My shtetl \ Lepel. Lepel - Belarusian median Belarus g lepel

The center of the Lepelsky district of the Vitebsk region. The city is located on the shores of Lake Lepel, 115 kilometers from Vitebsk. It is connected by roads with Polotsk, Minsk, Vitebsk, Orsha and Ula. Here is the terminal station of the railway line Orsha-Lepel.

Lepel was first mentioned in written sources in 1439, this year the Lepel land was granted to the Vitebsk church by Prince Mikhail Zhigimontovich. In 1541, Zhigimont I the Old handed over the Lepel Island to the Vilna Chapter.

During the Livonian War, a castle was built on the island. The castle burned down in 1563, next to the ashes in the same year there was a "place" Lepel. Today it is the village of Old Lepel.

In 1568, Lepel was part of the possession of the Polotsk churchman Zenovich, later it was owned by the Polotsk voivode Dorogostaisky. In 1586, the Lepel lands were bought by Lev Sapega, who founded Bely (or New) Lepel, a city that we know today, three kilometers from the "place" of Lepel. A shopping center was moved here, a castle, a church and a church were built.

In 1609, the Old and New Lepel were donated by the Sapiehas to the Vilna Monastery of the Bernandines.

On July 3, 1812, Lepel was captured by the French and burned. After 40 years, the city received its coat of arms, reminiscent of the "Pursuit" - a silver horseman on a red field.

From July 7, 1941 to August 26, 1944, the city was occupied by German troops, who killed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. The day of the liberation of Lepel from the Nazi invaders is celebrated as a city holiday.

Lepel residents invite Belarusians and guests of the republic to take part in the July festivities "Kupalye", which regularly take place on the lakes Lepel and Svyatoe.

In modern Lepel there is a museum of local lore, founded in 1954. Exposition area 237 sq. meters, there are about 14 thousand exhibits of the main fund. Six halls housed expositions dedicated to the history of the Lepel region. Among the exhibits are objects of labor, decorations of the 8th-12th centuries AD, found during excavations of ancient settlements in the region, documents and materials about the revolutionary movement of the 19th - early 20th centuries, civil war, industrialization, repressions of the Soviet period. A special place is occupied by the exposition dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. Items of labor and everyday life, pottery, national clothes, folk musical instruments are demonstrated. Stuffed animals and birds of the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve are exhibited in the nature section.

The House of Crafts also works in the city, specializing in pottery and tailoring of national costumes. Visitors are given the opportunity to craft under the guidance of experienced mentors.

Guests of Lepel can stay in the private sector of the city or take advantage of the offer of the hospitable hosts of the estate "Priozernaya", located in the village of Stary Lepel. In addition, a few kilometers from Lepel, there is a hotel complex on the highway where you can not only drink coffee and have a snack, but also visit a small "museum" of old cars. In the Berezinsky Reserve, which is also located nearby, there are cozy houses for tourists.

Billiards, the restaurant "Volna", the cafe "On the Moon", where discos are held, work until late at night in Lepel. Roadside service is well developed, there are private cafes. Near the city there are specialized parking lots for heavy vehicles, parking lots for cars, service stations. Tourist equipment can be rented at the House of Life and the health and fitness center.

There are several parks in the city, beaches are equipped on the shores of lakes - changing rooms, gazebos, wooden statues of animals. There is an open amphitheater, a dance floor. An arboretum with exotic trees and plants has been laid.

Lepel is a town and the administrative center of the Lepel district in the north of the Vitebsk region with a population of about 18 thousand people. Located on the southeastern shore of Lake Lepel.

The rivers Ulla and Essa flow through the city and the roads to Polotsk, Minsk, Orsha and Vitebsk pass.

From Lepel to the regional center - 115 kilometers. The city is also connected with the regional centers by railway. Lepel is the terminal station on the railway line Orsha - Lepel.

Five reasons to visit Lepel

1. See the Lepel Tsmok

Tsmok, who lives in the waters of Lake Lepel, has not been seen for a long time. However, local residents are convinced that at a certain time it is still possible to see it.

A few years ago, a monument to the local tsmok was erected on the embankment. Vladimir Korotkevich described how the Lepelsky flower looked like in the novel “Christ Jumping in the Garden”. Outwardly, it looked like a seal shining in folds, only without wool, with a wide and elongated - seven and a half sazhens of Logoy - body and wide fins. At the same time, the head of a tsmok, resembling the head of a deer or a snake, sat on a long and thin neck. On it stood out huge, like plates, dull blue with green, glazed eyes and sharp, horse-sized teeth.

Lepel is sure that the tsmok should be one of the mysterious symbols of the region.

