I have bright memories of Victory Day on 9 May 1945. We were at the plant. Employees – men and women – exchanged kisses and hugs. Women whose husbands, sons, and brothers had perished at the front were crying. We marched in the town – all of us were overwhelmed with joy. My mother was crying – we still hadn't heard from Aron and she thought he had perished.
- Tradíciók 11756
- Beszélt nyelv 3019
- Identitás 7808
- A település leírása 2440
- Oktatás, iskola 8506
- Gazdaság 8772
- Munka 11672
- Szerelem & romantika 4929
- Szabadidő/társadalmi élet 4159
- Antiszemitizmus 4822
-
Főbb események (politikai és történelmi)
4256
- örmény népirtás 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Atatürk halála 5
- Balkán háborúk (1912-1913) 35
- Első szovjet-finn háború 37
- Csehszlovákia megszállása 1938 83
- Franciaország lerohanása 9
- Molotov-Ribbentrop paktum 65
- Varlik Vergisi (vagyonadó) 36
- Első világháború (1914-1918) 216
- Spanyolnátha (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- Nagy gazdasági világválság (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler hatalmon (1933) 127
- 151 Kórház 1
- Thesszaloniki tűzvész (1917) 9
- Görög polgárháború (1946-49) 12
- Thesszaloniki Nemzetközi Vásár 5
- Bukovina Romániához csatolása (1918) 7
- Észak-Bukovina csatolása a Szovjetunióhoz (1940) 19
- Lengyelország német megszállása (1939) 94
- Kisinyevi pogrom (1903) 7
- Besszarábia romániai annexiója (1918) 25
- A magyar uralom visszatérése Erdélybe (1940-1944) 43
- Besszarábia szovjet megszállása (1940) 59
- Második bécsi diktátum 27
- Észt függetlenségi háború 3
- Varsói felkelés 2
- A balti államok szovjet megszállása (1940) 147
- Osztrák lovagi háború (1934) 9
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- A Habsburg birodalom összeomlása 3
- Dollfuß-rendszer 3
- Kivándorlás Bécsbe a második világháború előtt 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Bányászjárás 1
- A háború utáni szövetséges megszállás 7
- Waldheim ügy 5
- Trianoni békeszerződés 12
- NEP 56
- Orosz forradalom 351
- Ukrán éhínség (Holodomor) 199
- A Nagy tisztogatás 283
- Peresztrojka 233
- 1941. június 22. 468
- Molotov rádióbeszéde 115
- Győzelem napja 147
- Sztálin halála 365
- Hruscsov beszéde a 20. kongresszuson 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- Magyarország német megszállása (1944. március 18-19.) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (1935-ig) 33
- 1956-os forradalom 84
- Prágai Tavasz (1968) 73
- 1989-es rendszerváltás 174
- Gomulka kampány (1968) 81
-
Holokauszt
9685
- Holokauszt (általánosságban) 2789
- Koncentrációs tábor / munkatábor 1235
- Tömeges lövöldözési műveletek 337
- Gettó 1183
- Halál / megsemmisítő tábor 647
- Deportálás 1063
- Kényszermunka 791
- Repülés 1410
- Rejtőzködés 594
- Ellenállás 121
- 1941-es evakuálások 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristályéjszaka 34
- Eleutherias tér 10
- Kasztner csoport 1
- Jászvásári pogrom és a halálvonat 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann rendszer 11
- Struma hajó 17
- Élet a megszállás alatt 803
- Csillagos ház 72
- Védett ház 15
- Nyilaskeresztesek ("nyilasok") 42
- Dunába lőtt zsidók 6
- Kindertranszport 26
- Schutzpass / hamis papírok 95
- Varsói gettófelkelés (1943) 24
- Varsói felkelés (1944) 23
- Segítők 521
- Igazságos nemzsidók 269
- Hazatérés 1090
- Holokauszt-kárpótlás 112
- Visszatérítés 109
- Vagyon (vagyonvesztés) 595
- Szerettek elvesztése 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Beszélgetés a történtekről 1807
- Felszabadulás 558
- Katonaság 3322
- Politika 2640
-
Kommunizmus
4468
- Élet a Szovjetunióban/kommunizmus alatt (általánosságban) 2592
- Antikommunista ellenállás általában 63
- Államosítás a kommunizmus alatt 221
- Illegális kommunista mozgalmak 98
- Szisztematikus rombolások a kommunizmus alatt 45
- Kommunista ünnepek 311
- A kommunista uralommal kapcsolatos érzések 930
- Kollektivizáció 94
- Az állami rendőrséggel kapcsolatos tapasztalatok 349
- Börtön/kényszermunka a kommunista/szocialista uralom alatt 449
