ONLINE NEWSLETTER (No. 13/2002 - December 2002)

Editor: Fran Bock

 

Jews in Belarus: From our Common History, 1905-1953

by Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky,

Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University

Author's Foreword

Jews have lived on the banks of the Neman, Dvina, Dnieper and Pripiat rivers for almost seven hundred years now. The first mention of their presence in these regions dates back to the 14th century. The writs of law issued by Vitold, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, which granted certain privileges to the Jewish communities of Brest, Grodno and a number of other towns, show that Jews were seen as an integral element of Belorussia. In 1551 they were given the right to elect rabbis. Cases in which only Jews were involved were to be tried according to Jewish laws. The extensive rights enjoyed by Jewish communities were preserved even after Belorussia had been incorporated in the Russian Empire following the partitions of the late 18th century. "Let them live where and the way they live," Catherine the Second ordered. Belorussia was one of the main centres of Judaism, of Jewish culture and learning in Eastern Europe. Back in the late 16th century, the first yeshibot (yeshivas, Jewish theological academies) were opened in Brest, Grodno, Minsk. Many outstanding rabbis and thinkers who helped to build up the spiritual wealth of world Jewry studied in the yeshivas of Volozhin, Mir, Ivye. The Hassidic movement (Habad) originated in Belorussia. Its founder, Shneur-Zalman, was born in Liozno. Belorussia was the birthplace and scene of activity of the famous Shneerson rabbinical dynasty, which came from the nearby shtetls of Lubavich and Liady, of Mendele Moicher-Sforim, the poet Haim-Nahman Bialik, the founder of modern Hebrew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, historian Semyon (Shimon) Dubnov, artists Mark Chagall and Yehuda Pen, Zair Azgur and many other Belorussian Jews known for their invaluable contribution to world culture.

By the early 20th century, the Belorussian Jewry living in the Jewish Pale of Settlement was one of the most numerous communities in the European diaspora. Over generations, they played a dominant part in the development of many crafts and trade. The revolutionary upheaval of 1905-1907 catalyzed the growth of Jewish national self-awareness. In response to the Kishinev pogrom, the first Jewish self-defense patrols were formed in Gomel, and the Black Hundred met with a due rebuff there. Later, some of the patrolmen left for Eretz Israel. They formed the core of the Ha-Shomer organization and were the harbingers of the Second Aliyah. In Belorussia, a major Russian Social Democratic organization - the General Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund) emerged and was active. Israeli statesmen Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, as well as Haim Weizmann and Zalman Shazar, the first and third presidents of the State of Israel, and many other prominent public figures were born and spent their childhood and early youth in Belorussia.

In 1917-1941, Jews in Belorussia, like all the peoples of the Soviet Union, took part in socialist construction. Some of them cherished the delusion that Bolshevik ideas suited Jews best, sincerely believing that only the power of the worker-peasant state was capable of doing away with century-long national inequality, of giving them and their children equal civil and democratic rights. Others did not accept the postulates of socialism. They saw it as a regime that suppressed the individual's initiative and creativity and brought on the danger of complete assimilation. Still others pressed for emigration to Palestine as the only sensible solution to the Jewish question.

In the period between the two world wars, Jewish social, cultural and economic activities were allowed only within the limits determined by the pre-set ideological requirements of the Party. The Jewish section of the Communist Party of Belorussia served as the vehicle of communist influence among the Jews. Zionist ideas were prohibited, synagogues and Hebrew schools were shut down as "pernicious survivals of the past". Yiddish culture was for the time being recognized as the only successor of the historical and national Jewish heritage. On the whole, Jews were artificially cut off from the international community and made to follow the canons of Soviet ideology, world outlook and way of life. Many Jews were the innocent victims of the Stalin purges and repressions of the late 1930s.

Prior to the signing of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939, anti-Semitism was officially regarded as counterrevolutionary ideology in the USSR. The country's rulers kept stressing that in the Soviet Union, as distinct from pre-revolutionary Russia, Jews enjoyed full national equality. However, the period from September 1939 to June 1941 saw cardinal changes in Moscow's political line. The situation in Germany and its aggressive foreign policy were hushed up. Rebukes for harassing Jews stopped, as censure of fascism was ended. The Soviet mass media were passing over in silence the Nazi policy on the Jewish question, as well as Hitler's frank statements about his plans concerning the Jews.

During the Soviet-German war of 1941-1945, Belorussia became a major scene of the Holocaust of East European Jewry. Hitler saw the war against the Soviet Union not only as a war against Stalin, who also aspired to world domination, but first and foremost as a war against the Jews. The Nazis considered physical extermination of the Jews to be a means of destroying the Soviet state and preparing it for German colonization. Until now, the number of Jewish victims in the republic remains unknown, but it is definitely over 500,000.

