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A town in the district of Kamyanets Podilskyy, the region of Podolia. In 1847, the Jewish community counted 570 people and in 1897 - 1,240 residents in total, of whom the Jews were - 1,216.

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The period in which the town called “Frampol” came to be lies in the hidden place of history. About 200 years or more or even earlier, there lived and worked a small Jewish community in the same place where the village of Savyntsi now exists, at a distance of about two kilometers from Frampol (=Kosohirka) presently. Remains of tombstones of the residents of that community still existed in my youth, in the ancient Jewish cemetery of that village. Some of the elders of the city in the days of my youth would still go to the ancestral grave of one of the last ones named “R. Abele” who was buried there. He was a holy Jew from the descendants of the first Hasidim.

Apparently the first settlement of Frampol (=Kosohirka) centered around the wall called “Aavstria,” which was built during the “Fanshtashina” (=Panchizhni, i.e., “Fortification”) period. This place was the market center of the town. This wall was built in a square shape.

Its southern side was a residence in the form of a palace and the other three sides contained about twenty stores for food, flour, textiles, and other household needs for the surrounding area, which numbered about twenty villages with the aforementioned Savyntsi, which was the largest and closest village.

Frampol (=Kosohirka), along with the nearby villages, formed an economic unit whose population made their livelihood off each other. The shop owners and artisans supplied the needs of the farmers with clothing, footwear, and other necessities. The farmers, besides being workers on their farms and on the farms of the Polish landowners, would rent themselves and their carts out to transport goods between the two largest commercial centers in our region: Kamyanets Podilskyy and Proskorov (= Khmelnytskyi).

Our town was exactly on the main road between those two cities and its main street from the western part of the “Aavstria” served as a long line of inns for the merchants and wagoneers going back and forth between the two big cities which were centers of trade, industry (in the magnitude of that time), district government offices, etc.

And as the center of the town with the “Aavstria” at its head prospered and became successful, people with initiatives appeared from the first residents and built shops close to “Aavstria” as well as a residence with shops in front and taverns for the farmers who came for the market day twice a week. (On Sunday and on Wednesday).

The Frampol market made a name for itself in the district area and drew to it for its market day, too, farmers

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from the villages that were outside its natural domain. By this, some of the merchants and craftsmen of the other towns in our district were also attracted.

Its very location on the main road between Kamyanets Podilskyy and Proskorov (= Khmelnytskyi), being the center of all these villages, was an important factor in its growth and in its economic prosperity and, at the same time, also culturally.

But while they were paving, in about 1850, the road between the two big cities mentioned above, when engineers presented the owners of the inn (who profited more than anyone due to the position of the town) a demand for a bribe of about one hundred rubles, these refused to respond to their demand and for that reason, the engineers diverted the road a distance of about ten kilometers from the town. Because of this deviation, the town froze in place and its prosperity and growth stopped. And not only that, but since the large transport on “the dirt track” stopped - the large inns remained empty and without livelihood. The main street, which in previous days was bustling with people, became like a city of evil spirits.

And although the livelihood from the farmers of the area and the market days was still available as before, since weeks and months passed without seeing any new faces in the town and the people of the town did not come into commercial, social or cultural contact with the distant world, the news from the wider world arrived in our town very late. The winds of the Enlightenment, which began to blow in our Jewish world in the second half of the last century, did not reach us until after the great storm that was unleashed in the world by the Dreyfus Affair and the first Zionist Congress that followed it.

In about 1898, some young people arose from the students of the enclave and the Beit Midrash, who already smelled the scent of the new era from afar, and their degree of idealism was really much greater

Yiddisher school

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than their knowledge and education, and they decided to open a Talmud Torah for the children of the poor whose parents were unable to pay tuition fees to the city's teachers and, because of that, were expected to grow up in ignorance and boorishness. They decided that they would teach in the Talmud Torah, together with the Pentateuch, Rashi, Tanach, and Talmud, Hebrew grammar as well and - the Russian language. Then a great war arose against them on the part of pious homeowners who announced: Are they going to establish a Talmud Torah? No, because they want to establish “Talmud writing”! And the war took place all over the town: in the market, in the synagogues, and on the other hand, in the bath house and up to the rabbi of the city, R. Simcha Kahana.

The opponents of this idea went to the rabbi and complained about the “heretical scandal” in the form of the “Talmud writing” that was about to be created. And he, the rabbi, did not listen to their complaints and ruled in favor of the proposed idea. (I will continue to talk about the rabbi, R. Simcha, in the course of this article).