- Az emberi és állampolgári jogok hiánya vagy megsértése 483
- Élet a rendszerváltás után (1989) 493
- Izrael / Palesztina 2190
- Cionizmus 847
- Zsidó szervezetek 1200
Displaying 48001 - 48030 of 50826 results
Leo Lubich
Rosa and I went to start a new life in Lvov. We traveled via Moscow in September 1945 after the victory over Japan 19. We went to the Red Square where we mingled with a crowd of happy Moscovites. We saw fireworks. In Lvov we met the director of the machine unit plant, Litinetskiy. We were to work at this plant. We received a room that formerly belonged to a Polish family that had left Poland after the war. There was a Polish tenant in another room. He was also going to leave. We invited Rosa’s parents from Izhevsk and decided to stay. We lived in one room with my in-laws for many years until we got another room after our neighbor tenant died.
We didn’t have children and that was all right with us. We could enjoy life and went to the theater or restaurant every week. We spent vacations at the seashore in the Crimea or Caucasus. We had enough money. Rosa worked as laboratory supervisor at the machine unit plant. I worked at a shoe shop and then got a job at the Progress Company [one of the best shoe factories in the USSR]. I was Human Resources Manager there. I never faced any anti-Semitism, even during those years when it became state policy – in the early 1950s 20.
I have led an active life since I retired. I play sports and was a member of a jogging club for a number of years. Nowadays I write articles and poems that are published in the Jewish press and in the town newspaper of Lvov Vysokiy Zamok (High Castle).
Of course, perestroika had a disastrous impact on pensioners - we were deprived of our savings. We get miserable pensions. But, on the other hand, the arrival of Ukrainian independence in 1991 provided excellent conditions for the development and revival of Jewish life and culture. We often go to the Lvov Drama theater and get free tickets from the Jewish community. We watch performances of Russian and Ukrainian classics. We are active members of the Sholem Aleichem Association 21 where Rosa and I take part in parties and concerts. Rosa recites poems written by popular Soviet poets: Evgeni Evtushenko and others, and I perform tricks. Rosa also invites popular actors and producers to parties. We observe Jewish traditions: we buy matzah at Pesach and fast on Judgment Day. [Editor’s note: this is the word he uses for Yom Kippur.] We try to lead a traditional Jewish life and follow all the rules – everything that we were not allowed to do during the Soviet regime. We are grateful to Hesed, a Jewish charitable organization that provides food and medication to old people. And they also offer support in the form of kindness. That said, I don’t think of myself as an old man – not yet!
My grandmother Khava had no education. She was a housewife and raised children. The way I remember it, she was very old when I was growing up, or else she probably just seemed old to me. I remember her sitting in the yard playing with the children. My grandmother was deeply religious. She was too old to go to synagogue, but she prayed at home every day. She observed all the Jewish traditions and fasted at Yom Kippur. She died during the Civil War 1 around 1918.
Both my father and mother had brothers and sisters. Of all of them, I only knew my father’s brother Boris. Uncle Boris took part in the revolution of 1917 2, the Civil War, and after the war he became an NKVD official 3. From the middle of the 1930s he was Deputy Minister of the NKVD of Udmurt Republic. He lived in the town of Izhevsk in the Urals. His wife Lena was Russian. Of course, Boris didn’t observe any Jewish traditions. Basically, before the Great Patriotic War 4 he stayed out of touch with his Jewish relatives.
My parents grew up in religious families where all the Jewish traditions were observed. I don’t know how they met. My parents got married in 1908. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah at the synagogue. After the wedding my parents moved to Kiev.