Jews were active in the anti-fascist resistance. For a long time, however, their part in it had escaped the attention of Belorussian researchers. Fundamental studies on the history of the partisan movement, meticulously describing the popular struggle during the German occupation stage by stage, carefully avoided everything related to the Jews. Belorussian researchers had no access to the findings of their colleagues in other countries. Jews had stood somewhat apart in the partisan movement because, unlike Belorussians, they could not mingle with the local population and get help from it. Most of them had been ghetto inmates or hadescaped from extermination camps. Inasmuch as most of the ghettos had been liquidated by the year 1942, Jewish partisans could not get help from there either. Moreover, they had to stand their ground against anti-Semites and nationalists not only from among the local population but also from among their fellow partisans. All this generated the myth about the Jews' meekness in the face of the Nazi genocide which gained currency both in historical studies and in laymen's minds. The archives made available in the early 1990s disprove this allegation.

In 1944-1946, surviving Jews returned to Belorussia from evacuation, were demobilized from the Armed Forces and partisan detachments. They took an active part in the postwar rehabilitation of the shattered economy, culture and science. Their knowledge, experience and managerial talent brought them to the fore in many spheres of life in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. With the advent of the cold-war era in 1946, "the Jewish card" became a convenient leverage of the Soviet leaders' confrontation policy with the West. The years 1948-1953 are known in history as "black years" for the Soviet Jewry. They were marked by vociferous campaigns against manifestations of Jewish "bourgeois nationalism" and "rootless" cosmopolitanism. Yiddish culture, hitherto the only lawful outlet for Jewish national life, was banned. All Jewish institutions, literature, periodicals, unions of creative art workers, and theatres were outlawed. Many Jewish writers, poets, actors and stage directors in Belorussia were arrested. After the "Doctors' Plot" frame-up in 1953, Jews in Belorussia, as throughout the Soviet Union, were blacklisted. In the previous anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1946-1949, the word "Jew" was hardly ever mentioned, and the execution in August 1952 of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee leaders, prominent figures of Jewish culture in the USSR, was kept secret. In the early 1950s, it was succeeded by a torrent of vicious, openly anti-Jewish sallies. The months of January-March 1953 were a nightmare for the Jews in the Soviet Union . They lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred created around them, of fear for themselves and their children. The short period between the end of the Second World War and Stalin's death proved to be a period of profound disillusionment for many who had lived through the suffering and shock of the Holocaust and harbored the hope of restoring Jewish national life and freely identifying themselves with the Jewish State. Instead, they were facing an openly anti-Semitic campaign. Such sentiments were shared both by those who identified themselves as Jews and those Jews who had been almost completely assimilated. The conditions for dealing the final blow were practically ripe: the reasons had been concocted, the ground laid, and the perpetrators set for action. The machine was just waiting for the go-ahead signal. The massive repressions were prevented by Stalin's death. One can only speculate on whether the disaster could have been warded off had he continued to rule.

The present collection is a summing -up of the research done since I left Belorussia for Israel in October 1992. It contains the main articles written over 1994-1997 and published in scientific publications of Israel, Britain, and the US in Hebrew and English. Only a small portion of them (less than 10 percent) came out in Israel, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus in Russian and Belorussian. The articles cover the period from the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907 to the "Doctors' Plot" of 1953, inclusive. They deal with the main, the most controversial and painful periods in the life of Belorussian Jews. In all the articles I tried to treat the events objectively, without giving way to emotions, avoid high-sounding epithets and unsubstantiated conjectures, and be free of considerations of the moment. The research is based on archive materials deposited in:

Belarus:

National Archive of the Republic of Belarus, State Archive of Belarus, state archives of Minsk, Brest, Grodno, Vitebsk and Gomel regions; Archive of the Belarus State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, Belarus State Archive-Museum of Literature and the Arts, Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus, Archive of the KGB of the Republic of Belarus;

Russia:

State Archive of the Russian Federation, Russian Center for Storing and Studying Documents of Modern History, Russian State Historical Archive, Russian State Archive of the Armed Forces, Russian State Archive of Military History, Russian State Archive of Economy, Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of Russia

Israel:

Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, Archive of the Institute of the Contemporary Jewry of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Central Archive of the People of Israel, Central Zionist Archive, Yad Vashem Institute Archive, Archive of the Diaspora Institute at Tel Aviv University.

