Tag #134673 - Interview #93010 (Riva Belfor)

My parents rented an apartment in Kishinev after their wedding. Grandfather helped them out for a while until Father had acquired a profession. Then father learned how to become a shochet. Every week he went to the small town of Khyncheshtch [since 1940 Kotovsk, 30 km from Kishinev], where the butcher who taught him lived. My parents didn’t stay in Kishinev for a long time, and moved to Khyncheshtch, looking for a job. The old butcher, my father’s teacher, sent all his clients to my father. Father became a very skilled butcher. He could cut poultry, and he also knew how to slaughter cattle. In every house we used to live, there was a shed where my father did his job. There were huge hooks where fowl was placed and there were tubs with straw or boxes with sand underneath for the seeping blood. Father was very hard-working. Not every Jew was able to pay my father for his job, but my father couldn’t leave a Jew without a kosher Sabbath chicken. That is why my father worked for free sometimes. Each Friday Father rented a cart to go to the villages, where at least one Jew was residing, to cut chicken for Sabbath. He didn’t want any Jewish family to remain without kosher chicken, but there were families, which couldn’t afford to buy a chicken, and my father came back home empty-handed.