My father was a tailor apprentice in Kiev and in due time started his own business. My father had a traditional Jewish education. He studied in cheder and after finishing it he began to study a tailor’s profession in his hometown. My mother learned to stuff cigarettes and sold them in bulk. But her main occupation was housekeeping and raising children, of course.
After finishing secondary school Maria worked as a cashier at the cinema theater. Her husband Alexandr Rapoport was a shop superintendent at the shoe factory. Alexandr was a member of the Communist Party. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the regional Party committee sent him to the village in the Kiev region where he had grown up. The Party assigned him to become a partisan. His parents and brother Motia stayed in the village during the war. They were shot by fascists and Alexandr perished in his partisan unit.
We lived in a big four-room apartment in the basement. The apartment was nicely furnished and there were beautiful velvet curtains on the windows. We had carpets on the floors and nice china. There was electricity in the house, but no gas. There was a big stove used for cooking and heating the apartment. Later we got a kerosene heater and Primus portable stoves. We were a wealthy family, but there were no maids. There was one dark room without windows where we children slept. There was a big dining room, our parents’ bedroom, and another room with big mirrors and a cutting table where my father worked.
Janos Dorogi
I finished medical school in ’49, and by ‘50 I was working in the hospital in Kutvolgy as an internist. First I worked as an internist, and then as a pediatric surgeon. I met my wife at the university, when I held a contest as a graduate student, and where my wife was the best of course. We got married in December of ‘50. Unfortunately my father didn’t live to see it, but I thank my lucky stars that he at least got to know Agi. My mother and her two sisters lived with us right away, and Agi had to give up a lot for them, but I believe we got along well with my aunts and my mother until they died. It could be that’s why we never had any children, and why we traveled so much, and travel so much now. Even though my wife’s family, who were as Jewish as we were, had Christmas, because one of her aunts married a Swabian, the two of us never celebrated Christmas, but we didn't celebrate Jewish holidays either. (My mother had a little prayer-book, though, and I know she went to the synagogue from time to time.) It’s hard to say, but we only felt comfortable among Jews, even though we were mostly surrounded by non-Jews at work, naturally.
Well, let me tell you about my Bar Mitzvah we had in ’39. It was in the boys’ orphanage in elegant surroundings. It was important for them that I do it there. When there was a Bar Mitzvah then everyone who was to be invited got a very nice, proper invitation. Jews and non-Jews. The circle of friends, the immediate ones, wasn’t all Jews. But they all know that he went to Rosh Hashanah, or temple. He didn’t go regularly, sometimes on Friday, but usually I did instead, because its what you half-way had to do in school. At the end of ’44 I fell out with the non-existing God, I even went so far as to say that man made God in his likeness, and not the other way around.
My father, who really knew how to lead a Seder, never hosted one at our home. My aunts weren’t really interested in religion. My aunt Iren was rather an atheist. Friday they kept, my mother lit candles. But my father bought a gorgeous, leather-bound complete prayer book – unfortunately somehow we managed to spirit it away. There were one or two volumes on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. My father bought them. He took me, when I was still a little kid, to temple, then in school it was sort of required.
We had summer vacation in Nogradveroce every year. My parents went on vacation there for the first time in ’24, and they went there until my father’s death. My parents went on vacation there for 24 summers, and I spent 20 summers there. We always took the whole household with us, because that was the style. With the servants. From the end of May to the first of October. The Hungaria Rubber Factory gave us their car – it was a dark green, closed, large coupe, with big back doors – there were our baskets, our chests, the whole household went. And we always rented there. Those who were a good deal more well-to-do had their own villas. The aunts were always there for the summer at Nogradveroce too. Pretty much the same company had vacation together, it got to be a big circle of friends. Jews. Mostly Jews. My father always went in to work in the morning, and came back at noon.
I started school in Sziv street, because it was the standard then that there should be no private school. My father wanted me to go to the Lutheran high-school in the [Varosliget Avenue], because he had good information, and it came through too. But they told my father that they would put me on the list, and I could only go if they had a place. So my father, the moment that happened, grabbed me and had me entered in the Avenue [i.e. this Lutheran high-school]. I got into high-school, in the year the Numerus Clausus came out, so there could only be 10% Jews in any class. I went to religious school there from first to eighth grade.