Along with archive materials, which for the most part were presented to the scientific community for the first time, data obtained from periodicals, collections of documents, statistics materials, recollections of eyewitnesses and participants in the events of the time, results of the polls conducted by the author, and monographs by scholars from Israel, Great Britain, United States of America, Germany, Belarus, Russia and other countries were used.

Valuable help and moral support in organizing my Research came from Israeli scholars - Professor Mattityahu Mintz, Professor Minna Rosen, Professor Ya'akov Ro'i, Professor Aharon Oppenheimer, Professor Dina Porat and Dr. Rafael Vago (Tel Aviv University), Professor Benjamin Pinkus (Ben Gurion University in the Negev), Professor Mordehai Altshuler and Dr. Mikhail Beizer, Arkadi Zeltser (Hebrew University in Jerusalem), Dr. Shmuel Krakowsky, Dr. Anatoly Kardash, Dr. Aharon Shneer (Yad Vashem). I am extending my heartfelt gratitude to them. Important advice and suggestions on studies of the history of Belorussian Jews were made by Dr. Howard Spier (London Institute of Jewish Policy Research) and Dr. Michael Gelb (the Research Institute, United States Holocaust Museum). The research was supported by the contribution of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Yoran-Sznycer Research Found in Jewish History of Tel Aviv University. My thanks go to them too.

The present collection has been revised and enlarged to include new facts that have come to light since the materials were first published.

Introduction

by Dr. Shaul Stampfer

The history of the Jews in Belorussia is at the same time one of the most studied but also one of the most ignored aspects of East European Jewish history. It is worthy to note that when the term "Russian Jewry" was used with regard to the Jews of the Czarist empire, very often it was Belorussian Jewry which was being referred to. Almost all of the major movements in the history of Jews in Eastern Europe either took place in Belorussia or had strong ties with Belorussia. This is true for Haskala and Hassidism, Jewish socialism and Zionism, migration and traditionalism etc. All of the studies on the development of these movements shed light on the history of Belorussian Jewry. At the same time, surprisingly little is known about Belorussian Jewry as a group. Relatively few studies have been devoted specifically to the history of this community and the special characteristics of the Belorussian context which made this community such a productive and dynamic one. Almost all of the attempts in this direction began after the Bolshevik revolution. In other words these studies, while often original and rich in primary sources, were written under stultifying ideological conditions and often with serious limits on bibliographical sources.

The study of the fact of Belorussian Jewry in the period of the Holocaust has had no better luck than the history of Belorussian Jewry in general. The constraints imposed by the communist regime made writing about the specific Jewish experience under the Nazis almost impossible. This was also the case with regard to the resistance of Jews to the communist regime . It is only in recent years that the first steps have been taken to reclaiming the history of Belorussian Jewry from oblivion. It is already clear that there is a multitude of sources in archives and other location which make at least a partial reconstruction of the Jewish past a reasonable goal. What is needed is trained and capable historians who have the desire to locate relevant sources, analyze them and then integrate them into a synthetic whole.

The volume of Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky is a major step in the direction of renewing the study of Belorussian Jewry's past. The rich variety of topics it deals with, the range of sources it brings together, both written and oral, expand our understanding of the active response of Belorussian Jewry to the challenges it was forced to face. This volume clearly demonstrates the desire of Belorussian Jews to take their fate in their hands, their resourcefulness and capability under conditions of extreme repression and persecution. This found expression in the efforts of Belorussian Jews to maintain cultural and religious life in the USSR despite governmental policies opposed to religion. In the Nazi period, the Jewish will to live found its expression both in the bravery of fighters and the resourcefulness of those who sought means for the physical survival of the Jews.

Reading the various studies collected here strengthen our awareness of how much more remains to be done - both with regard to Jews in the pre-revolution years, after the revolution and during both the Holocaust period and the post Holocaust years. It is now clearer than ever how much can be done if there is only a desire to do so and the necessary intellectual skills. In many issues, these studies have set an agenda for future investigations and new standards for research. Moreover, apart from the scientific value of these studies, these contain very human elements which can certainly serve as inspirations of humanity and conviction even in the very worst of possible conditions.

