[Page VII]

Several years ago in the home of my friends Liuba and Mark Yoaviler I met a couple by the name of Tauber, who had come from Israel. In our conversation, it appeared that Mrs. Kreina Tauber (whose Hebrew name was Etrah Tauber) came from Vitebsk, loved Vitebskers, and wished to meet with Vitebskers in America. She also told me that she had addresses of two Vitebskers. One of them—Shmuel Abramson, a young friend of her brother Yisrael Ripin, lived in California. The other, H.A. Abramson, lived in New York. She did not know that the former was my brother Shmuel and the second was—little me. From my brother I had heard about his friend Yisrael Ripin, the idealistic Zionist who had worked with him in the pioneer movement until they both left Vitebsk. My brother went to California and Ripin—to Israel.

I desired to fulfill the mitzvah of welcoming guests, so I invited Mr. Etrah Tauber to one of the meetings of the “Vitebsk Benevolent Association”, where I was a member. Mrs. Tauber came with her coworker. They gave our companions a hearty greeting from the Vitebskers in Israel, told about their difficult and intense situation, and about the great work of building that occupied the Yishuv. She also told us that in Israel had passed away a well-known Vitebsk community leader, Rabbi Yisroel-Zev Wolfson, who left behind a manuscript of several hundred pages about Vitebsk, and people who had read this memoir reported that it was a fundamental and interesting work. Our guests were received in a warm and friendly way. They were listened to

[Page VIII]

with interest. They were thanked in a moving way, as happens among those who are close but have been separated by fate.

Speaking of Wolfson's memoirs, they stressed that they would very much like if those memoirs were published, but they could not see how that was possible in the current difficult, tense situation in Israel. They would like our help.

The Tauber family, community workers and very warm people, befriended me; and when we spoke together, our central topic was Wolfson's memoirs. When they returned to Israel, Mr. Tauber died suddenly. I did not hear from Mrs. Tauber again, but her brother Yisrael Ripin began to bombard me with letters about Wolfson's memoirs, how urgent it was to have them published, but he could not do it alone. If I—he wrote—could get them two tons of paper, they would not only have enough paper for the book but also for other publications. At that time paper was not manufactured in Israel. After a short deliberation, I undertook the “business.” Meanwhile, the “Organization of Emigrants from Vitebsk and Vicinity in Israel” had decided to put out a Yiskor Book with the title “The Book of Vitebsk,” in which, in addition to Wolfson's memoirs,” there would be other writings about Vitebsk. The committee asked me to undertake some essays about the important writers Yakov Lestchinsky and Grigori Aronson. This request, too, I honored.

Through these negotiations, I learned that the book would be produced in Hebrew. For me it was news that the memoirs had been written in Hebrew, and simultaneously it was a disappointment, since I knew how few of our landsmen, and possibly even our landsmen in Israel, could read and understand a Hebrew book. Generally in a city like Vitebsk, that teemed with Jewish life. Where most people spoke and read and lived in Yiddish, only a special few lived through the Hebrew language, and only a few of our fellow citizens could read and derive pleasure from a Hebrew book. If this book were truly to be a Yizkor Book for a great, destroyed Jewish settlement, where the

[Page IX]

predominant language was Yiddish, it should be in the language in which Jews lived. So we decided to publish “Vitebsk Amol” [“Vitebskl of Old”] in Yiddish.

I discussed this with my dear friends Grigori Aronson and Yakov Lestshinsky. They agreed with me, and at my invitation, they agreed to edit the book. In order to give the enterprise a community character, I went to the landsmanshaft, to the “Vitebsk Benevolent Association,” to which I had the honor to belong, as well as to the Vitebsk Alliance, branch 224 of the Worker's Circle via my old friends and companions Sam Agelof, Barnett Miringof, and Morris Slavin, and to other friends and acquaintances. Both organizations were receptive and elected their most important and most active members to work on the book committee that had been established.

