This is one in a series of stories submitted by readers about their ancestors’ experiences growing up in Ukraine, during a time when it was a thriving center of Jewish life. My grandmother, Perl (we called her Paula) Braver or Braverman, was a fair-haired, blue-eyed woman who usually wore her long hair in braids atop…
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a blouse that my mother made with fabric that she had hidden from the Nazis before being deported to the notorious Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Before the war, my mother lived in Radom, Poland, a…
On March 1, 2022, artillery shells fired by the Russian Army in Ukraine fell in and near Babyn Yar (also known as Babi Yar), the Holocaust’s largest mass grave. On September 29-30, 1941, led by the SS commanders, a large number of Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht and German police units as well as Ukrainian collaborators combined to…
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, the latter’s national anthem, hauntingly called ‘Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished’, has become a song of protest against Russian aggression throughout Ukraine and around the world. Ukraine’s national anthem sung inside a bomb shelter. pic.twitter.com/3hDSWx7Zuk — Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) February 26, 2022 The anthem, whose melody was adopted…
In the 1920s, after the horrific pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, a Jewish musician and ethnomusicologist named Moyshe Beregovsky, also known as Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovskii, travelled across Ukraine with a phonograph in hand, seeking to record the authentic Yiddish music of Ukrainian Jewry. Among the hundreds of songs that he collected were Yiddish folk…
Last summer, as we hosted a number of friends for brunch at our new home in Newport, Rhode Island, there was one question that kept coming up. After the initial “How was the traffic?” and the well-known COVID-related question, “Are you hugging these days?” we would walk out onto the patio, make ourselves comfortable and…
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a notebook that my mother used when she was learning Hebrew as a teenager. My mother Cypora (Cesi in Polish, Sylvia in English) was born in Przytyk, Poland in 1928, site of an infamous pogrom during the interwar period. Her…
Eleanor Reissa The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey Post Hill Press, 289 pp. –––––––––––––––––––––––– The Holocaust left considerable traces – some obvious, some hidden – on the Jewish collective soul, and although it took place far from America’s shores, it’s become an integral part of American history. Tens of thousands of survivors immigrated here, most…
Ukraine is in the news. Daily reports pour in about the buildup of Russian troops – as many as 130,000, to the north, east and south of the country. Diplomatic activity is also escalating but without a clear path to resolving the situation. NATO is on alert. Ukrainian civilians are beginning to train militia-style to…
Wayne Hoffman The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder Heliotrope Books, 2022 362 pp. The history of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe often serves as a strong basis for creating American Jewish identity: Jews escaped persecution and pogroms in Russia and found a secure place of refuge in the “golden land.”…
If I were a children’s author, I would write a story about how our family heirloom – a glass goblet etched with shofars, that my paternal Bubbe bought in about 1915 in Reading, Massachusetts – wound up in Long Branch, New Jersey more than a hundred years later. The tale would begin about 1905 when…
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