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The Holocaust in Belarus, 1941-1944

by Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky

Author's Foreword

The extermination of Jews in the occupied territory was one of Germany's major objectives in its war against the Soviet Union. Their physical annihilation was seen by the nazi regime as a way to crush the Soviet state and prepare the ground for making it a German colony. Nazi propaganda presented Jews as enemies of the German people, and bolshevism as a veiled form of Jewish dictatorship. Hitler declared that the extermination of Jews first in Europe and subsequently throughout the world was his goal. Following the signing on August 23, 1939, of the treaty on non-aggression between the two countries (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the German anti-Semitic policy began to be hushed up in the Soviet Union. The underlying doctrine of the Red Army was not defensive action but an offensive war waged on the enemy territory. Therefore, no provision for the evacuation of the population had been made. Immediately after the war broke out Belorussia became the scene of fierce fighting as it was the territory on which the Centre group of the German armies were advancing to Moscow, the main direction of their thrust. The swiftness of the German offensive made it impossible for most of the Jews to flee. Besides, they identified themselves with other Soviet people. In the newly-annexed areas of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, in the Baltic republics and Bessarabia, the frontier guards did not let the population across the "old border". The time factor was very important because it was only after some time that people began to realize the imminent danger. Minsk was occupied on June 28, 1941. Its leadership secretly left the city on the evening of June 24, 1941, without declaring evacuation. As a result, nearly 100,000 Jews were killed. The figures for some other cities and towns are: Vitebsk - some 20,000 out of 37,000 (occupied on July 11, 1941), Moghilev -10,000 out of 20,000 (occupied on July 27, 1941), Gomel - 4,000 out of 40,000 (occupied on August 19, 1941).

It was in Belorussia that the nazi mechanism of wholesale murder of Jews was first tested. At the same time, many ghettoes became centres of resistance. Underground organizations were active in the ghettoes of Minsk, Baranovichi, Bobruisk, Brest, Grodno, Slonim, Vileika and others. Ghetto inmates maintained contacts with partisans, collected medicaments, weapons, ammunition and intelligence and smuggled combat-capable young people out into the woods. In some ghettoes, uprisings erupted on the day preceding mass executions: Nesvizh (July 22, 1942), Mir (August 9, 1942), Lakhva (September 3, 1942), Kamenets (September 9, 1942), Tuchinka (September 23, 1942), Kletsk (July 21, 1943). Inmates offered armed resistance in the Glubokoe, Kobrin, Novogrudok, Lyakhovichi and other ghettoes.

Partisan movement played a significant part in saving Jewish lives. However, until the spring of 1942 the situation of the partisans was desperate. Their small, poorly armed detachments lacked liaison and the backing of the population. They acted separately, taking shelter in remote areas difficult of access. Moreover, meeting partisans did not always mean salvation for Jews. As often as not, they were seen as a burden. Old people, women and children, the sick and the undernourished were ill-suited for life in the woods and impeded the actions of partisans. Knowing that to escape death was well-nigh impossible for the Jews, partisans often suspected them of being German spies sent in to poison wells and kill partisan leaders. A great number of partisans sympathized with the Jews and regarded them as their comrades-in-arms. Still, anti-Semitism was rife in their ranks. Throughout the war, the Soviet leadership in Moscow kept extolling Russian patriotism, thus enhancing the nationalist slant in Soviet ideology which in a certain way found expression in the activities of partisans in Belorussia in 1941-1944.

Jews who had escaped from ghettoes joined the ranks of many Belorussian partisan detachments. They took part in combat, the "rail war", ambushesand reconnaissance, gathered intelligence, did propaganda work, acted as physicians and radio operators, repaired weapons, got provisions, mended shoes and clothing, worked in laundries and took care of the wounded. One form of their resistance was family camps and detachments, something no other European Resistance had. It was the idea of Anatoly (Tuvya) Belsky of Novogrudok who organized the escapes from many Western Belorussian ghettoes to Naliboki Forest. Another big Jewish camp, under Sholom Zorin, operated 30 km from Minsk. Their main objective was not only resistance to nazis but also saving Jews. Many of such family camps suffered heavy losses and were ultimately destroyed. Some could stand their ground and survived. The composition of partisan detachments in Belorussia reflected the multinational character of the republic's population. In the western regions there were Polish, Belorussian and mixed Belorussian-Polish detachments with Jewish fighters in each of them. Part of the Polish antifascist groups cooperated with Belorussian partisans. The "Armia Krajowa" and the "Narodowe Sily Zbrojne" (People's Armed Forces) acted independently. They treated the Jews as pro-Soviet elements. In the summer and spring of 1943, they victimized Jews in the forests of Lipichany, Naliboki, Rudensk, Naroch and Bryansk.

