English

Many are the motivations which bid the survivors of the Holocaust create memorial volumes and books of remembrance, to eternalize the communities destroyed in the disaster.

These volumes are of tremendous significance. Many writers, in depicting the calamity which overtook the European shtetl, regrettably emphasized its negative aspects, with the result that their readers, particularly the young people, obtained a false picture of these thousands of Jewish communities. This accounts, in no small measure, for the negative attitude which the younger generation bears toward its immediate past. A balanced presentation of all the aspects would therefore render an important service to the future strength and cohesion of the Jewish people everywhere.

such a presentation would bring to light the life of the small Jewish shtetl in all its grandeur, as well as quaintness – the manifestations of brotherhood and mutual aid, the institutions of Torah and learning, of welfare and physical health, the orphanages and old age homes, public baths, wayfarers' lodges, banks and free loan societies, visitations of the sick and burial of the departed. It would portray the Torah personalities and the simple folk, the purity of the Jewish family, the role of the Jewish mother, the assistance given to needy brides, the upbringing of the little orphans.

These volumes will provide future historians with the true facts about the Jewish shtetl. These volumes are also the monuments to the great and the small, the leaders of the flock.

Few are the survivors who once called Tooretz and Yeremitz their home, and the means available to them are limited. We therefore hesitated for a long time before deciding on the publication of this volume. At long last, thirty–five years after the destruction of our communities, we are bringing forth this Book of Remembrance.

I trust that the readers of this volume will find that our Publication Committee and Editorial Board have done justice to our martyrs and to our towns. Much effort and work has gone into preparing the material for publication, by a handful of dedicated townspeople. This volume is primarily the fruit of their labor. Among these who have

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Made this publication possible, I shall mention only the help by S.L. Hoffman of New York, who has done so much to keep our societies alive, to his very last day.

We cannot but take note of the marvel of Jewish history, in that, at the very moment that our people was so sorely stricken, to the point of almost complete annihilation in the European disaster, the State of Israel came into being, not only to rescue the remnants but also to revive Jewish sovereignty, restore the pride and greatness of the Jewish people, and vindicate the eternality of Israel. This is part of the covenant which the Almighty made with our forefathers, that the seed of Jacob shall endure forever.

Let us therefore enshrine in our hearts the memories of our fathers and mothers and all the generations of Israel. Let us continue with the propagation of our heritage and thus bring nearer the comfort of the redemption which the Lord G–d of Israel holds for His people.

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Tooretz is one of the oldest towns in the region called Western Byelorussia. Centuries ago, this region was the arena of warfare between the forces of the Lithuanian principalities and the Slavic tribes under the protection of the large principality of Kiev. Situated on the highway between Lithuania, via Novogrudek, and the Slavic principalities, via Nisuyezh and Slutsk, Tooretz was at the time a fortified point in those inter–tribal struggles.

An item in the Wohlin chronicles, dated 1276 (seven centuries ago), mentions the destruction of Tooretz by Wohlinian Prince Vladimir, in his ear against Prince Giligin of Greater Lithuania. For some time thereafter, Tooretz was regarded as the possession of the Great Prince of Kiev. However, in the 14th Century, when Kiev was weakened by the incursion of the Tatars, the Lithuanians defeated the Slavic princes, and the Lithuanian Archduchy ruled the area until 1569, when Lithuania and Poland were unified under the name of the “Lublin Union”. As a result, the region came under the influence of the Poles, politically and militarily, even though Lithuania exercised some measure of autonomy over its territories after the unification.

The Polish influence on Tooretz was such that already at the end of the 16th Century the ownership of Tooretz and its environs passed into the hands of the renowned Polish general, Hudkiewicz. His family retained ownership for 200 years, until the first partition of Poland in 1772, as a result of which Russia annexed to its empire all the territories of Greater Lithuania. After the annexation, ownership of Tooretz and its vicinity went over to the family of the nobleman Kashitz, which apparently enjoyed greater favor with the Russians did the descendants of Hudkiewicz. At the end of the 18th Century Kashitz granted the Jews of Tooretz a “privilege” (“bill of rights”), the details of which are given below.

Evidence of the Tooretz fortifications, in the early period, is furnished by the high rise of ground in the center of the town and

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the spacious park planted on it, named (the reason for it is not clear) “Schwinter Park”. This was not a natural rise but, as stated in the geographical dictionary of 1892, an artificial mound built up during the period of the warfare between the Lithuanians and the Slavs. Later (1747) a church was built atop the rise, first as a small wooden structure and later (1886) as an ornate stone edifice which cost all of 45,000 Russian rubles, according to the dictionary.

