The children got Jewish education: the boys finished cheder, and the girls studied with a melamed at home. Grandfather Iona knew the torah and Talmud and taught his children Hebrew, Jewish prayers, history and traditions. They followed kashrut and celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays in the family. My grandfather usually wore a long jacket and a kippah, and my grandmother also wore traditional Jewish clothes and a wig. Grandfather Iona was a contractor in the Russian troops in Poland.
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Holocaust
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Displaying 49561 - 49590 of 50504 results
Ilia Rozenfeld Biography
It’s hard to explain grandfather Iona’s intentions: whether he wanted my mother, the youngest in the family, to be able to support herself, or he wanted her to know about the true life, but when she was about 9 years old, he sent her to a shoemaker to learn his trade. He trained my mother for about a year. I don’t know whether it helped my mother in her future life, but at least my mother could do everything with her hands. Then my mother finished a grammar school for girls in Zamost’ye.
I know very little about the life of my parents’ families during this uneasy period of the revolution 3, Civil War 4, gangs 5 and famine. I know that during pogroms the Anikeev family gave shelter to my mother’s family. My mother’s cousin brother, whose name I don’t know, who served in the czarist army during WWI, stayed in Poltava and the Bolsheviks who came into town shot him, when he was walking in the town wearing his military uniform.
My parents met during the Civil War. In 1919 they got married. They didn’t have a traditional wedding. They registered their marriage in a registry office and in the evening they had a dinner party with their relatives at my mother’s home.
The fate of my mother’s family was tragic. According to the archives grandfather Iona and grandmother were kept in the Warsaw ghetto where they perished. Her older brother Yakov also perished there. He was single and had no children. Gintsia Bialskaya, which was her family name, had three children. Her older son Elek Bialskiy, born in 1900, big, fair-haired, with nicely-groomed moustache, finished an Agricultural College in Poland before the occupation, defended his candidate’s dissertation and was a teacher. During the occupation he went to work for a landlord. Elek did not look like a Jew and besides, his landlord gave shelter to him rescuing him from deportation to the ghetto. He survived and lived and worked in Poland for many years. Another son Avraam Bialskiy perished in 1939, when Hitler troops invaded Poland. Gintsia’s daughter Tsyrtse was married. She gave birth to a girl few days before Poland was invaded in 1939.
Elek took this girl to a Catholic nunnery where he said that she was Polish and the nuns raised the girl calling her Carina. Tsyrtse and her husband and Gintsia perished in the ghetto. After the Great Patriotic War Elek began his search for this girl. He addressed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 8, Chairman of the Soviet Informbureau Lozovskiy, and either Lozovskiy or his associate Yuzefovich went to Poland, found Carina and brought her to Moscow. Yuzefovich or one of his assistants adopted Carina. What happened was that after the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was defeated Lozovskiy and Yuzefovich were executed, and some distant relatives gave shelter to the girl and raised her.
Elek took this girl to a Catholic nunnery where he said that she was Polish and the nuns raised the girl calling her Carina. Tsyrtse and her husband and Gintsia perished in the ghetto. After the Great Patriotic War Elek began his search for this girl. He addressed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 8, Chairman of the Soviet Informbureau Lozovskiy, and either Lozovskiy or his associate Yuzefovich went to Poland, found Carina and brought her to Moscow. Yuzefovich or one of his assistants adopted Carina. What happened was that after the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was defeated Lozovskiy and Yuzefovich were executed, and some distant relatives gave shelter to the girl and raised her.
My father worked in the pharmacy and later he became director of a pharmaceutical school in Poltava. My mother worked and studied in college. The family lived in the same house where their parents had lived. The new regime renamed the street to Komsomolskaya. My parents were allowed to keep two rooms, though they were really big, about 30 square meters each. My mother went to work as an accountant in prison. She had a kind heart and began to take messages and parcels to prisoners and my father insisted that she quit her job, or she would have been arrested. My mother went to work as a German lecturer in Poltava Construction College where she later became chief of department.
Our apartment became a communal apartment 11. My father’s sisters, their husbands and children often got together in our apartment to celebrate birthdays and Soviet holidays. We didn’t observe any Jewish traditions or celebrate holidays. I don’t remember any Jewish celebrations in my childhood.