There are several other mysterious lakes in the vicinity. For example, the Dragon Lake, on which it is theoretically possible to build an entire tsmok residence. Or the Holy Lake, at the bottom of which, according to legend, there is a church - they say that in calm and clear weather, at a great depth of the lake, the dome of the shrine is visible and the ringing of bells is heard.

2. Relax on Lake Lepel

The Lepel tsmok no longer bites boats and does not eat fishermen, so the lake in the city center is actively used for recreation. Lepel Lake is the largest in the region. On its southern shore there is a city park with sculptures, turning into a sandy beach. Structurally, the lake consists of three reservoirs interconnected by straits: Kustinsky, City and Bely. The length of the coastline of Lake Lepel is almost forty kilometers. This is the third position after Nescherdo and Naroch. There are seven islands of different sizes on the lake. On one of them there is a boarding house "Lode".

3. Prepare tea in linden forests

Scientists explain the origin of the name Lepel in different ways. According to some, it is based on the Belarusian words "lepe" and "lepy" in the meaning of "lepshy, jumpers". This is confirmed by a folk legend about a wanderer traveling through the Lepel region. Once in these places, the traveler was surprised, saying: “Oh, how magnificent it is here!” At this place now stands the village of Pyshno. Having traveled further, the wanderer exclaimed: “Wow, and here is Yashche Lepey!” Since then, people say, the name Lepel has stuck.

Other historians adhere to the version that the name of the city comes from the Latvian "lepe" or the Lithuanian "lepele", which in both cases means "yellow water lilies". If we consider the Finno-Ugric origin, then the word "lep" is translated as "alder".

Many historians support the conjecture that the name was formed from the Latvian word "liapa", or "linden". The meaning invested in the name can be deciphered literally as "a lake among linden forests." If the latest version is correct, then this is a good reason to wander around and prepare fragrant and healthy tea in moderation in the linden forests around Lepel.

4. Approach the first monument in Belarus to Lev Sapieha

In 1586 Leo Sapieha bought Lepel from the Vilna cathedra and founded a new place three kilometers from the old settlement. Soon Lepel received the right to self-government and became a significant cultural and commercial center. On the 571st anniversary of the founding of Lepel, a monument to the Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania appeared in the city center. A three-meter bronze sculpture of Leo Sapieha stands on a granite pedestal. The chancellor is dressed in ceremonial kuntush and a cuirass with hetman's regalia - a mace and a gentry saber in his hands.

The monument in Lepel, performed by the sculptor Lev Oganov, appeared on the initiative of priest Andrei Aniskevich, rector of the church of St. Casimir.

5. Look at the tour horn and the oldest Belarusian pipe

To do this, you should go to the local history museum, opened in Lepel in 1953. The museum occupies a wooden building of the former office of the Berezinsky water system of the 19th century, where Yan Chachot, a native of the Grodno region, worked from 1833 to 1839.

The seven halls of the museum contain the history of the Lepel region from ancient times to the present. There are more than 12 thousand exhibits in the museum funds. On display are the tools of labor and everyday life of peasants of the 19th-20th centuries, a collection of clothes, musical instruments, ancient coins, photographs and postcards by the Lepel photographer Fidelman, seals of county and volost authorities of the 19th century, materials about participants in revolutions, civil and First World Wars, personal belongings and documents of partisans and liberators of the Lepel region from the Nazi invaders, paintings by local artists.

Among the most valuable exhibits is the oldest duda in Belarus. This traditional Belarusian musical instrument was made in 1877. The horn of the tour, a primitive bull, which is now considered an extinct species, is also kept in the museum. The last tour on earth died in 1627. The Lepel horn was found at the bottom of Lake Okono. Its length is 60 centimeters.

Story

Archaeologists date the earliest settlements on the site of modern Lepel to 9-6 thousand years BC. Mesolithic sites have been found on the southwestern shore of Lake Lepel. In the Peschanitsa tract, scrapers, chisels, knives, and axes were found, testifying to the occupations of the local people. During the Neolithic period, people settled on the island of Lake Lepel, at the mouth of the Essa River, on the southern shore of Lake Okono.

The settlements were part of the Polotsk principality. The local lands were an important point on the trade route from the "Varangians to the Greeks." As part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the settlement was first mentioned in chronicles in 1439. In honor of this, a memorial stone was erected in the center of modern Lepel. The village and the estate of Old Lepel in the first half of the 15th century were located on the island of Lake Lepel and belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. During the Livonian War, a fortified wooden castle was built on the estate. The town of Lepel on an island with a castle and a trading port appeared on the map in 1563. Now it is the village of Old Lepel.

In 1586 the estate became the property of the Chancellor Lev Sapieha. The new owner built Bely, or New Lepel, three kilometers from the old settlement and made it a trading center. Having received the Magdeburg Law, Lepel began to develop rapidly.