For the next 150 years after 1772, Tooretz remained under Russian rule. It was included in the “Pale of Settlement”, outside of which Jews were forbidden to settle anywhere in the Russian Empire. At the end of the First World War, Russia was forced to forego the western part of Byelorussia in favor of the new Poland. As a result, Tooretz came under Polish rule in 1921 and remained there until 1939, when the Russians again took over the western part by virtue of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact at the outbreak of the Second World War. Since then, except for the German occupation (1941 – 1944), Tooretz has been within the borders of Soviet Byelorussia.

The Jewish Community of Tooretz

It is difficult to pinpoint the beginnings of Jewish settlement in the town. Its community records were probably burned in the fires which periodically swept the town. Some information may nevertheless be garnered from various encyclopedias and collections, particularly from the records of Lithuanian communities gathered by the renowned historian, Prof. Shimon Dubnow, and from the Book of Lithuanian Jewry, published in Israel in 1960.

These sources indicate that there was an independent Jewish community in Tooretz in 1566. The community existed up to the Holocaust, that is, 400 years.

The relative size of the Tooretz community in its early days may be gathered to some extent from the amount of taxes levied on it by the Lithuanian Communities Committee, as part of the total sum of the per capita tax levied by the authorities of Lithuania. The geographical dictionary of 1893 states that, in 1717, Tooretz paid a per capital tax in the amount of 340 Polish zlotys. Prof. Dubnow's records contain the proceedings of a conference called by the Lithuanian Communities Committee in 1752, according to which the Committee apportioned a head tax on the Tooretz community totaling 215 zlotys. The register states that the amount that the tax then due

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was from one to three zlotys for every Jews. This suggests that the Jewish community of Tooretz, in the second half of the 18th Century, numbered about 150 souls.

The community grew appreciably in the course of time. The Jewish Encyclopedia published in Czarist Russia states, on the basis of the 1897 census, that the current number of Tooretz's Jewish residents was 737, out of a total population of1,616. Part of this community growth should be attributed to the “bill of rights” granted to the Jews of Tooretz, as aforesaid by Kashitz. This document, which granted Jews the right to settle in the town, to build home and engage in commerce and the crafts, was discovered by change in the archives of the Kashitz family about 20 years before the Holocaust,when the Jews needed proof of their right to permanent residence, in the course of court action they had taken against the Christian residents voer the right to use the public pasture lands of the town. A copy of this document was furnished by the undersigned to the YIVO Institute in Wilno; it may, perhaps, be found in the new YIVO Institute in New York.

The First World War marked a sharp turn in the life of the Tooretz Jewish community. Many families left the town and went to live in Russian towns, as they fled from the approaching battlefront; also, the Pale of Settlement decree had been lifted, at least temporarily. after the war, the town was annexed to the territory of the new Poland. As the Polish authorities began exerting economic pressure on the Jews, many Jewish families immigrated to countries across the sea. The number of Jews in Tooretz consequently dropped to a total of 550 souls, on the eve of the Holocaust.

The Jewish community of Tooretz was destroyed in late summer, 1941. On Heshvan 13, 5702, the Nazi troops, aided by many local collaborators from among the Christians, rounded up the Jews, took them to the Jewish cemetery and there massacred all of them. Only a small group of males, fit for hard labor, was spared. They were taken to a labor camp in a town near Swershne. Some of them later escaped into the forest, to join the partisan groups fighting against the Nazis. Their remnants, scattered all over the world, many of them now living in Israel, are all that is left of our town of Tooretz.

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During the 19^th Century, the rabbinate of Tooretz was famous for its sages and scholars. Among the best known were Rabbi Eliyahu Hayyim b. Nahum Rabinowitz, author of Aderet Eliyahu, and Rabbi Mordecai, author of Darkhei Emet.

Another distinguished author, on matters of law and homiletics, was Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef Rabinowitz, who became the Rabbi of Tooretz in 1884, having served in the rabbinical court of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman in the neighboring community of Mir; several of his manuscripts were published in the State of Israel. His son, rabbi Shraga Feitel Rabinowitz, escaped to the United States on the eve of the Second World War and was named rabbi of a Brooklyn congregation.

Rabbi Yitzak Yosef Rabinowitz passed away at the end of the First World War and was succeeded by his son–in–law, Rabbi Shmuel Markowitz, a product of the Telshe Yeshiva. When Poland was taken by the Soviets, he fled to Wilno and perished, together with his family, in one of the roundups by the Germans in 1941.

