Rosalia Rabinovich

This is my wife Fira Rabinovich's mother Rosalia Rabinovich, nee Ratmanskaya. The photo was taken in Kiev in 1912. During my post-graduate course at Kiev Light Industry University, in 1947, I met my future wife. She was a student at the institute. She was born into a respected Jewish family in 1923. Her father Saliman Rabinovich came from a big assimilated Jewish family. He came to Kiev from Riga. He was a big china specialist and worked in famous china factories. He met his wife Rosalia , born in Kiev in 1890, in 1911. He died of spotted fever in 1933. My wife didn't know Yiddish. Her father took her to the synagogue several times when she was a child. Fira worked at a hospital at the front. She was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War. Her grandmother and grandfather were killed in Babi Yar. Her grandmother's name was Lubov and her grandfather's Wolf Ratmanskiye. After Fira and her mother returned to Kiev in 1944 they lived in the hospital for some time and then they received a room on Saksaganskogo Street - and that replaced their nice apartment in Pushkin Street that they had before the war. Rosalia died in Kiev in 1956.