in it.
The head of community programs, Raisa Kastelyanskaya, spoke about her family: her father’s sister was married to David Gutkovich from Ulla. And she told about the children of David Gutkovich, who fought at the front, died a brave death in battles with the Nazis, were shot in the Beshenkovichi ghetto, and survived the blockade in Leningrad. Life has scattered the family, and now grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in different countries of the world.
On the posters hung in the Vitebsk Charity Center, touching words were written in Russian and English: “Dear Merle and Barry! You have arrived home." This brings both a smile and tenderness. We are brought together by the past, but thousands of kilometers separate us; we are different in our perception of the world, tastes, and mentality.
But it’s still nice to know that somewhere on the opposite side of the Earth, there are people like Merle and Barry.
I would like to believe that their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will come to the Belarusian cities and towns where the Ginzburgs’ ancestors once lived. They will be interested in and know the history of their family, people, and our traditions. And the famous “golden chain” of generations will never be interrupted.
April 19th, 2015 , 09:31 pm
Lepel (emphasis on the first syllable) is the second Belarusian city after Dokshitsy that we visited in the hot summer of 2012. Lepel looks larger and more impressive than Dokshitsy, which looks more like a village. There are more people and more interesting things here. In Lepel there is a modestly preserved piece of the old town and dead-end railway station. Among other things, Lepel stands on the shore of a picturesque lake.
See how the average middle-sized Belarusian province lives approximately in the middle of the country - below the cut.
1. The central square of Lepel - Svoboda is an intersection with a large roundabout, inside of which there is a public garden with flower beds and Lenin, and outside, along the circle, there are administrative buildings.
One of them is the district executive committee, local administration: 
2. Wikipedia claims that people lived in the vicinity of Lepel 9 thousand years BC. In the Lepel region, archaeologists have discovered sites from the Mesolithic era.
In addition to the administration on the central square there is a cultural center: 
3. On a warm August evening, after rain, a rainbow appeared over the wet Lepel asphalt and Lenin:
4. The history of Lepel is generally similar to the history of neighboring Dokshitsy and is typical for these regions. It began its existence as a village in the Principality of Polotsk, and later in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Along the central square there is also a local branch of Belarusbank and several shops, including the obligatory Belwest.
In the photo, in the middle of a flowerbed in front of a two-story pink government building, you can see a monument to the Lepelchanin. For some reason I didn’t take a closer picture of it, apparently I didn’t notice: 
4a. That's why I'm bringing photos from the web. The monument is completely new, from 2011. In Lepel, as they say, a peculiar tradition has arisen of erecting new monuments almost every year, on the day of the city. A couple more monuments from this series will be below. Many are surprised why the Lepelchanin is represented as a sort of Selyuk, riding a sheep, with a pig and a chicken under his arm.
Photo taken from here: http://www.lepel.by/news_396.html
5. The first mention of Lepel dates back to 1439. Like most of Belarus, which is in the path of military attacks on Russia, Lepel was attacked and looted many times.
One of the main attractions of Lepel is the post office building from 1902 (brick, on the right), which is still used for its intended purpose. To the left, the building of the education department of the Lepel district executive committee is closely adjacent to it. 
6. We visited Lepel twice - on a weekend evening, when the streets were quite crowded, and on a weekday, when the streets of Lepel were a little less than completely deserted. I asked the same question - where did everyone go - in the story about Dokshitsy.
View of the square, located inside the traffic circle in the central square. The flower beds there, by the way, are gorgeous. As you can guess from the number of people, this is a weekend evening: 
7. Initially, Lepel was located on an island in Lake Lepel and partly on the western shore, where today the village of Stary Lepel is located.
There, on the main square, there is a school of art, which apparently means an art school: 
8. In 1558-1583 there was a Lepel castle. The status of the city has been since 1563. In 1586, Lepel was sold to the famous philanthropist, Hetman Lev Sapega. With him, Lepel was somewhat more fortunate than the Dokshitsy, whom the Polish-Lithuanian landowners endlessly sold, transferred, inherited and divided. Sapieha gave the city a certain impetus in terms of development, including industrial development. Plus, it was he who founded the town of Bely Lepel, or New Lepel, in the village of Belaya, on the shore, in 1586, where a shopping center, a church and a church were moved. It is this Lepel that has already survived to this day. Therefore, in some places Sapega is called the founder of Lepel, although the city already existed before him for more than a century.