The Tooretz community, under the leadership of its rabbis, was suffused with the Jewish tradition of learning. The children received their primary schooling in the heder. Later on, religious education left some room for worldly knowledge, as well. In his memoirs, Israel's third President, Zalman Shazar, tells about the attempt to merge the two (Kochvay Boker, Tel–Aviv, 1950, pp. 82–84). He recalls a young “Talmud virtuoso”, also proficient in Russian, German, French and Arabic who moved to Tooretz from Yeremitz, where he was a tutor in the estate of a rich Jew. He maintained a sort of dormitory in his home for his students, and introduced a revolutionary system of education, Talmud plus secular studies. Shazar himself attended this “school” one month before his Bar Mitzvah in 1902.

Tooretz had two synagogues, a bath–house, purification bath and a cemetery, as well as several charitable institutions.

Among the better known families in Tooretz was the Rozowsky

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Mordecai Rozowsky

In all my travels, my thoughts always go back to my home, town, Tooretz, its streets and alleys, the modest wooden houses and the more pretentious brick homes. I remember its people, the hardworking artisans and the “privileged” storekeepers, waiting for customers.

Several of my townsmen made a living from writing Scrolls of the Torah, which were sent to America. These “scribes” didn't earn much, but their work was steady.

The Jewish community was one big family, sharing joys and sorrows, everyone turning out for a wedding or a birth, visiting the sick, and escorting the departed to their final resting place. And, like in a family, there were quarrels and disputes, usually about how the community would be run best. There was no such thing as indifference.

Perhaps this is why Tooretz, so small in numbers, had so many

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lively and active institutions, amazing in the scope of their activities. The community organized a bank, a night vigil of the sick (to let the family get some rest); the young folks set up a circulating library of books in Hebrew and Yiddish, and at times they put on dramatic performances to raise funds for some public enterprise. Audiences gathered to listen to speakers on Zionist, Jewish and worldly matters.

Elections – to anything; the Polish Sejm (Senate), community councils, Zionist bodies, and the like – always aroused a fervent flurry of excitement. The young people were particularly enthused, and they worked in the campaigns as though the success of the movement depended on their efforts.

The men who had at one time attended a yeshivah met every evening for a “page of Gemarra” with the rabbi. This gave them tremendous spiritual pleasure.

The focal point of the town were the two synagogues, where people came for prayer and also for public meetings. The synagogue was the “Parliament” of Jewish Tooretz. The time devoted to the reading of the Torah was used regularly by the more avid “Parliamentarians” to slip out into the corridor an there voice their opinions of what took place during the preceding week, anywhere in the world and, needless to say, in Tooretz. The formal matters of the community were decided at meetings in the home of the Rabbi; these meetings were particularly lengthy on winter Saturday nights.

Friday afternoon was homecoming time for many Jews of Tooretz who had been out all week peddling to the villagers. As the Sabbath arrived, candles sparkled in every home, and the streets were filled with Jews going to the synagogue – religious Jews, semi–religious Jews, all of them sharing this festive family occasion. In winter, the townspeople gathered again in the synagogue, after the meal, to listen to dissertations by the Rabbi. The young people had their own cultural group.

Poor as the Jews of Tooretz were, they were always ready to give some of their meager means to charity. They aided each to tide over hard times. And they had a passion for study and learning, from the popular legends of the sages to the tomes of the Talmud.

When we were young, we thought Tooretz was too confined. We dreamt about the big, wide world. Now, as we look back, we realize that, despite all its faults and shortcomings, our town possessed real spiritual values, which command our respect and intensify our yearning for that vanished world.

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Right to left: Peshe Lubetsky, Zalman Hoffman, Miri Bat Haim, Leizer Berly Lubetsky, Yaacov Trembitsky (the tailor)

Obrina, the avenue of chestnut trees on the way to Yeremitz Right to left: Miriam, Pinhas and Shulamit Mendelowitz

A farewell party for Shmuel Eliezer Turetsky (Zvieli at center) on his aliya in 1935

In 1934: (seated, right to left) Feivel Kaban, Zecharia Bernstein, Shmuel Sliezer Turetsky (Zvieli), Uri Shimonovitz, Dov Turetsky, Uri Yitzhak Yalovsky (Standing, right to left) Hana Velitovsky, Avrahm Chitovitz, Moshe Yaacov Mendelewsky, Aharon Nagnivitzky

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