The Levente training [a quasi-fascist troop, modeled on the Boy Scouts] started at the end of the ‘30s in that school, just about the same time as the first Jewish law. It was required. I wasn’t really a Boy Scout, just a little bit, in one of those Jewish Boy Scout troops. During Levente class the Leventes would practice in hats and with rifles. The Jews, depending on the school, had to practice with shovels. In the Avenue, when they told us ‘specially to get shovels, I went into the principal and asked why. The principal was very kind to me because he respected my father, who was a decorated officer. He was just a lieutenant. And he said, if I need a shovel the school would buy one for me. What a shame that brings to the spirit of the Avenue school.
The Levente training [a quasi-fascist troop, modeled on the Boy Scouts] started at the end of the ‘30s in that school, just about the same time as the first Jewish law. It was required. I wasn’t really a Boy Scout, just a little bit, in one of those Jewish Boy Scout troops. During Levente class the Leventes would practice in hats and with rifles. The Jews, depending on the school, had to practice with shovels. In the Avenue, when they told us ‘specially to get shovels, I went into the principal and asked why. The principal was very kind to me because he respected my father, who was a decorated officer. He was just a lieutenant. And he said, if I need a shovel the school would buy one for me. What a shame that brings to the spirit of the Avenue school.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
My parents lived in Dohany street, but in ’26 my father was sort of out of a job, and we had to give up the flat. That’s when we moved to where my aunts lived. So, my grandfather Ullmann, my mother’s three siblings, my mother, my father and I lived in that very big apartment [Janos was born in 1924]. I grew up there from ’26 to 1933. Then, in ’33, when my father had become a good, honored colleague, his pay was 1,000 Pengos, and that was quite a good salary then. Summer vacation, and everything else we needed, fit in.
My mother got a prayer-book from my father once, who courted her back in ‘20. In it he wrote, ‘believe and trust in this book, so that every one of your desires may be fulfilled. Laci’. It was the famous, beautiful prayer-book by Arnold Kis. Just in Hungarian. Because my mother was completely amhorets [ignorant] from that point of view. When my parents got married, they were to have the Rabbi, Dr. Simon Hevesi marry them [He was the Chief Rabbi of Budapest from 1905 – one of the leading figures in Jewish social and cultural life at the time.] But he suddenly got sick and asked, ‘what would you say if my son, who just became a rabbi, were to marry you, it would be his first independent marriage.’ My father said, fine. And the famous Bernat Linevszki was the main cantor.
My mother had one other aunt, Etel, whose husband was Gyula Weinberger. When they circumcised me he was the one who held me. Uncle Gyula was started as an apprentice with Lampert-Wodianer Press, which later became Franklin Publishing, and was a real powerhouse, and he became the Director whom everyone respected enormously. My childhood is wound-up with uncle Gyula. Uncle Gyula was good-looking. We would have our summer vacations in Nogradveroce, and sometimes we’d go to Vac or Nagymaros by boat to the market. And then early in the morning the boat was full of saleswomen, and baskets, and everything. Uncle Gyula would immediately stand up, if he was sitting, and have an old peasant woman sit down, and he would say – he was relatively old then – ‘my dear soul, I’m only on summer vacation, you’re tired, please take a seat’. Everybody really liked that. Uncle Gyula died in ’41 or ’42.
Aunt Berta was one of my mother’s youngest aunts. She was very smart, and cross-eyed, and one of the ugliest of the girls, and she married a man named Richard Igel. Uncle Igel was a wiry-haired, bandy-legged Jewish man. He never did know Hungarian well. He was from Moravia, and was the son of a very well-to-do family. My mother’s family got to know his mother, and his five sisters who were elegant ladies. They were well-to-do Moravian Jews. Richard Igel didn’t really want to study, and he zipped in to be a soldier in the Monarchy. He was a gear-making sergeant, and he’d make horse tack, saddles, and horse outfits. And when he got married, and took aunt Berta, they opened a saddlery in Gyongyos that became famous all over the country. The aristocracy there had their coach gear, and horse fittings done there. I got a rocking horse from him when I was 3 or 5 years old, and it was covered with real hide. Aunt Berta would come up and visit Pest from time to time, to see my mothers’ family. Then she was really devastated because her sole daughter, Bozsi, married a non-Jew from there, Sandor Benei. Those Beneis were very well-to-do peasants. And their boy, who wasn’t prejudiced against her because she was a Jew, fell in love with her, and Bozsi married him, and they had a child.
