Tag #116694 - Interview #99625 (Dora Feiman)

At first my parents rented a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the town. When I was born, this lodging became too small for the family, and we moved to a three-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood. We lived there until the evacuation in 1941. Our family wasn’t very wealthy. We had no property and my father worked for a living. However, my father provided well for the family. My mother could afford to have a housemaid to help her. Also, when the children were small, we had a nanny. I remember my nanny, an old German lady who had a small dog. I remember her taking my older brothers and me for a walk in the suburbs where there were no houses, but fields. Those were memorable adventures for us. After we started going to school, our nanny went to work for another family. The housemaid helped my mother with cleaning the house and washing dishes, while my mother did the cooking. There were no fridges and my mother bought food products at the market and cooked fresh meals every day. She observed the Jewish traditions. She followed the kashrut and cooked traditional Jewish food. 

 

Tartu is the second biggest town in Estonia. It was famous for its university both during the tsarist and Soviet regimes. Young people came from all over Estonia and other countries to study there. There was no Jewish quota in Tartu University. Therefore, during the tsarist regime many Jewish folks from tsarist Russia went to study there due to the existing Jewish quota in the higher educational institutions in their country [see Five percent quota] [3]. In 1875 the Jewish Students’ Fund, the first Jewish organization in Estonia, was established. Wealthy Jews could afford to pay for their children’s studies, while the fund supported poor students. That same year the first Jewish elementary school was opened in Estonia. Before 1907, Jewish students worked as volunteer teachers in this school. During the First Estonian Republic [4] the Jewish Cultural Autonomy [5], which granted Jews more rights, was established. There was no anti-Semitism in Estonia. Jews were treated as equal residents.