This picture was taken in the photo salon Levinas in Jurbarkas at the beginning of the 1920s. These are my maternal relatives, whom I don’t know. My mother's sister Dina Shabashevich, dressed in white, is sitting in the center. Zhenya Grinberg, Uncle Joseph's wife, in a dark dress is behind her.
My family comes from the small town of Jurbarkas 200 kilometers away from Vilnius. My mother’s middle brother Joseph, born in 1890, worked in the store with Grandpa Morduchai. He had an accident and became disabled: one of Joseph’s legs was shorter than the other. In 1920 Joseph got married. His wife, Zhenya, was from Riga. In the 1930s Granddad was ill, and Joseph managed the business. He ran the store. Joseph, his wife and their small child were exiled with Grandpa Morduchai on 14th June 1941. Joseph was the only one of the family who survived. Zhenya and Robert died on their way to exile. Joseph was sentenced to eight years in camps for having been a member of the Shaulist Council. It was a kind of a military and sports organization. Joseph was charged with counterrevolutionary Fascist activity because he regularly paid a membership fee to the organization. Having gone through this ordeal Joseph came back to Lithuania in the post-war period, then he immigrated to Israel, where he died in the 1970s.
My mother’s sisters were married to well-off people and had a comfortable living. The eldest, Polina, born in 1893, was married to the venereal disease doctor Volgart. They lived in Riga. They had two children. Polina, her husband, and their two children perished in 1941 during Fascist actions in Riga. The family of my mother’s sister Dina, born in 1895, was also doomed. She was married to a pharmacist, Shabashevich, who owned a large apothecary in Kaunas. Dina had a small daughter. In 1941 they were put in Kaunas ghetto and shot on 28th October during one of the Fascist actions.
