The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [72]
Talmud Torah Jewish day school for boys that has a number of teachers and teaches the classic Jewish religious texts.
Tzimmes Baked dish of mixed ingredients like chopped carrots, dried fruit, and meat.
Tzitzis Tassels on the corners of prayer shawls.
Yom Kippur Day of Atonement; the most important day on the Jewish calendar.
Zmires As used here, Sabbath songs.
CHRONOLOGY
1791 Czarina Catherine the Great establishes Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement, an area that eventually extends from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
1795 The last of three partitions of Poland leaves Poland’s eastern lands, including Volyn province in which Trochenbrod will arise, in the hands of Russia’s Catherine the Great and the czars who follow her.
1804 A decree of Czar Alexander I permits Jews to live only in larger towns and cities of the Pale of Settlement. The decree also exempts from harsh taxes and other discriminatory laws Jews who engage in agriculture on unused land. In the years following this decree the first individual Jewish families settle in the marshy Trochim Ford clearing.
1813 The first baby is born in Trochenbrod.
1820 An organized group of Jewish families from cities in the surrounding area joins the earlier Trochenbrod settlers.
1827 Czar Nicholas I issues a decree that conscripts Jewish boys into the Russian army until age forty-five. Again, families of Jewish farmers on unused land are exempted. In response, there is a new surge of Jewish settlement at Trochenbrod and outright purchase of the land by the settlers. The United States is just over fifty years old.
1828 Approximately at this time a group of twenty-one families of Mennonites establishes the villages of Yosefin and Sofiyovka near Trochenbrod. They begin to abandon these settlements several years later.
1835 Another decree from Czar Nicholas I requires rural Jews to be in agricultural “colonies” and have passports and permits to travel. Trochenbrod is formally recognized as a Jewish agricultural colony and given the name of the former Mennonite village, Sofiyovka.
1837 Ignatovka, also known as Lozisht, is established near Trochenbrod as a sister Jewish agricultural colony.
1850 A new decree outlaws Hasidic dress. From this point on Trochenbrod is gradually de-Hasidized, though it remains strongly religious.
1865 Another Czarist decree allows Jews to change their status from farm villager to town dweller without giving up their land. The Jews of Sofiyovka petition for and are granted town status; Ignatovka remains a colony.
America’s Civil War ends.
Tolstoy begins publishing War and Peace in serial form.
1880 Trochenbrod begins a process of steady economic diversification, modernization, and growth, increasingly transforming itself into a real town and regional commercial center. This process continues until the First World War.
The first Trochenbrod immigrant goes to the United States.
1882 Czar Alexander III enacts the “May Laws,” highly oppressive anti-Jewish regulations that restrict where Jews can live, how many can receive higher education, and the professions they are allowed to practice. These regulations remain in effect until the 1917 revolution, and are one factor encouraging massive Jewish emigration from Russia during that period.
1885 Heavy emigration from Sofiyovka begins and continues to 1940, except during the First World War. Trochenbroders immigrate to North and South America, and after the First World War also to Palestine.
1897 Trochenbrod and Lozisht have a population of close to sixteen hundred Jews. Trochenbrod begins to have light industry, begins to modernize, and begins to diversify into a larger array of economic activities. The economy of the entire Pale of Settlement becomes more dependent on industrial production.
1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes president of the United States.
1904 The Russo-Japanese war spurs illicit emigration of many Trochenbrod men