The fate of Jewish children is an inalienable part of the Holocaust history. Lack of experience and physical strength made them the most vulnerable victims of anti-Semitism, which hit them hardest. They could not explain the phenomenon of anti-Semitism but felt that they were doomed. Death was stalking children of mixed marriages: the Nazis demanded that they should be given away. At the same time, children had an edge on the adults because their reactions to changing situations were quicker. In some cases they had a stronger striving to survive than the adults and the behavioural habits they had developed often made their actions more useful. It is not fortuitous that partisans often used children as guides, scouts and liaison men who got into the ghettoes and took adults out to the woods. After the war ended, great-power Russian chauvinism became more pronounced. The authorities obstructed the re-evacuation of Jews and return of their property, and limited their job opportunities. A shortage of housing, acute as it was before the war, had dramatically increased. Communal services and amenities did not function, the housing resources were only a fraction of their prewar level. Hostilities had made some three millions people homeless. The situation was hardest for the Jews. Most of them were all alone, having lost their relations who had either been killed in action or executed in ghettoes. They were mostly widows, children or old people. They did not have any property, not even the essential things for daily life. Houses and apartments in which they lived before the war had been either destroyed, burnt down or looted. The housing that remained suitable to live in was arbitrarily occupied either by non-Jews or by state organizations. The absence of documents lost during the war made it very difficult to prove one's right to certain living quarters. For Jews, reinstatement in their possessions was an important factor in adaptation to peacetime life.

In the post-war years Jews had to cope with new problems: refusal to admit that the Holocaust had taken place and that by fighting on the battlefield and working at munitions factories in the rear Jews had contributed to victory over Germany. Various groundless obstacles were raised to perpetuating the memory of the Jewish dead. In many cases, the burial place of the genocide victims remained unmarked. In others, instead of the word "Jews", the standard monuments erected by local authorities on common graves bore the inscription "peaceful civilians" or "Soviet citizens". Whenever the relatives of the Jewish victims made an attempt to perpetuate their memory on their own, the local authorities refused to take the prospective monuments under state protection and were trying to make them do without the words "Jew" and "ghetto", as well as inscriptions in Yiddish, let alone Hebrew. The Russian Federation and Ukraine pursued the same policies.

Listed in the concluding part of the book is Ilya Ehrenburg's hitherto unknown address to the session the of Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Russian abbreviation EAK) held in Moscow on July 26, 1944. He spoke about the Holocaust in Belorussia. The document was found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Russian abbreviation GARF) in 1998. The EAK's mission was to inform the world public about the German policy of genocide of the Jewish people and raise funds for the war effort. After the committee was disbanded in November 1948, all its documents were confiscated and then kept in the archive of the USSR Ministry of State Security for decades. In 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg was among the first witnesses of the wholesale murder in Trostenets, fourth largest death camp after Auschwits, Majdanek and Treblinka. He visited Minsk, then Rakov, Ivenets, Molodechno, Smorgon and Vilno. His account of this trip produces a tremendous impression and adds to the gruesome picture of German genocide.

Until the late 1980s, the Holocaust was a subject carefully avoided in the USSR. The traditions of professed Soviet internationalism ran counter to highlighting a catastrophe of some one ethnic group. It was taken for granted that Russia and other former soviet republics had lost so many Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, etc., that it was improper to focus on the genocide of Jewish people. The extermination of Soviet Jews was regarded exclusively in light of the USSR-German confrontation and the term "genocide" was avoided for the 15 years immediately following the end of the second world war. The mass murder of Jews was ascribed not to their belonging to a definite ethnic group, but to the fact that they were Soviet people.

In Belorussia, whose losses during the war were heavier than in any other Soviet republic, the German policy of genocide of civilians had been studied comprehensively enough. Yet, no special mention of Jewish victims was made. Belorussian historiography persists in its methodological mistake by claiming that the tragedy of the Jewish people was part of the tragedy of the Belorussian people, even though the nazis never killed Belorussians just for being ethnic Belorussians. The subject of the Holocaust has long been drawing the attention of researchers. The first publications, essentially memories, appeared in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and English back in the late 1940s and in the 1950s. They describe the experience of former ghetto inmates who went all the way from the ghetto to freedom and participation in the Resistance. These works are in many respects naive, superficial and tendentious. However, they contain invaluable factual material, convey the atmosphere of the epoch and arouse the reader's empathy. The 1960s-1990s decades saw monographs and serious studies on the Holocaust published mostly in Israel and in the West. They can be divided along several lines: the period immediately preceding the Holocaust, publications of documents and materials on the nazi policy towards the Jews, history of ghettoes, Jewish Resistance, and acts of genocide.