Lubov Rozenfeld Biography
My great grandfather on my father’s side Mordko Bulkin was born in Zvenigorodka village of Byshev district Kiev province in the 1850s. This was a small village of about 100 houses. Jews constituted about one third of the total population. There was a synagogue and cheder and a shochet in the village. According to the family history he owned a mill and that was how his surname derived from the Russian word ‘bulka’ – ‘a bun’. The village lay in a picturesque area near the wood and Chasov Yar. Mordko built a saw mill near the forest and became a timber manufacturer. His wife Hanna was a housewife.
The family was religious. They celebrated all Jewish holidays and Sabbath, followed kashrut, observed Jewish traditions and went to the synagogue. The local farmers had a very good attitude to Mordko and Hanna. Their neighbors knew that on Saturday and Jewish holidays the Bulkin family were not supposed to do any work according to their faith and brought them milk in pots, sour cream, honey and berries.
Shortly after the revolution of 1917 [1] there were many gangs [2] in the area of Zvenigorodka, and a tide of pogroms [3] swept over the area. The Bulkin family were caught in the disaster: my great grandfather Mordko and his son Gershl were killed in the wood by a gang of Ataman Zelyoniy [4]. My great grandfather, Gershl’s wife Ginda and their three children Aron, Raya and Mikhail survived.
Raya Radutskaya and her husband lived in Kharkov before the war. (My father corresponded with her. All I know about her is that she had two children. After the war none of my father’s letters was answered. She must have perished during the holocaust with her children.
My father’s aunt Sosl and her husband Yankel Fastovskiy lived in Yekaterinoslav (present Dnepropetrovsk). They had six children: David, Semyon, Grigoriy, Yelena, Nina and Mania. Sosl failed to evacuate during the great Patriotic War. Germans killed her, her daughter Mania and Mania’s two children (a boy and a girl) and other Jews in Zvenigorodka in 1941.
The Rozenfeld family observed Jewish traditions, went to the synagogue on holidays, celebrated Jewish holidays, and on Friday evenings my grandmother lit candles. They spoke Yiddish at home.
Shortly after Ruvim’s birth my grandfather Peisia died from typhoid, when he was quite young. Grandmother Gitia was to raise seven children alone. She had to send my father to a children’s home to save her other children and his life, at least, he was given food there. In the children’s home my father learned the profession of a mechanic and supported the family working. He was very talented: besides working as a mechanic he wrote for a radio agency and later worked for the RATAU [Radiotelegraph agency of Ukraine], as a censor in the Department for Literature.
My grandmother Bela Belova married Zus Rozenstein, born in the 1870s. According to Buzia, he was ‘extremely handsome and came from Berdichev’. They lived in Skvira. My grandfather was a sales agent for Zinger sewing machines.
My mother told me they followed the kashrut strictly, didn’t work on Saturday and Meishe, grandmother Bela and even the children fasted on Yom Kippur. However greedy Meishe was, the family still celebrated holidays.
My mother Sophia Rozenstein lost her father at the age of four and began to work at an early age selling oil and sunflower seeds in Kiev. During the Civil war my mother lived through several pogroms in Skvira. During pogroms Jewish families found shelter in the judge’s home whose name I don’t remember, regretfully. During one pogrom my mother didn’t want to go to the judge’s home and dragged Yuliy to a frozen swamp where they lay on the ice all night through. The pogrom makers didn’t come to the swamp. Bela and Dosia hid in their neighbor’s home. After the pogrom the family returned to their plundered home, but they all survived. My mother told me that armed villagers were opposing to pogrom makers.