My mother’s family, the Ullmanns, also came from Hajdudorog. My Ullmann grandparents had six children. My mother’s oldest sister was Ilus, then came Iren, then my mother, Margit, she came in ’94, then Jolan in ’97, Marcsa in 1902, and after her Sanyi [nickname for the male Sandor]. My aunts all resembled one-another, in appearance and character too. Since he [the grandfather] had six kids he wasn’t drafted to be a soldier, but worked for the Red Cross. For instance, he was there to meet the trains coming from the front in the First World War. My grandfather was a very good-looking man. He wore a top-hat and it was always a joy to walk with him on Andrassy Road [in Pest] because we lived nearby. Grandpa Ullmann prayed in the morning. He didn’t go to temple much, but he prayed, every morning.
My great-grandfather was called Steiner. He must have been born around 1840-1850. He had a sort of guesthouse in Gyongyos. He died relatively young. He had 7 or 8 kids, both boys and girls. If I look at his picture, I had a really ‘gutmuttig’, dear, and very handsome grandfather. He wasn’t deeply religious. He had a true Jewish family, full of love. But the rest of the siblings, the kids all married Jews. He wasn’t a Neolog in the sense of today – he surely kept the great holidays. I don’t believe the house was kosher. Well, the guesthouse wasn’t kosher for that matter. One of his sons took over the guesthouse. He was nice and a great singer.
My father had only one sibling, a little sister called Ilonka. She married Zsigmond Brechel, the son of a very well-to-do family from Beszterce [now Bistrica, Romania]. That was a patriarchal Jewish family in Beszterce. They had a brewery called Hohrich and Brecher. They made a quality of beer that was very well known in Transylvania.
There was a brass mesusah on every door in the brewery. Uncle Zsigmond worked in banking, and for awhile he was the Director of the Romanian-Hungarian Bank in Kolozsvar [now Cluj, Romania], and then Arad. Then the bank somehow didn’t do too well, and the family asked Uncle Zsigmond, who understood banking, but didn’t like to work, to run the brewery. When the Jewish laws were passed, Count Balazs Bethlen took on the brewery as a strohman [false director, or frontman]. Then they deported the family. They would have saved my uncle. Mengele told him to step a bit to the left, but after a little thought he went over to my aunt. He was murdered immediately….the first day. In Auschwitz. They had a daughter, Eva, who was also killed, but there’s no way to tell where.
There was a brass mesusah on every door in the brewery. Uncle Zsigmond worked in banking, and for awhile he was the Director of the Romanian-Hungarian Bank in Kolozsvar [now Cluj, Romania], and then Arad. Then the bank somehow didn’t do too well, and the family asked Uncle Zsigmond, who understood banking, but didn’t like to work, to run the brewery. When the Jewish laws were passed, Count Balazs Bethlen took on the brewery as a strohman [false director, or frontman]. Then they deported the family. They would have saved my uncle. Mengele told him to step a bit to the left, but after a little thought he went over to my aunt. He was murdered immediately….the first day. In Auschwitz. They had a daughter, Eva, who was also killed, but there’s no way to tell where.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
That’s why I didn’t wear a star, and in ’44 I got into the university, where I wrote that my religion was Israelite, but I was not to be considered a Jew. Right after the war my father got into the Association of War Invalids, and worked there for two years. At the start of the ’20s the Rico Bandage Factory was established. My father became the Assistant Director there. Then in ’28 he got into the Hungaria Rubber Factory, which had ten workers at the time. By the time of the Second World War it had 1,200 workers, and was a very modern factory. And my father was there until December 2, 1944. When the Germans came in, I also joined the factory right away. It was a first-class military-factory, and that’s why I came back out of forced labor, because I got a special relief, because the factory director said that Dorogi had done more for the Hungarian homeland than anybody else.