From the central square along the cozy Lepel streets we head towards the lake: 
9. Since 1793, Lepel has been part of Russia. In 1805, by decree of Alexander I, the city received district status. Lepel became a significant trade and cultural center; a pharmacy, a school, an Orthodox cathedral and a Catholic church appeared in the city. After the fire of 1833, the city began to be built according to a regular plan.
A small number of beautiful pre-revolutionary buildings have been preserved on Leninskaya Street. This building is occupied by the district executive committee, which does not fit into the new one shown in photo 1. On the right you can see the yellow transition between them, i.e. in fact they have grown together: 
10. By the end of the 19th century, Lepel had grown to 6 thousand people. There are 3 Orthodox churches and 4 synagogues in the city. There are 4 factories. The large Transfiguration Cathedral was built in 1844 and dismantled after the war. 
11. At the beginning of the 20th century, Lepel, like the whole of Belarus as a whole, found itself under the rink of a continuous series of wars, occupations and conquests, including the German occupation during the First World War, the Polish one in 1919-1920.
Former shopping arcades, which are now occupied by local union printing and insurance: 
12. But the worst thing, of course, was the Great Patriotic War. The Nazis occupied the city on July 3, 1941, bombing it. He was released only in June 1944.
In 1941, a ghetto was organized in Lepel, where Jews from all over the city and its environs were resettled. In the ghetto, Jews were subjected to inhumane conditions, many died. Already at the beginning of 1942, they were all killed. In total, the Germans killed more than 5,000 people in Lepel.
In the photo - the building of the editorial office of the newspaper "Lepelsky Krai": 
13. At the end of Leninskaya Street, almost on the shore of the lake, stands the Church of St. Casimir - a characteristic Catholic cathedral. Built in 1857-1876 at the expense of a local citizen. In 1935, the church was closed and the priest was arrested. At first the building was abandoned, and in the 70-80s it housed a garage and a transformer substation. Worship services resumed in 1993. 
14. Catholicism was developed in Lepel long before the construction of the Church of St. Casimir. The parish was founded in 1602, when Lev Sapieha ordered the construction of a Catholic church here. 
15. In 2010, a predictable monument to Lev Sapieha was erected near the walls of the church. This is exactly one of those monuments that laid the foundation for the above-described Lepel tradition of annually installing new sculptures. During the Time of Troubles, Lev Sapega participated in the preparation of the intervention of Polish troops in Russia and supported both False Dmitrievs.
Already in 2013, after our trip, a monument to Tsmok, a legendary creature living in Belarusian swamps and lakes, in particular in Lepelskoye, was erected in the city.
16.
Belarus, and especially the Vitebsk region, is a land of picturesque lakes. And the image of Lepel as a typical Belarusian city is complemented by Lake Lepel, on the shore of which it is located.Lake Lepelskoye is quite large and ranks third in the country in terms of coastline length.
17. You can get to the picturesque shore of the lake a five-minute walk from the central square - at the local PKiO, filled with nice Soviet artifacts. 
18. Sunday Lepel is relatively crowded in the evening. There are a lot of young people. The guys hang out in groups, talk loudly, and drink. Some dead BMWs with roaring mufflers are rolling along the roads. There is a feeling of slight danger in the air, which is not what you would expect from Belarus, the image of which is filled exclusively with blueberries, storks, sanatoriums and Soviet nostalgia. The atmosphere is more like in Ukrainian towns. The feeling of Ukraine was enhanced by the abundance of dark-haired girls with characteristic facial features. Still, Belarusian women are very recognizable, and they differ greatly from Ukrainian women.
19. Lepel unexpectedly turned out to be related to what we recently visited in the Tver region - in the vicinity of Lepel at the end of the 18th century, the Berezinsky water system of canals, similar to Vyshnevolotsk, was built, connecting the Dnieper (Black Sea basin) and the Western Dvina (Baltic).
Unlike Vyshny Volochok, the canals of the Berezinsky system do not pass directly through the city, and they are much worse preserved than the canals of the Vyshny Volochyok system, so this is not noticeable in the city. However, Lake Lepel is part of this waterway, and outside the city, in the Lepel district, there are still abandoned canals.