I will take this opportunity to thank first the “Vitebsk Benevolent Association” for its generous and active members of our book committee: Louis Horowitz, Sam Leon, Jacob Levinson, Louis Naumov; the Vitebsk Alliance, branch 224 of the Worker's Circle: Sam Agelof, Berke (Barnett) Miringof, Morris Slavin, the Women's Club of branch 224, and the individual members of the book committee: Shmuel Abramis (Abramson), H. Levin, Ida Seltzer, Vera Kaplan, and the artist Marc Chagall; the friends and supporters: Mrs Natalia Rakolin (widow of our departed friend Dr. Mendel Rakolin, a”h), his brother Avraham Rochlin, my relatives—the families from California: Goldstein, Schechter, Niemoitin, Markovitsh, Beller, my dear friend and fellow editor from the “Kinder Journal) and manager of the “Matanos” publishing house—Lippa Lehrer, my dear friend Mendel Elkin, Sh. Shev, all coworkers and everyone else, known and unknown, who responded to our call. And finally, finally, my dearly beloved friends, the editors Grigori Aronson, Yakov Letchinsky, Avraham, Kuhn. For me it was a privilege and truly a joy to work with them. To all of these, and to those whom I do not remember—my deep and sincere thanks and appreciation.

May I also recall that the chief credit for the initiative came from the Vitebsk Committee

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in Israel, “The Organization of Emigrants from Vitebsk and Vicinity in Israel” and its generous, energetic, truly dynamic activist—friend and companion Ripin. To the whole committee, with him as its leader, congratulations.

I do not know if this work has totally succeeded. This I will leave to the judgment of readers. But it is certain that all of the above-mentioned friends spared no time, energy, and resources in creating a beautiful memorial of a great Jewish settlement that lived a colorful and spiritually rich life, that shone with its spiritually rich administrators, and that had a great influence on Jewish life far, far beyond the borders of the city and country—a great Jewish settlement, that the evil ones and murderers, may their names and memories be obliterated, destroyed. May their souls be bound in the bundle of life.

The sad honor that fate has given to this generation to put out such Yizkor Books for destroyed Jewish cities should not be repeated in our time or in future generations, not by our tortured people and not by any other people in the world.

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The purpose of the book “Vitebsk Long Ago” is simple and clear, so we can be satisfied with a brief statement. All of us who are interested in preserving the memory of our destroyed cities and towns, but especially Vitebskers in America, who are intimately bound to their hometown of Vitebsk, have felt a duty to create a monument to their former dwelling, which was so horribly exterminated.

Earlier, people could visit their old home, seeing the fates of their relatives and friends. But an Iron Curtain has descended and we have been isolated, cut off from our old home. Time will show that the years of being cut off and isolated will weaken the nearness and landsmanshaftliche feelings, erasing from memories the youthful dreams and aspirations for a free and just life. So we thought. But truthfully, interest in our former home has not weakened. And our youthful years have not been erased from our memories. In the numerous and colorful descriptions and memories in this book, our old home of Vitebsk and its people, with their political, community, and cultural movements, shine forth—the holy community, which the enemies of Israel, the horrible killers who drank its blood, stands before us. We present this holy community in our modest monument.

The program for this book was, from the beginning, quite broad. We strove to present a multisided, objective, unprejudiced picture of Vitebsk. We wanted to present the history of the Jewish community, from its rise until the Bolshevik revolution, to describe the development of the social-economic structure of the Jewish population in

[Page XII]

Vitebsk and its role in the surrounding economic life. We took on as a responsibility to to present in a detailed away the new time in Jewish life from the end of the 19^th century until the second Russian Revolution in 1917—all the Jewish community, cultural, religious, nationalistic streams and movements. We strove to characterize the participation of Jews in the general movement toward freedom, and especially at the time of the first Russian Revolution in 1905—at the time of much emigration to America. We wanted to recall a roster of real leaders that the city of Vitebsk produced and who also got a reputation beyond the city's borders.

In order to make this book about Vitebsk more detailed in historical material, we went to the well-known historian Mark Wischnitzer to ask him for an exhaustive work. To our great sorrow, his sudden death in Israel took him from us.

It is our duty to express our heartfelt thanks to: the Public Library of New York, the archive of the “Bund” in the name of Franz Kurski, the library and archive of YIVO and the library of the Theological Seminary, all of which enabled those working on the book and the members of the editorial staff to proceed successfully with their work. We also thank the Friends of Vitebsk in Israel who, in a mutual exchange, sent us important materials, among them the memoirs of Yisrael-Zev Wolfson about religious life and the Zionist movement in Vitebsk. We also take this opportunity especially to thank the daughter of Y.Z. Wolfson, Tzilah Wolfson-Honikberg, for permission to publish extracts from her father's memoirs.

Finally, our deepest thanks to our friend H.A. Abramson. His fervor for the project, his tact, his innate ability to unite people in a cultural project, his special dedication to “Vitebsk of Old”—all of these stimulated the work of editing and publishing. Our friend H.A Abramson hasa truly learned the recognition of all of our landsmen and of all friends of Yiddish culture.

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