In what was the Soviet Union, literature on the history of the Holocaust did not appear until 1991. Lacking archive materials, Western historiography had to keep away from the subject in the immediate postwar years. The result was an information gap which was being quickly filled in the 1990s. The most valuable research was made by Israeli scholars and their colleagues in Western Europe and the United States. Articles, reviews, reminiscences, collections of documents and monographs on the Holocaust published in 1996-1999 differ from the earlier works a great deal as regards professional level, depth of analysis, understanding the purport of events, and authenticity. The most striking contrast present works written in Belorussia. They combine serious research and emotions. A great part of the cited facts are based on oral accounts unsubstantiated by documents and are difficult to check. The relations between Jews and non-Jews on the occupied territory is an entirely new aspect in Russian-language historiography. Access to archives since the mid-1990s has greatly enriched the Holocaust historiography in Belorussia. Documents on the history of the Holocaust, lists of ghetto victims, descriptions of partisan actions in which Jews took part, lists of monuments on common graves, etc., began to appear in the Pamyat' (Memory) series of documented chronicles of Belorussian towns and districts which have been published since 1987.

On the whole, despite no dearth of literature on the Holocaust in Belorussia, only the first steps have been made towards serious research on the subject. Conceptual works are conspicuous by their absence. Those published are largely descriptive and lack an insight into the far-reaching implications of the phenomenon. There are no teams of researchers and no international cooperation of scholars working on the subject. Joint effort could promote mutual understanding and help arrive at common conclusions. We are yet to establish in what way the Holocaust in Belorussia differs from the Holocaust in other areas of the Soviet Union and East European countries, find an explanation to the relations between Jews and non-Jews in the occupied territory, show the contribution of the Jewish people to the Resistance movement, count the losses suffered by the Jewish population of Belorussia, and do much more.

The monograph The Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941-1944 contains the main text, a collection of documents, references, a glossary of the main terms and names mentioned, and geographic and name indexes. The research is based on archive materials deposited in National Archive of the Republic of Belarus, region archives of Minsk, Brest, Grodno, Vitebsk and Gomel, Archive of the Belarus State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, State Archive of the Russian Federation, Russian Centre for Storing and Studying Documents of Modern History, Russian State Archive of Economy Centre for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, Archive of the Institute of the Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Central Archive of the People of Israel, Central Zionist Archive, Yad Vashem Institute Archive (Jerusalem). Along with archive materials, data obtained from periodicals, collections of documents, statistics materials, recollections of eyewitnesses and participants in the events of the time, results of the polls conducted by the author, and monographs by scholars from Israel, Great Britain, United States of America, Germany, Belarus, Russia and other countries were used.

Valuable help and moral support in organizing my research came from scholars: Professor Mattityahu Mintz, Professor Ya'akov Rio's, Professor Aharon Oppenheimer, Professor Dina Porat, Irena Kantorovich (Tel Aviv University), Professor Benjamin Pinkus (Ben Gurion University in the Negev), Professor Mordehai Altshuler, Dr. Shaul Stampfer, Dr. Mikhail Beizer, Dr. Israel Koen, Daniel Romanovsky, (Hebrew University in Jerusalem), Dr. Shmuel Krakowsky, Dr. Itshak Arad, Dr. Aharon Shneer, Rita Margolin (Yad Vashem). I am extending my heartfelt gratitude to them. Important advice and suggestions were made by Dr. Howard Spier (London Institute of Jewish Policy Research), Dr. Michael Gelb (the Research Institute, United States Holocaust Museum), Dr. Pinchas Agmon ((Beit Lohamei ha-Ghettaot) and Eliahy Valk (first Israeli Ambassador in Belarus).

Preface

by Daniel Romanovsky, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The book by Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky is the first careful systematic study of the history of the Holocaust in Belorussia written in Russian. The historiography of the Holocaust has been in existence for some 50 years, but in the USSR/CIS no works on the subject appeared until 1988, as in the period from 1948 to 1987 the subject had been tabooed. As a matter of fact, the Belorussian chapter in the history of the Nazi genocide of European Jews is yet to be written not only in Belorussia but in the West and in Israel as well. The historians had no sources to re-create or analyze the events: documents on the genocide of Jews stored in state archives were kept confidential while the eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, both Jewish and non-Jewish, could not have their reminiscences published.

Today many Soviet archive documents have been declassified. However, neither in the West nor in Israel has the historiography of the Holocaust in Belorussia made its appearance. Lately, there has been a veritable rush of Western historians to the Moscow, Minsk and Kiev archives. But what they are looking for is not evidence of the Holocaust, partisan reports or materials of postwar investigations on the territories formerly occupied by the German troops. It is only to be regretted that what most of the Western historians are interested in are captured German documents kept in Soviet "special archives" (the now accessible Goebbels' diaries made a sensation in the West). The Holocaust in Belorussia and Ukraine has remained a blank spot in the historiography of the second world war.

