Ilya Halperin with friends

This is a photo of my father Ilya Halperin (second from right, standing) with two friends. I don?t know who they are. The picture was taken in Dvinsk in 1906. My father Ilya was born in 1891. He was a very educated man, he graduated from the Saint-Petersburg Institute of Psycho-Neurology, the faculty of law, along with the famous actor Solomon Mikhoels from the Moscow Jewish Theater . But then the revolution [Russian Revolution of 1917] started and he didn't have time to defend his diploma. Papa went to the synagogue twice a year - on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur. In the 1930s, in Dvinsk, he didn't go to the regular synagogue, but to his friends' home, who had a prayer-room in the house left to them by their parents. Ten people were to attend. Once he took me with him, that's why I remember. But in Riga, after the war, when he was very old and didn't work, he didn't go to the synagogue on Saturdays, only on high holidays, when he kept the fast.