The mermaid on the shore of the lake is another “annual” monument. It should refer to the Copenhagen sculpture of a mermaid, but given her build and the stump on which she sits, I rather remember the cartoon “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf”:
20. Also on the Ulla River, flowing from Lake Lepel, not far from the city there is a small hydroelectric power station built in 1958. During the construction of the hydroelectric power station, a small area was dammed, as a result of which the water in the lake rose by 3.5 meters, which is why Lake Lepel is sometimes called a reservoir. In the 70s, the hydroelectric station was abandoned, in 2003 it was reconstructed and restarted, and two turbines from the 50s, which had not lost their serviceability over 30 years of downtime, were put back into operation.
A pleasant fact about the revival of once abandoned objects. Maybe someday the water system will be put in order.
Summer scene in the park: 
21. The Soviet era in the history of Lepel was marked by a large-scale restoration of the war-ravaged city, as well as the emergence of most of the Lepel industry.
Lepelchanki bathe at sunset: 
22. If my memory serves me right, these three houses on the western shore of the lake are located exactly at the historical location of Lepel.
23. In Lepel there are touches, in addition to the goofy youth, that somewhat knock him out of the beautiful image of the blue-eyed one. For example, outright dirt and garbage on a couple of streets, abandoned houses. 
24. And also, forgive me for the details, in Lepel there is the worst station toilet ever seen, which by chance I had to use. It didn’t occur to me to take a photo of him. In the photo - a toilet in the park: 
25. However, back to the good stuff. On Leninskaya Street there are bathhouses of a standard Soviet design. The project, however, was quite successful. In other industrial towns, this building may well be the most beautiful in the city.
Twins of these baths have been seen in many places, for example in Novoulyanovsk. 
26. We entered this establishment with the intention of drinking a cup of coffee and the timid hope of some pastries. There is a cafe on the ground floor. It seemed open, but the girls said they were no longer working and sent us to the second floor, to a restaurant.
In the restaurant, three Belarusian beauties gathered in a group and indulged in communication. Having with difficulty taken away their simple menu, we found the coveted coffee in it, but never got the opportunity to order. The girls did not look in our direction at all; they responded to our requests with indifference. As a result, we managed to get into a catering company in the Russian Federation, in the Smolensk region. 
27. In my opinion, the longest and most mind-blowing acronym I have ever seen is:
28. From the center we slowly move away to the outskirts.
Church of the Nativity 2000s: 
29. Near the station square is the Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior, built in 2004. Too lazy to come closer:
30. Next door is the Seventh Day Adventist Church:
31. An infantry fighting vehicle (?) was installed on the station square “in memory of the soldiers who honorably fulfilled the sacred duty of defender of the homeland”:
32. Station of the dead-end railway line "Orsha - Lepel", built in 1925. Suburban communication with Orsha is represented by two and a half pairs of trains: 
33. Beautiful building on the street. Soviet - like a school: 
34. One of the most interesting buildings in the city is a pre-revolutionary distillery, also called the “wine purification warehouse” (1897):
35. Opposite the market square is a department store, respectable for Lepel, with a rare Soviet sign. By the way, this is the middle of a weekday - not a soul on the street: 
36. As in, a significant part of the city is the private sector. As in Dokshytsy, water is extracted from pumps in buckets: 
37. Unlike Dokshitsy, Lepel has at least some kind of industry that creates jobs in the city. This, in addition to the railway and the restored hydroelectric power station, is a dairy plant, the products of which I even had a chance to try, a bakery, an electromechanical plant that produces gear wheels and for some reason furniture, a forestry enterprise and some other small things. 
38. The private sector in Lepel is also very picturesque - nice bright houses, well-groomed front gardens, neat fences: 
39. I heard somewhere that the wheel covers above the entrance are not just decoration, but a tribute to the ancient religious tradition of these places - the circle should symbolize the sun: 
40. New high-rise buildings in Lepel are not architectural masterpieces, but they have a right to life. They resemble those in other regions of Russia - for example, in Mordovia. 
Lepel is a nice, neat town, not devoid of attractions. It’s quite possible to come here to get a general impression of the provincial towns of the center and north of Belarus. The main thing is to take food and a thermos with coffee or tea...