Serious research into the history of the Holocaust in Belorussia can be expected to come from historians for whom the subject is presumably of greater interest - those who live or were born in Belorussia or are of Belorussian descent. No Belorussian historian belonging in any of the above categories has yet published what might be called a history of the Holocaust. All that has been written on the subject in Russian and Belorussian deals, strictly speaking, with regional studies rather than history. There is a plethora of works describing events that occurred in some locality, town or settlement. Publications that have appeared in the past decade are also essentially descriptive and lack any analysis or interpretation of events. Dr. Smilovitsky's monograph is testimony to the fact the Holocaust studies have at last entered the stage of interpreting and conceptualizing the material amassed.

There may be two ways of writing a history of the Holocaust. One way is meticulously to describe the events as they were occurring - day by day and region by region. The other way is to try to disclose the inner logic and interdependence of the events (ignoring for the time being when and where they took place), analyze, typologies them and interpret them in a wider historical context. Dr. Smilovitsky has chosen the second way. The chapters in hs monograph are arranged not chronologically or geographically but according to such aspects of the history of the Holocaust in Belorussia as: the impact of the Holocaust on the Belorussian Jews' demography and their survival under the ghetto and genocide conditions; confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazis; resistance to genocide and the participation of Jews in the Belorussian Resistance in general; sources and historiography; postwar efforts to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust victims and the counteraction to these efforts on the part of the Soviet authorities. In one chapter an attempt is made at re-creating events in some localities on the basis of the meager archive materials available; there is a section devoted to Rechitsa, the author's birth town.

The monograph is not meant to whitewash or justify any of the dramatis personae of the Holocaust in Belorussia, including the Jews and their non-Jewish milieu, which, it must be noted, is a feature of the Holocaust historiography in present-day Ukraine, Russia, Poland and some other countries. Nor does the author condemn out of hand the "Gentiles" who turned their backs on the Jews and were thriving under the Nazi regime. Censuring such people, to which Western and Israeli historiographies of the Holocaust tended in the 1970s, has found expression in Claude Lanzman's documentary "Shoah" (Holocaust) in the 1980s. Dr. Smilovitsky is not passing over in silence the tense relations between Jews and Belorussians during the German occupation but is trying to get at the root of this phenomenon. The collision between the Jewish ghetto escapees and Soviet partisans who refused to let them join partisan detachments is common knowledge today. The author attributes it to a) weakness of the partisan detachments in 1941 and early 1942 when Jews would be a burden to them; b) the misconception, widespread among the partisans, that "all Jews had already been killed and the survivors could only be German spies"; besides, partisans refused to believe that the stories of escapes from ghettoes told by Jews could be true; c) anti-Semitism of some partisan commanders and Slav nationalism inculcated by Moscow come only third.

The author has studied and summarized in his monograph a tremendous amount of material not limited to archive documents and eyewitness accounts - most Belorussian researchers into the history the Holocaust in the USSR base their works precisely on these. He knows very well the literature dealing with the Nazi occupation of Belorussia and covering in one way or another the fate of the Jews. German documents, on which many works on the Holocaust published in the West are based, are used only sparingly, as such documents are of little use to a researcher whose sphere of interest is the fate of the Jewish victims of genocide, their relations with the non-Jewish population, and Resistance. In this sense Dr. Smilovitsky's book can be seen as a counterweight to the works of J. Buechler, J. Kraussnik, A. Streim, H. Herlach, U. Matteus, Kr. Browning and others who, while describing events which took place in Belorussia, fully ignore the fate of Jewish victims and focus on the Germans who did the killing of Jews, on their actions, official correspondence, and how they felt about what they were doing.

Speaking of the shortcomings of the monograph one must note its somewhat fragmentary character, as it is to some extent based on the articles published in scientific journals ("Yalkut Moreshet", "Shvut", "Jews of East Europe", "East European Jewish Affairs", "Holocaust and Genocide Studies", etc.). The logical connection between chapters is in some cases hard to trace. Some aspects of the history of the Holocaust are not mentioned at all. There are passages overburdened with details, which are only superficially typologized. The chapter re-creating events in certain localities on the basis of the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission and citing eyewitness accounts of the genocide must be supplied with a more detailed historical comment. Despite the above-mentioned, there is every ground to say that the author has successfully coped with his task. His work is a history of the Holocaust as seen by a person who was born and spent his formative years in Belorussia and who knows and understands its history. It is a history of the Holocaust as seen in Belorussia, not in Germany, the U.S. or the Jerusalem "Mea Shearim" district.

