Deborah Averbukh with her mother Rakhil and her brother Israel Averbukh

This is a picture of me, my mother, Rakhil Averbukh, nee Gorovits-Vaisbrot, and my brother, Israel Averbukh. The photo was taken in Kiev in 1924. I was born on 19th July 1921 in the urban-type community Medjibozh, which was a Jewish shtetl. Today it is in Khmelnitskiy region. My parents lived in Yekaterinoslav at the time. But those were the times of military communism and my parents were in great need, starving, especially my mother when she was pregnant with me. Two sisters of my father lived in Medjibozh, and it was easier to live in the province, so at the beginning of summer 1921 my parents moved there, and in July 1921 I was born. The hotel, where I was born, was located at the corner of the main street and the street where the theater was. Later, when I visited Medjibozh, there was a cinema there. The hotel was across the street from the two-storied brick house of my father's sister Tuba Fishman. My father's other sister, the older one, Serl, lived in a different house, and its back was facing the grave of Baal Shem-Tov. I was shown this grave when I visited Medjibozh at the age of seven and eleven. When I was six months old, my parents took me and moved back to Yekaterinoslav, which later became Dnepropetrovsk. I wasn't the only child in the family - I had a brother, who was four years older than me, Israel Yakovlevich Averbukh, born in 1917. He was born in Yekaterinoslav shortly after the February Revolution. When my parents' friends came to congratulate them on the birth of their son, everyone wore red rosettes in their buttonholes and everyone was happy that a democratic regime would finally replace the Russian Empire. When I was approximately one and a half years old, my family moved to Kiev because my father's younger brother lived there and worked as a doctor, so he was wealthier than my parents. By that time my father had lost his job as the director of the Yekaterinoslav yeshivah, because at that time the Bolsheviks closed all religious educational institutions. Today, the Yekaterinoslav yeshivah is the only Jewish religious institution of higher learning in Ukraine.