My father went to temple regularly. We went to the boys’ orphan home, where there was a nice, modern synagogue, with an organ. And the service always started with a schnoder of 50 thousand golden Pengos. My father always gave them 200 pairs of gym shoes because he said ’you’ll steal it otherwise’. And my father was proud to admit he was a Jew. Along with the fact that he was a K. und K. soldier, with medals.
My father went to temple regularly. We went to the boys’ orphan home, where there was a nice, modern synagogue, with an organ. And the service always started with a schnoder of 50 thousand golden Pengos. My father always gave them 200 pairs of gym shoes because he said ’you’ll steal it otherwise’. And my father was proud to admit he was a Jew. Along with the fact that he was a K. und K. soldier, with medals.
My father was born in 1893 in Nagyvarad. He was called Laszlo Feigelbaum, but he magyarized it to Dorogi in 1906. My grandfather decided to magyarize it, and it became Dorogi because he was born in Hajdudorog. My father went to high-school for four years in Nagyvarad, and then to a trade college for three years. He graduated from there. Uncle Vilmos, who wanted my father to work in the trade business, sent him to Pest for a year to learn banking, and in Marosvasarhely he sent him to work with an agent who would buy a trainload of, say, coffee or tea for the business. Uncle Vilmos had my father educated. But in the meantime the war began. My father was a volunteer then, with the rank of Captain. He was sent to the Russian front, and he got shot so badly in the arm in ’17 that his right arm was paralyzed.
My grandfather [Lajos Feigelbaum] was born in Hajdudorog. Then he had a little tool workshop in Nagyvarad. He put together one of the first bicycles in Hungary there. He also installed the first telephone in Nagyvarad, in the Town Hall. My grandfather wasn’t well-to-do. I’ve got a couple of cards from the front that he wrote my father when he sent him 50 crowns, ’send it back, because I’ve got such troubles’. My grandparents actually kept kosher. But my grandmother didn’t wear a wig.
My father’s mother was called Berta Schwartz. She was born in Kecskemet around 1860. She went to grade-school there. She finished 6 grades. First she lived in Nagyvarad [now Oradea, Romania] then in Marosvasarhely [now Tirgu Mures, Romania]. She went there with my grandfather because that’s where one of my grandfather’s cousins – Vilmos Feiglbaum – lived. He had the biggest colonial goods trade in Transylvania, and he had no children. And he wanted to leave the business to my father. In the end he closed the business and bought a little one-floor house, and my grandmother, who was a widow by then, went there to take care of her beloved in-law, who was blind.
Solomon Meir
I liked Israel. I traveled to Israel on 2 occasions: in 1969 and once again in 1989 – 20 years later. I traveled to Trumpeldor in 1969, as my cousin, Lica Smil – the son of Rasela Smil – lived in Trumpeldor at that time – he now lives in Naharia. And in 1989 I visited both of them, I went both to Beersheba, where I visited Katz Manase, and here [in Trumpeldor, where I visited Lica Smil].
,
After WW2
See text in interview
The Jewish tradition for both weddings and funerals is that any Jew can recite [the prayers that need to be recited], it doesn’t matter as long as he knows what needs to be recited. At funerals, both the muhla and the Kaddish are recited. The son must recite the Kaddish, if there is no son, then someone else must do it, but it must be a family member: the husband of the deceased – if the deceased is a woman –, the brother of the deceased. In order to recite the Kaddish, at least 10 adult Jews must be present. You can recite the muhla alone, without any Jew present, the person who conducts the burial ceremony recites it. And you must also recite Tzadik Adem, a paragraph from a book – that book is called Mona Lusi – either in the room where they dress the dead, or at the burial site, before placing the body inside the grave.
I sat shivah after my parents. You sit on the ground for 7 days. After that, men must say a prayer at the synagogue for 11 months without a day – they recite the Kaddish – for the dead – for there must be at least 10 people present when this prayer is recited – every day, including Saturdays. I went to the synagogue every day to recite the Kaddish for my parents, for there was a religious service every day. Now they no longer perform the religious service every day.
