The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [17]
Trochenbrod immigrants went to the United States and settled in larger cities like New York; Boston; Baltimore; Cleveland; Pittsburgh; Detroit; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Columbus; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In South America, some went to Argentina and some to Brazil, but also to Venezuela and Cuba. In Argentina, the German Jew Baron de Hirsch established a Jewish colony called Rivera not far from Buenos Aires, to which he sent many Russian Jews, including a number of Trochenbrod families, for a better life. Some Trochenbrod immigrants went first to places in South America, to where their travel was paid by sponsors or where they had relatives, and after a period moved to the United States.
In 1910, a rabbi born Moshe David Plesser, who after a child or two had changed his name to Moshe David Pearlmutter to help his sons evade conscription, accepted a position as the Berezner Rabbi in Trochenbrod. He came from the town of Verba, about forty-five miles south of Trochenbrod, where his father was a rabbi and scholar descended from a long line of rabbis well-known in the Volyn region. A follower of the Berezner Hasidic sect, Moshe David jumped at the chance to relocate to the town that was now known among Volyn Jews as a place where, incredibly, being a Jew meant being what everyone else was. The Berezner synagogue was located toward the southern end of Trochenbrod on the west side of the street, and Rabbi Moshe David Pearlmutter moved into the house next door with his wife Bella and their eight children. In 1912 Bella gave birth to their ninth and last child, a son they named YomTov—holiday, a day of happiness. In order to have this child, too, recorded as a first-born ineligible for conscription, Moshe David, my grandfather, again changed the family name, this time to Beider.
In an article written in 1945 in Palestine by an immigrant from Trochenbrod, Moshe David Beider is remembered as the Chief Rabbi of Trochenbrod, though there was no such formal title, highly regarded by the townspeople. He was “a great scholar and very educated in matters of the wider world,” and was an ardent Zionist. He was known as a very personable man who was attentive to the needs of the people of Trochenbrod and had a special affection for its children.
World War I brought devastation and hardship to Trochenbrod, as it did to much of Europe. As the front between the Habsburg Austrian troops and Russian troops shifted back and forth through the area around Trochenbrod there was intense fighting and widespread destruction. The glass factory and several other small factories were destroyed, livestock were confiscated, homes and shops were looted, and remittances stopped arriving from relatives who had emigrated abroad. The economy of Trochenbrod was decimated; the people were terrorized and brutalized.
In late 1915, Habsburg Austrian troops pushed out the Russians, under whom Cossacks had been allowed to ransack Trochenbrod, pillaging, raping, and murdering. When the Austrians occupied Trochenbrod they at first requisitioned all food to feed their troops, returning only scraps to the townspeople, and they imposed forced labor, requiring everyone to cook or wash or sew or make leather goods or tend horses or in some other way support the army, even on the Sabbath. During the nine months of Austrian occupation Rabbi Beider continued his teaching programs for the children in order to give them structure and routine and purpose as best he could. At the same time he cultivated a good relationship with the Austrian commandant, with whom he was able to converse in German and discuss world events. He convinced the commandant that productivity would increase if he allowed the people of Trochenbrod to observe the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, have a more reasonable workload at other times, and improve