In the summer, while in Buteni, I would play tennis and go bathing with my friends. I can’t think of any other sport that I may have practiced.
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Major events (political and historical)
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Displaying 48151 - 48180 of 50826 results
Andrei Popper
While in high school, I lived as a tenant with some strangers, non-Jews, although my grandparents lived in Arad. My parents thought my grandparents spoiled me, so it was only during my last year of high school that I lived with them. I always went home, to Buteni, on vacations: for Christmas and Easter.
I also took private lessons in subjects taught at school, especially the foreign languages. In high school, French was taught from the first to the last year; in the second year, we began the study of German, and Latin was introduced in the third year. I think that Ancient Greek was also taught in the sixth year. But I was more interested in Math. My Math teacher was named Stan Crisan. I had friends at school. I also had some Jewish classmates. If I remember correctly, it was the hakham who taught the religion class. I studied the first and second year in Arad, then the third and fourth in Buteni, and then I moved back to Arad. We had classes on Saturdays too. The only day off was Sunday.
While in Buteni, I took music lessons for a few years, piano and violin, but I didn’t really like it.
The house in Buteni was rented. We had two to three rooms and running water; the heating was based on firewood.
My mother always had an aid around the house. All the families used to have an aid back then; moreover, when there was a great clean up or laundry had to be done, more than one aid would be employed.
But we didn’t eat kosher food, nor did we use separate vessels for Pesach.
My family wasn’t very religious. My mother lit the candles on Friday evenings and ate matzah for Pesach. My parents celebrated the New Year, the Day of Atonement and Pesach.
After World War I ended, a very powerful Orthodox community was founded in Gurahont; it was larger than the one in Buteni.
We didn’t have a rabbi in Buteni, we only had a hakham. The nearest was Rabbi Sonnenschein in Pancota, in Arad and in Gurahont there was Rabbi Schwartz.
We didn’t have Talmud-Torah classes; there weren’t too many children. We didn’t learn Ivrit, but we did celebrate our bar mitzvah when we turned 13; the hakham prepared us for the event.
My father was the president of the community.
Buteni had a pretty large Jewish community; there were 15 to 20 families. Jews didn’t live separately from the other inhabitants of the town. There used to be a beautiful Neolog synagogue, until 1924/25. It was about that time that many Jews came from Maramures and the Orthodox became the majority group.
The Arad County was divided into several electoral districts that counted for the Great National Assembly [the supreme body of the State power], and one of them was Iosasel, which was located between Buteni and Gurahont. [Editor’s note: The traveling distance between Buteni and Gurahont is about 18 kilometers.] Back in those days, Gurahont was nothing compared to Iosasel [Iosas]. The landowner there was a Jew named Polacek. His castle is still there today. Polacek had acquired the estate during the war. He had bought it from the Purglis, an Iosasel-based family who belonged to the nobility, whose daughter became the wife of Horthy [7]. I knew the Polaceks: they owned a spirits factory which is still there today. And since we’re talking about the Jewish landowners, I remember that the entire Moneasa and the Dezna Valley belonged to the Wengheims at the time of World War I.
As far as the Jews in Buteni were concerned, I remember one of them was a tradesman, another one was a clock smith; the town’s physician was a Jew, and so was the chief judge, Dr. Erger, accidentally. I remember that during my childhood, there were many peasants who had beautiful handwriting and worked for the courthouse.
Ignatie Pollak bought a house in the center of Arad in 1870.
His tombstone reads ‘Pollak Ignatie’ and ‘Sebis’ between brackets – the place he came from. I found out from some documents in Sebis that he was one of the leaders of the community there; he had an honorary chair.
My mother’s maternal grandfather, Ignatie Pollak, lived in Sebis, where he was in the trade business.
It was in Buteni that Karoly Csemegi ran a lawyer’s practice in the 19th century. He was a Jewish major in the Austro-Hungarian army. After the defeat of the 1848 revolution, he was forced to reside in Arad, where he opened a practice. Because the Austrians persecuted him, he sought refuge in the Romanian commune of Buteni, where he worked as a lawyer for eight or nine years. Csemegi was a very good jurist; he had studied Law in Budapest. After peace was declared between Hungary and Austria in 1870 [Editor’s note: There was no peace treaty in 1870; the interviewee refers to the Great Compromise of 1867.], he was hired by the Ministry of Justice and he ended up as a royal councilor. His greatest achievement was the completion of the Hungarian Penal Code, which is still used today. Until 1946, it was also used in Transylvania [6], up to Gurahont, Zam on the River Mures and to the border of the Bihor County on the River Cris. [Karoly Csemegi (Csongrad, 1826 – Budapest, 1899): criminal lawyer. He was a major in the 1848 war of independence, and because of that he was imprisoned after the war of independence was suppressed. He later worked in Arad as a lawyer, then, from 1867 – the year of the Great Compromise – he entered the Ministry of Justice and later became a secretary of state there.] The Hungarians didn’t have a written civil code, this was only written after World War II, so the Austrian civil code was used in Transylvania. The Romanian one was just a translation: Napoleon’s code was translated into Italian, with mistakes, and from Italian, it was translated into Romanian.
One night, the county’s prime secretary of the Communist Party had the courthouse moved to Sebis, without notifying the Ministry of Justice. The decision wasn’t altered. But in 1952, when the courts of justice were distributed according to districts [5], the district court house was established in Buteni.
