Tag #142199 - Interview #95769 (Kofman Raikhchin)

In 1937 when I finished the 7th class, our school became extinct as a Jewish one. [In 1918 Soviet authorities permitted national minorities to teach their children at schools in their mother tongue. But in 1938 they issued an edict ordering to teach all schoolchildren in Russian.] It became Belarussian. There came a lot of children who finished rural seven-year schools. Teachers started teaching in Belarus language, and Russian was still taught as a foreign language. Here I’d like to tell you that my sister studied at our Jewish school her first three years, and then parents sent her to a Russian school, though by that time our Jewish school still functioned. You see, parents understood that studies at a Jewish school give no good outlook for a child. Other parents understood it too and stopped sending their children to the Jewish school.