The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [18]
As the war wound down and Trochenbrod began the long process of recovering and rebuilding, the town was left in the hands of the Russians. In 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the typhus epidemic rippling through Eastern Europe struck Trochenbrod. After suffering years of hardship during the war, the people of Trochenbrod yielded easily to the disease and were strained to their limits to care for their ill family members. Terror and despair were in everyone’s eyes. Anguished parents looked on helplessly as rashes spread over their children’s skin, they began violently coughing and vomiting and crying out in agony, and finally coughed up blood and surrendered their exhausted bodies. Authorities boarded up the homes of families where typhus struck, believing that would help check the disease. Rabbi Moshe David Beider, too, was struck by the infection. On a damp fall night, as an early light snow fell and he was stumbling home from the house of an ailing family, my grandfather collapsed in the street and died.
1. More precisely, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
2. There were some rare exceptions, where Jews farmed land they had purchased in the name of a non-Jewish collaborator. Jews generally had not been farmers for nearly two thousand years. The explanations scholars give for this include government prohibitions on Jews owning land, government or local cultural occupational restrictions, the higher return to Jewish literacy investment that could be obtained from urban trades and professions than from farming, and conflict between Jewish religious practice and the demands of agriculture.
3. Also known as “Volhyn” and “Volhynia.”
4. Some of these Mennonite families immigrated to the United States in 1874.
5. The few remnants of Jewish farming colonies that still operated in this area after the Soviet Union was created were absorbed into Soviet collective farms and not heard from again. I found no record of any operating in what became eastern Poland between the wars.
6. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, in response to pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, the German-French philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association supported transportation of Jews from Russia to new Jewish agricultural settlements they established in Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere in North and South America (also in Palestine). On the whole, these settlements did not survive very long; most of the immigrants or their children moved to urban centers. In one case, however, a settlement named Rivera, in Argentina, does survive today—not as a Jewish town, but as a multi-ethnic town substantially smaller than Trochenbrod was.
7. Hasidic Judaism, or Hasidism, is a subset of Orthodox Judaism that originated in the mid-1700s in a town just southeast of Volyn province. Hasidism emphasized spirituality and joy as key elements of Judaism, in contrast with the typical emphasis at that time on religious scholarship. Different Hasidic sects organized around specific rabbinic leaders, called Rebbes. Hasidic men usually wore dark kaftans, white shirts, and dark fedoras or large round fur hats. Hasidism gradually became a worldwide subset of Orthodox Judaism, but by the early 1800s it was already the rule among Jews in Volyn and neighboring provinces.
8. Ritual slaughterer for kosher meat.
9. “Peace upon you,” a traditional Jewish greeting.
10. A kaftan worn for Sabbath and holiday services.
11. Tassels on the corners of prayer shawls.
12. A prayer sanctifying the Sabbath.
13. Slow-cooked stew, a Sabbath specialty.
14. Baked dish of mixed ingredients.
15. Coins given to children during the Hanukah holiday.
16. Spinning top used for Hanukah games.
17. Potato pancakes, a traditional Hanukah dish.
18. Festival of Lots, a happy