At 14 my mother went to work as a courier at the sugar supply office in Kiev. She attended an amateur performers’ club. She told me they studied singing, dancing, dressing and washing there. They staged play and had lots of fun. My mother used to say: ‘Who would have I become if it hadn’t been for the revolution? would have sold things at the market in the sticks’. My mother had a strong voice. She went to study singing at a music school and later – at the College of music and Drama. After finishing this college my mother went to work as chief editor of music radio programs at the radio committee where she met my future father Mikhail Rozenfeld. They registered their marriage at a registry office in 1935. They were atheists and didn’t have a Jewish wedding. My mother didn’t want to change her surname from Rozenstein to Rozenfeld: ‘Why trade bad for worse?’ My father felt hurt…
In 1936, when my brother was just a baby, my mother fell victim to repression and didn’t work for a year. Before my mother went on vacation she made a music program. When she was on vacation, Kamenev and Zinoviev [17] were sentenced. In the program in Kiev their names were mentioned. Many editors from various sectors of the issue of this program were exiled to Kolyma and Magadan. My father also lost his job, but to not disturb my mother, he kept pretending to go to work to the RATAU every day, while he actually wandered in the city during a day. Two weeks later my father was restored at work. My mother went to Kiev and managed to have an appointment with Zemliachka, a comrade of Lenin [18]. When she heard that my mother was on vacation and the program had been prepared one month before it was put on the air, she said: ‘Go home, it will be all right’. And this was true: my mother was restored at work and was even paid for the time when she was not at work due to the circumstances.
Anna, Petia and grandmother Gitia were planning to evacuate, but they failed to do it. On 29 September 1941 Anna, 9-year-old Petia, grandmother Gitia, grandfather Peisia’s sisters Sonia and Pyria Rozenfeld, Ruvim’s wife Fira holding her 8-month-old baby daughter and Semyon’s pregnant daughter-in-law – all of them went to Babi Yar where they were killed along with thousands Jews. Solomon was a professional military and was sent to the front.
I have dim memories about our trip across the Ural in a freight train for coal transportation. Frosia told me that I was black with coal and when the train stopped she took me off the train to wash me. The train moved on all of a sudden, and Frosia managed to jump on the footboard of the last railcar with me. The footboard broke all of a sudden, and fortunately, a soldier managed to grab Frosia. During air raids my brother screamed: ‘I don’t want to be killed by a bomb!’ When the train stopped during air raids, we jumped off to hide in the fields. We arrived at Vereschagino (about 2 thsd. km from Kiev) Molotov region. I remember that we lived in a wooden house on the 2nd floor. There was a green meadow near the house. My mother told me that my father worked in a railcar depot for a short time and then he volunteered to the front. My mother was chairman of a kolkhoz. They manufactured clay pots and she brought some home to cook in them. Somebody made us a steel stove with exhaust holes at the bottom. I put sticks in the stove and lit them and could see flames through the holes. My mother’s sister Dosia, May and grandmother Bela lived with us. I remember how May bought wild strawberries from local boys and dropped them incidentally. My brother and I burst into tears. Later Dosia and May moved out and grandmother Bela stayed with us.
My father often wrote mother from the front. He became an intelligence officer. My mother kept his letters through her life. He was looking for his brothers Solomon, Ruvim and Semyon. There was a message that Solomon, an artillery lieutenant colonel, disappeared during the liberation of Kharkov in 1943. Shortly before this happened he wrote: ‘I’ve been offered a job. I see to be the first to come to Kiev’. I guess he went to serve in KGB [20].
Near Stalingrad my father was shell-shocked and awarded a medal ‘For the seizure of Stalingrad’. In winter 1944 my mother received a death notification. My father perished near Velikiye Luki in January 1944.
In early 1944 the radio committee called for my mother from the evacuation. We went back in a freight train. It was cold and we had to burn my brother’s skis. He cried a lot after them. We also sailed a boat along the Volga and I remember my mother trading clothes for food products. She gave me a piece of white brick-shaped bread with a lump of sugar: this was an incredible luxury. Then we took a train again. When we returned to Kiev, it was ruined. Our house in Podol was there, but our neighbor Fania moved in our room. She even didn’t want to return our furniture. My mother received a dwelling from the radio committee in the very center of Kiev in Kreschatitskiy Lane. In the past it housed a brothel: on the 4th floor on both sides of a long dark curved corridor there were 11 square meter rooms. We received two rooms. This was a pre-revolutionary building with high ceilings, but there was no elevator. There was a stove in the room and we carried wood from the basement to the 4th floor. My brother had hernia afterward. Our neighbor Fania finally gave us back 4 cabinets, but she didn’t return our bed and we slept on the floor at the beginning. There were other employees of the radio committee living on our floor: singers, pianists and conductors. There were many tables and a sink in the common kitchen. When in the evening we turned on the light in the kitchen, the cockroaches scattered around in all directions. We cooked on primus stoves [editor’s note: Primus stove -a small portable stove with a container for about 1 liter of kerosene that was pumped into burners], before gas stoves were installed. There were two toilets and one bathroom where there were lines to get in. Life was funny in our communal apartment [21]: at night our neighbor Kolia often chased after his mother-in-law threatening to beat her and she used to run away from him in the corridor screaming. My mother was the only one, who opened the door and pronounced with a well-set voice: ‘Stop this scandal! The children are sleeping!’ Kolia replied in a drunken voice: ‘I am not doing anything to her. She screams on purpose’. Our neighbor Vova usually made a lot of noise in the afternoon teaching his ever changing wives. Singer Galina Sholina living in the room across the door to our room gave me a little doll. This was the first doll in my life.