Although the county capital was in Sebis, the courthouse was in Buteni; it was the largest building in the entire county. Back in the old days, long before World War I, the Buteni notary persuaded the peasants to send a delegation to Budapest in order to request the opening of a courthouse in Buteni, so that they wouldn’t be forced to go to Sebis anymore. This is how the courthouse was built, some time between 1901 and 1903. The building is still there, but it’s no longer in use, although it’s a wonderful edifice.
Before World War I, my father had a practice in Arad. In 1923, a lawyer passed his Buteni office to an uncle, who in turn gave it to my father. The Buteni courthouse spread its jurisdiction over more than 50 communes [administrative division smaller than a town and comprised of several villages], and the town only had three lawyers; one of them was my father.
At the time of my birth, my father was already a prisoner. They would take a photo of me every month and send it to him in Siberia. In the evenings, my mother would pray with me so that God could bring my father home. I first saw him when I was five. He came back from the war in 1921.
Solomon Manevich
My father Henry Manevich (his Jewish name was Evzer-Genekh) was born in 1888. I have no information about his childhood or young years, except that my father finished cheder and a 7-year Jewish school.
My mother worked at a military hospital and my father followed her when the hospital relocated with the frontline during the Civil War 2. My father grew up in a poor family and like many other children from poor families got very enthusiastic about new ideas brought by the revolution and Bolsheviks. He joined the Bolshevik party. When he served during WWI, in the tsarist army he carried on propaganda against the tsar and the imperialist war. After the October revolution of 1917 3 he finished School of Red Directors and became an officer at the revolutionary committee of Ekaterinoslav [Dnepropetrovsk at present]. My parents got married there. It took him a while to convince my mother to marry him.
My grandfather’s name was Yankel-Leizer-Evzer Katz and my grandmother’s name was Sarra. They were born in a small town of Chahussy in Belarus in the 1850s. They lived in this town all their life. My mother told me that Chaussy where she was born and Mstislavl where my father was born were small towns with numerous Jewish population. Jews lived in small houses in central parts of the town. There was a synagogue and market square in the center: farmers came to sell their products at weekend. Jews were mainly handicraftsmen.
My grandfather belonged to the middle class. He had Jewish education. I don’t know whether he finished cheder or studied at yeshivah or was self-educated, but he had deep knowledge of the Jewish religion, traditions and history. Leizer read Torah and Talmud and had reputation of a wise man in the town. He held an official position at the synagogue – I know no details about this – and many Jews came to ask his advice on everyday matters: how to teach their children, or what to buy and how to deal with family budget. The family lived in strict accordance with halakhah, followed the kashrut and celebrated Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. My mother didn’t tell me any details since she and her sisters and brothers found their father’s requirement to strictly observe Jewish religious traditions a burden. It wasn’t a burden only for Nohim, one of my mother’s brothers. Grandmother Sarra was a housewife like all Jewish women. The family was very poor since grandfather didn’t know any craft to enable him to provide for the family and reading religious books did not bring any earnings.
My mother Rachil Katz was born in Chaussy in 1886. At birth she was given the Jewish name of Rokhlia-Genia. My mother didn’t like talking about her childhood and so I know only fragments of her life. After finishing the Jewish school she spent few years at home helping her mother around the house. My mother read a lot. She was fond of Russian classics and liked Pushkin, Tolstoy and Turgenev 5. She was bored with living in a small town with its old traditions and customs, she was attracted by new progressive ideas. Besides, my mother was eager to get a good education and become a teacher or a doctor. She left home at the age of 16. Looking for a job she visited few towns in Belarus. Somehow she happened to come to Tomsk, a big town in Siberia, in 1907. She found a job and was an attendant at the pharmacy in the town hospital, then assistant pharmacist and later she became a pharmacist. She didn’t attend any school, but she was smart and the doctor she worked for sympathized with her and trained her after work. Her brother Nohim came to visit her there. My mother lived in Tomsk until 1910 and then she began to travel in Russia. She worked in Syzran, a town near the Volga River, Troitsk and few other Russian towns. I don’t know where or how she lived at that time. I think she probably rented rooms from various people. At that time she became fond of Bolshevik ideas and attended clubs: there were communist units in every town, but I don’t know how she got there. They studied Marx and Engels. My mother didn’t become a Bolshevik, but in one of Bolshevik groups she met my father Henry Manevich. They went to the front together in 1914 when WWI began. My mother was the director of pharmacy in the hospital in the Southern front. She worked in Tiflis (the capital of Georgia, Tbilissi at present) and Sverdlovsk. In 1918 she and my father settled down in Ekaterinoslav [Dnepropetrovsk at present, a big industrial town in central part of Ukraine]. My parents were married by that time, but I have no idea when or where they got married or whether they had a wedding of any kind.
From Ekaterinoslav the family moved to Rostov-on-the-Don and then in Kharkov. All I know is that it had something to do with my father’s job. He was a logistics supervisor an official in public economy. My mother’s dream of getting education came true in Kharkov. She studied and graduated from the Kharkov University and became a pharmacist.
I know that my father was a Deputy director of Berdichev leather factory for some time. From there he was transferred to Commercial representation in Berlin. In 1937 6 my father and all other employees of the Commercial representation were called to Moscow where they were arrested. He then disappeared like millions of other communists.