Moisey Goihberg's parents, Iosif and Lisa Goihberg

These are my parents Iosif and Lisa Goihberg after their wedding in Yaruga in 1920. In 1918 or 1919, soon after my grandfather was killed, my father was captured by members of a gang, who wanted to kill him. They took him to Yaruga, the neighboring town. Then all the men of Ivanovka, Jews and Ukrainians, went to Yaruga to fight for my father. They came to the ataman [headman or leading cossack official of a town] and demanded that he released Iosif. However strange it may seem they managed to rescue my father. I don't know how they managed this. The bandits probably released my father because so many people came to ask for him. That same year my father met my mother, Lisa Voloshyna. She lived in Yaruga, this typical town within the Jewish Pale of Settlement. There were many Jews in Yaruga. They lived in peace with the Ukrainians. There were no national conflicts. There were 3 synagogues and rabbis in Yaruga. There also was a Christian church. People in Yaruga respected the national traditions of one another. My mother was born in 1894. My mother only finished elementary school, but she read a lot, mainly Russian and foreign classics in Russian. She was an intelligent person for her time. She worked at the vineyard of her father along with the other children. My parents married in 1920. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah in Yaruga. But they didn't have a big wedding party. They just arranged a dinner for guests. This was a difficult time when the remnants of gangs attacked the villages. At first my parents lived in the house of my paternal grandparents in Ivanovka. Around 1921 my grandmother moved to America with 3 of her sons and her daughter. My father was married by the time of his mother's departure. This was one of the reasons why he stayed in the Soviet Union. I was born in Ivanovka on 23rd May 1921. The inhabitants of Ivanovka treated Jewish families very well, but there was still danger from pogroms. Three of Ivanovka's Jewish families decided that it was better to live in a Jewish environment, and so they left. I was 6 months old when my parents sold their house and moved to my mother's parents home in Yaruga. A few weeks later, the other two families from Ivanovka also moved to Yaruga.