The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [10]
The Jews of Trochenbrod were Hasidic Jews.7 In an 1850 decree the Czarist government outlawed Hasidic dress. The decree was resisted in Trochenbrod but nevertheless had an impact, and Hasidic dress and the practice of Hasidism itself slowly waned over the decades that followed. Yet the town always remained religiously observant. Even toward the end of the ninety years left to Trochenbrod at this point, when some young people became openly nonbelievers, everyone went to synagogue on Sabbath and observed all the religious holidays. It was required by the heads of families: no family would be shamed by having a son out and about when all the men in the town were at prayer in the synagogues.
At the same time that America’s Civil War was ending in 1865, Czar Alexander II promulgated a law allowing Jews to change their status from “farm-villager” to “town-dweller” without giving up their land. This time the idea was to allow Jews to keep their farms and return to cities and towns from which they could move about freely and avoid the permit system for ensuring they lived in their villages. But they had to pay a price: in the towns they would be subject to conscription laws. The conscription laws were no longer universal: now a quota of conscripts was set for each community. Those who were conscripted were still required to serve until age forty-five. The Jews of Trochenbrod figured that if they could convince the government to change Sofiyovka’s status from a colony to a small town they could stay in place while avoiding the hated passport and permit system for traveling to and from the cities, where they had relatives to visit and business to conduct. By this time Trochenbrod had begun selling its dairy products in the cities of Lutsk, Rovno, and Kolki.
Trochenbrod’s elders petitioned the government and were granted town status, figuring they’d find other ways to avoid conscription. This they did by employing tactics that were widespread in the Pale of Settlement: falsifying or avoiding birth records, hiding their sons or having them flee the town when government agents came looking for conscripts, sending their sons to faraway cities for long periods of yeshiva study, and regularly changing family names, so that every son born would be recorded as a “first-born,” exempt from conscription.
Nevertheless, the conscription problem created a dangerous situation for rural Jews. When the obligation to supply a son to the army fell on a wealthy town family, they could hire professional kidnappers to snatch another Jewish boy to serve instead. Gangs of such kidnappers, chappers they were called, roamed urban and rural areas looking for suitable targets. Trochenbrod lost a number of young people this way. In his memoir published in Israel in the 1950s, Trochenbrod native David Shwartz recounts a childhood memory—it must have been at the turn of the century—of a letter arriving from a stranger saying that he was looking for a brother he had not seen in many years. The brother’s name was that of David’s grandfather. The mysterious letter-writer eventually visited. He looked very much like David’s grandfather, they had a tearful reunion, and he stayed with his brother in Trochenbrod for a few days. But he remained a stranger. They could not really connect; there was a gulf of life experience that could not be bridged even by brotherhood. The visitor had been kidnapped by chappers as a youngster. He said he was a general in the Russian army and had been baptized, but now he was thinking of fleeing Russia and returning to Judaism. Then he left Trochenbrod and was never heard from again.
By 1880 Trochenbrod was visibly being transformed into a bustling little town. Behind