Tag #146916 - Interview #92478 (Rebecca Levina)

There were five or ten Jewish families among our pals and neighbors. Maybe, there were about 100 Jews in Bologoye, however I can’t even guess what the population of the town was. There were no synagogues or prayer houses. Men gathered to pray together. I don’t think they met very often, perhaps once a week, perhaps only on holidays. They never gathered in our house, Father had to go to some other Jews. But they certainly didn’t rent any special place for those meetings; they just went to someone’s house. I remember the Alperovich family, the family of Bertha Finkelshtein – they came from Ukraine, and Bertha studied in our class – but those families didn’t visit the praying ceremonies. There was no mikveh in town, and there were no Jewish schools either. There was no ghetto; Jews lived everywhere, but mainly in the center, near the station.

Before the Revolution, Jews in Bologoye had to be craftsmen or merchants. And only afterwards all other professions appeared. Mark Evseich Alpert was a schoolteacher. Alpert, after all, is a rare family name. And in Bologoye somehow there happened to be two Alperts, and they weren’t relatives, or from the same settlement.