I remember well Victory Day of 9 May 1945. My brother and I, my mother and grandmother were very happy. I ran into the yard: our neighbors hugged and danced and there were fireworks across the skies in the evening. My mother was happy and she cried. She said: ‘I lost this war. I lost my beloved one to it’.
In autumn 1946 I went to the first form of Russian school for girls # 67. It was located on a hill and there were steep stairs leading to it. I was little and thin and our teacher Ksenia Mikhailovna made me sit at the first desk. I didn’t have all excellent marks, and Ksenia Mikhailovna only liked those who had excellent marks.
In the late 1940s struggle against cosmopolitism [23] began. My mother was incriminated liaison with her relatives abroad [24]. The thing was that my mother’s stepsister Fania, whose mother had lived in the USA since the beginning of the century, returned to Kiev from evacuation and had no place to live. Before she and Buzia bought their house, Lisa sent her letters to us. In 1952 my mother was fired and expelled from the party, though her husband had perished at the front and she had two dependent children and an old mother to support. My mother couldn’t find a job till her friends helped her to get a job of a typist in a shop of invalids.
On 5 March 1953 Stalin died and some time later my mother restored her membership in the party and was restored at work. She became a sound producer, though. When I heard on the radio that Stalin died, I ran outside and along the street. I was very glad that I didn’t have to go to school. I tried to make myself cry, but it didn’t work. My mother believed Stalin sincerely, I think. It never occurred to her that Stalin had anything to do with repression and that he presented terrible threat. There were my father’s letters from the front, from which I understood that he and mama believed in the revolution and communism sincerely, believed in some truth, but lived in fear in those years.
At home my mother and grandmother spoke Russian to my brother and me, but grandmother and mother spoke Yiddish to one another. I understood Yiddish a little, but I knew curse words particularly well. We didn’t observe Jewish traditions, celebrate Jewish holidays or follow kashrut in our family. My mother was an atheist and had a responsible job, and religion was persecuted [25]. My grandmother remembered the dates of all Jewish holidays. She baked triangle pies with poppy seeds till she managed. She tried to tell my brother and me about Jewish holidays, but we were pioneers and Komsomol members [26] and took little notice of her. On Chanukkah my grandmother gave us some small change saying: ‘Chanukkah gelt’. She didn’t eat pork, but we could fry something on pork fat lying to her that it was not pork. My mother’s relatives didn’t observe Jewish traditions, though they didn’t quite eat pork.
There were many Jewish children in my class, but I didn’t face any anti-Semitism. I faced it in the 10th form, when they refused to admit me to preparatory course in the Pedagogical College. At school Man’ka and I got the profession of copy makers, but I couldn’t find work after finishing school. My mother’s acquaintance composer Zherbin, who was also a construction engineer, helped me to get a job in design institute ‘Ukrgiproshakht’ making designs of mines. I worked as a copy maker and then was employed by a correction department where we proofread documents and numbered pages. My colleagues treated me well. I went to a parachute club and jumped with a parachute twice, though doctors didn’t allow it. When working as a corrector I went to the preparatory course to talk about admission, but they replied: ‘Well, if you were a mechanic’. I said: ‘Is a mechanic closer to the profession of pedagog than a corrector?’ I turned away and left.