I remember that war very well because my brother, Shmuel, my nephew, Eliezer, and I, the little one, were among the first students of that institution. Our parents, Yosel Feysis and Volvel Feysis, were both Torah-observant Jews and their sons, even without studying in the teachers' rooms, were not expected to grow up without Torah and without good manners. We were sent to study at the same main institution - because of the prospect of receiving a general education, even to a small extent, and secondly, out of gratitude to the idealistic young people who were willing to give of their time and money, not in order to receive a prize, but in order to teach Torah to the children of the poor. Our parents entered into the thick of things with all the power of their reasoning and their glibness for the establishment of the institution and fought with the opponents until they won on the whole front.

As far as I know, only one of those initiators of the Talmud Torah is still alive, after so much time, and he is Mendel Kramer, who went to America, graduated as a dentist, and retired from this profession only two or three years ago.

Those young men were all single in their twenties and after some of them got married and left our town, the supervision of the institution and its development fell to Yitzhak Rabin and his brother-in-law, Yitzhak Eliash. These two Yitzhaks were the backbone of our city because of their belonging to the spiritual aristocracy in it. The first was the son of Meir Rabin. The erudition of the latter was no less than that of the great rabbis in Israel, but he did not use his knowledge to earn a living and instead engaged in trading grain and flour. His son, Yitzhak Rabin, did not fall behind his father in his learning, he even mastered the secrets of the new Hebrew literature and Russian literature, and so did his brother-in-law, Yitzhak Eliash. Both were grandsons of “Reyzel, the Matriarch” of our town. Reyzel, after whom her son-in-law, Meir Rabin, was called: “Meir Reyzeles” it was after she became a widow, practiced hospitality in her home that was unparalleled in our area. All the poor who came to our city knew her address and of her adherence to the teachings of Abraham our father, and her good name preceded her in all the surrounding cities.

They, these grandchildren of Reyzel, dreamed of a modern “Improved Cheder” for the town and pinned their hopes on the first students and “graduates” of the Talmud Torah. The graduates themselves also dreamed of that time when they could in some way repay their debt to their benefactors and their town, but in between came the First World War with its vicissitudes and turned all those dreams into nothing.

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The Zionist resistance movement in town

My father, peace be upon him, belonged to the Zinkiv Hasidim who prayed in the large enclave and R. Simcha used to pray in the “Beit Midrash,” a place where he served as a community emissary during the terrible days. And even though we shed quite a few tears at the Arvit Shemoneh Esrei prayers of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in our enclave, where the prayers ended earlier than those of the Beit Midrash, we still entered the Beit Midrash immediately after our prayers concluded to hear the rabbi's “Le-David Mizmor.” In my mind's eye, I see the old rabbi standing erect in front of the Torah scrolls and pouring his heart out in front of his Maker, praying for himself and for his congregation, the congregation of the Children of Israel…

At the beginning of the first war, when R. Simcha reached old age, he resigned from the rabbinate in favor of his son, R. Nahum, who was the son-in-law of one of the rabbi of Chortkiv's gabbais. R. Nahum was then a young man approximately, with beautiful attributes, and sampled a little of the Galician education in Chortkiv. On him, as on his father, was the pride of the city. He served as a rabbi and teacher in the town until the middle of World War II. When Hitler (may his name be obliterated)'s troops entered the town and demanded of R. Nahum that he hand over ten Jews from the town as guarantors, he replied that he could not present anyone other than himself. Of course they did not delay to take him and executed him in the center of the city. They executed him infamously, but his memory will remain blessed and glorious in the hearts of all the citizens of the city until the end of all generations.

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And a few words about another two or three Jews, members of “Amcha,” simple because of their innocence and righteousness. The first is “Moshe Volis,” the bookbinder in our city. When they gave him a book for binding, they never knew when they would get the book back. Simply, there are so many prayers in the prayer book and so many psalms to say every day, and you also have to go to the mikveh every day, and you also have to collect alms for the poor, and to prevent that anyone might “suspect of kosher things,” he stole for himself one grush each time from what he had collected. On Friday nights, in his two-room house, apart from the Shabbat candles, about twenty large lanterns were lit and the light there was of great fame, “almost seven times the light of the sun”…

There was one couple in our city that God did not bless with sons of their own, Yoel Yehuda Leyves and his wife, Devorah. Although they were childless, they “raised” sons and daughters from the poor of our city and helped them with their dowry and wedding expenses, and by doing so, they were blessed with many grandchildren.

I will mention just one more name from the residents of our city that I was not privileged to get to know. He died a few years before I was born, but his name was remembered with great fame by the elders. His name was Itzi Tolner, a tenant farmer. Were Y. L. Peretz among the people of Ukraine, I would say that Itzi Tolner served him as a prototype for his story, “If Not Higher.” Exactly the same righteousness that Y. L. Peretz sets an example in his account of the tzaddik of Nemirov was said by the elders of our city of this “down-to-earth” person, Itzi Tolner.

A group of “Po'alei Tsiyon”

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