Usually, it is customary to lay the [funeral] tombstone 1 year after someone dies. But in Israel they do it after 30 days. It also depends on when you find the money for it. I believe I laid my mother’s tombstone after about 2 years, if not more, as I couldn’t find marble. I wanted to build a larger marble plaque and I couldn’t find the marble for it. This was during the Ceausescu [7] regime, you couldn’t find marble in those days. Anyway, I found some eventually and I built the tombstone. My father had also died by then, and that’s why I know that I had it built after 2 years. You must say another prayer by the tombstone [when it is laid], to inaugurate it.
I sat shivah after my parents. You sit on the ground for 7 days. After that, men must say a prayer at the synagogue for 11 months without a day – they recite the Kaddish – for the dead – for there must be at least 10 people present when this prayer is recited – every day, including Saturdays. I went to the synagogue every day to recite the Kaddish for my parents, for there was a religious service every day. Now they no longer perform the religious service every day.
Usually, it is customary to lay the [funeral] tombstone 1 year after someone dies. But in Israel they do it after 30 days. It also depends on when you find the money for it. I believe I laid my mother’s tombstone after about 2 years, if not more, as I couldn’t find marble. I wanted to build a larger marble plaque and I couldn’t find the marble for it. This was during the Ceausescu [7] regime, you couldn’t find marble in those days. Anyway, I found some eventually and I built the tombstone. My father had also died by then, and that’s why I know that I had it built after 2 years. You must say another prayer by the tombstone [when it is laid], to inaugurate it.
Jewish funerals are very simple. Here, in Botosani, after someone dies they are placed on the floor with the legs towards the door, towards the exit, a candle or two are lit and placed at their head and they are buried the following day. The custom in Israel is to bury the dead 3-4 hours after they die – because of the intense heat, that’s why. Over here, people are buried the day after they die. The deceased is taken to the chapel – we have a chapel in the cemetery – and they wash and dress the body in funeral clothes. They are buried wrapped in a shroud. A shirt, a pair of trousers, a shroud, a hood over the head to cover it, and that’s all. And the trousers are closed – just as if they were attached to the shoes [as if the socks and trousers were one item of clothing]. They bury the men with a tallit, and they remove the athura and the kotzitzis when they inter them. The tallit has an adornment on the back upper part, to a side – which is called athura – so that you know how to wear it [in order to know which is the front and which is the back], it is removed. And there are 4 tzitzit, one of them is severed.
The burial attire for women is exactly the same, with the exception of the tallit, which they don’t wear.
In Harlau, Jews are buried without a coffin. They do it like in the old days. It is written in the Bible: men must lie directly on the ground. The dead are clothed with the same clothes for dead people, enveloped in this shroud, which is called takhrikhim
and they build a wooden rectangle without a bottom side, on which the dead are laid, That’s how they did it in Harlau, I attended a funeral there and saw how they did it. I had never seen it done before I saw it in Harlau. Here, in Botosani, the bottom part of coffins isn’t whole either, it is like a wooden rail. We had these bottomless boxes as well, but many years ago the SANEPID didn’t allow it anymore. [Editor’s note: Sanepid – the name of the public health institution.] And then an agreement was reached to make the bottom out of rails. They make a plain coffin from boards which aren’t planed down, just like a box – they use nail to close the coffin.
The burial attire for women is exactly the same, with the exception of the tallit, which they don’t wear.
In Harlau, Jews are buried without a coffin. They do it like in the old days. It is written in the Bible: men must lie directly on the ground. The dead are clothed with the same clothes for dead people, enveloped in this shroud, which is called takhrikhim
and they build a wooden rectangle without a bottom side, on which the dead are laid, That’s how they did it in Harlau, I attended a funeral there and saw how they did it. I had never seen it done before I saw it in Harlau. Here, in Botosani, the bottom part of coffins isn’t whole either, it is like a wooden rail. We had these bottomless boxes as well, but many years ago the SANEPID didn’t allow it anymore. [Editor’s note: Sanepid – the name of the public health institution.] And then an agreement was reached to make the bottom out of rails. They make a plain coffin from boards which aren’t planed down, just like a box – they use nail to close the coffin.