Hopefully, this work will be followed by others. We wish the author every success.

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Jewish Religious Life In Belarus, 1944-1953

by Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky

Author's Description

(This monograph, 202 pages and 70,000 words, is a result of my three years of work.)

In the post-war period, the Soviet state began to systematically suppress the reviving Jewish identity, wiping out every aspect of Jewish culture - education, theater, literature, newspapers - and effectively banning the Yiddish language. Under these conditions, the synagogue remained the only legal venue not only for observance of Jewish religion and traditions, but also for daily social contacts. At the same time, the authorities viewed the synagogue as the hotbed of Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and anti-Soviet activities. The USSR's international isolation caused by the beginning of the cold war, the change in Moscow's policy concerning the Palestinian issue, and the wave of ideological campaigns unleashed in 1946-1953 made the life of religious Jews unbearable.

They were subjected to various administrative reprisals, persecuted at their places of employment and residence, dismissed from work, expelled from the party, ridiculed, reviled in the press, and so on. Yet despite all this, religious Jews refused to buckle under and continued to defend their rights. This found expression in the endless flood of request, petitions and appeals addressed to local and central government organs (the executive committees of regional, municipal and district Soviets, the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Soviet and the Central Communist Party Committees of the BSSR and the USSR), asking for official recognition of Jewish communities, permits for synagogue construction, removal of the ban on religious observance and rituals (Torah studies, designating Saturday a day of rest, circumcisions, kosher meat production, matza baking, the opening of Jewish cemeteries, collecting donations, publication of religious literature, training religious officials, etc.), commemoration of Holocaust victims (more than 700,000 in Belarus), and granting the freedom to immigrate to Palestine.

Despite the prohibitions, Jewish communities set up and ran numerous minyanim which became local points of Jewish activity even in small towns and settlements. The synagogue played a crucial role not only in safeguarding Jewish traditions but also in preserving national self-identity, forming a bulwark against the pressure of the authorities and the lure of assimilation. The fruits of this unequal struggle became apparent some decades later, when the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled the Jews to leave the Diaspora and make aliyah to Israel.

Originality of the Research

Up till now, there have not been any major studies focusing on the religious life of Belarus Jewry. Some partial information may be found in contemporary Soviet as well as Russian Jewish history works. Some important facts, examples and statistics concerning Belarus Jews may be found in general studies of Belarus history, dealing with the relations between Belorussians and Jews. The most authoritative of these were published in the West. Unfortunately, they had to be based on Soviet sources and these deliberately distorted factual information in the interests of the communist doctrine. The vast majority of this literature suffers from the lack of authentic and verified archive material. Until the early 1990s, all of Belarus party and state policies, actions and intentions with regard to the Jews were classified as strictly confidential by the Soviet authorities. As a result, the issue of Jewish religious life in Belarus between the years of 1944 and 1953 remains largely unknown.

Methodology

The manuscript of the monograph is conducted on the basis of a wide and substantial range of archive material, such as the collection of the Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, the Institute of the Contemporary Jewry of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, the Israel Central Archives, the Central Zionist Archives, and the Tel Aviv University's Diaspora Research Institute Archives. In addition, some valuable new material has been collected from Belarus sources, such as the Belarus National Archives, the Belarus State Archives, the Belarus KGB Archives in Minsk, as well as provincial archives in Brest, Grodno, Vitebsk , Gomel and Mogilev, where the author had the opportunity to work during his two missions to the region (1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002).

Table of Contents

Chapter I: Religious Jews in Belorussia and the Soviet State

1. The peculiarity of religious policy in the post-war period

2. Legalization of the religious societies

3. Synagogues staff and the leaders of the communities

4. Social profile of the believers

Chapter II: The activities of the Jewish Organizations and Groups

1. Perpetuation of the memory of the Holocaust

2. Financial situation in Jewish communities

3. The role of minyans

4. Publication of religious literature

Chapter III: Jewish Tradition and Holidays

1. Observance of the Jewish tradition in the post-war period

2. Circumcision

3. Kashrut

4. Producing of matza

5. Funerals and the condition of cemeteries

Chapter IV: International Communications

1. Contacts with abroad

2. Events in Palestine. Response to the events and to the creation of State of Israel

Chapter V: From the strategy of restriction to the entire liquidation of Jewish religious life

1. Obstacles obstructing the renewal of the religious life

2. The role of the authorities of the Soviet Religious Affairs in Jewish life

3. Persecutions

Conclusions

Attachments

Bibliography

Name & Geographical indexes.

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