As a result of the second division of the Commonwealth, Lepel became part of the Russian Empire. In 1805, the construction of the Berezinsky water system was completed, connecting the Dnieper and the Western Dvina. Part of the artificial waterway ran along the Esse River, Lake Lepel and the Ulle River. Being connected with the main water transport arteries, Lepel has become a developed economic and cultural center. In the same year, by imperial decree, the town received the status of a county town. Lepel developed at the expense of industry - bricks, wine, beer, and cardboard were produced at the Lepel factories. However, the main source of income was logging and timber trade. The directorate of the Berezina water system was located in Lepel, one of whose employees was Jan Chachot. The system lost its significance after the construction of the Riga-Oryol railway. Now the Berezina water system has been given the status of a historical monument.

During the war of 1812, Lepel was burnt down. During the 19th century the city was restored. In 1852, Lepel received the coat of arms "in the red field Chase". At the beginning of the 20th century, there were about eight hundred buildings in Lepel, 12 small enterprises, a weather station, a library, religious buildings belonging to various denominations, a library, a printing house, seven educational institutions, including the Mariinsky Women's School. Fairs were held in Lepel four times a year.

During the First World War, Lepel was occupied by German troops.

March 25, 1918 Lepel became part of the BNR. On January 1 of the following year, the city became part of the BSSR, and 15 days later became part of the RSFSR. In October, power changed again, and the city was subordinate to the Polish authorities until mid-May 1920.

In 1924, Lepel became the district, and later - the district center of the BSSR. The following year was marked by the construction of a section of the Orsha-Lepel railway. A railway station was opened in the city.

During the Second World War, Lepel was under German occupation. On July 6-10, 1941, Soviet troops unsuccessfully launched an offensive in the Lepel direction, which went down in history as the "Lepel counterattack". In the occupied Lepel, a prisoner of war camp, a ghetto, a sabotage and reconnaissance school and the headquarters of one of the secret field police groups were organized. Lepel was liberated on June 28, 1944 during the Vitebsk-Orsha operation by the troops of the 1st Baltic and 3rd Belorussian Fronts. Lepel was awarded the pennant "For courage and perseverance at the watch of Vyalikay Aichynnay Vayna".

Burned during the war, Lepel was quickly restored. Now it is an industrial and commercial city. Among the well-known enterprises are the Lepel Dairy Canning Plant, which manufactures products under the Lepelka brand, a bakery and a flax factory.

What to see?

Lepel adorns the wooden building of the Church of St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa built in 1841-1844. The Orthodox chapel of St. George appeared in Lepel in 1900. The stone church of St. Casimir in the style of classicism was erected a little later - in 1857-1876.

The once lively Berezinsky water system is now recognized as a historical monument. The first Lepel Canal, 8 kilometers long, with two locks, and the second Lepel Canal, two hundred meters long, with one lock, have survived. The Lepel hydroelectric power station on the Ulla River, put into operation in 1958, has also become an attraction.

An architectural monument is a brick building of the former wine-cleaning warehouse. The estimated date of construction is 1897. The railway depot building is an architectural monument of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The first monument in Belarus to Lev Sapieha appeared in Lepel. It was installed in 2010.

The silhouette of modern Lepel is partly formed by historical buildings at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It will be interesting to walk along the burial places in Lepel. The city has an old Jewish cemetery, as well as a Catholic cemetery with a gate and a gravestone chapel from the century before last. And walking along the embankment of Lake Lepel, it is worth stopping at the sculpture “Lepelsky Tsmok”, the image of which was taken from the works of Vladimir Korotkevich. In Lepel, there is a house of crafts and a house of culture, in which the Poshuk folk theater operates.

Events

In August, Lepel hosts the international festival of mythology "At the Gosci da Lepelskaga Tsmok". It is held in the Tsmoka tract in the city park on the shore of Lake Lepel. In addition to the musical program, there are locations with fun for children, folk crafts, national cuisine, and traditional dances.

In autumn, the Lepel Readings are held at the local history museum. The scientific and practical conference is dedicated to the history and culture of Lepel and the region.

Celebrities

The doctor and Belarusian national leader Frantisek Petkevich was born in Lepel, known in the press under the pseudonym Franuk Markotny. He became a popular doctor in the Polish Krynki, where he headed the local hospital. A native of Lepel is Karl Solenik, an actor who stood at the origins of the Ukrainian realistic theater. Film director Vladimir Motyl is from Lepel. Among his directorial works are "Children of the Pamirs", "White Sun of the Desert", "Star of Captivating Happiness".

What to bring

An indispensable souvenir from Lepel is everything related to tsmok, which has become a real brand of the region. In the museum of crafts, it is worth taking a closer look at the products of folk craftsmen. According to one version of the origin of the name Lepel, it is based on the word "sculpt", associated with pottery. Dairy products from Lepelka may well become a gastronomic souvenir from Lepel.

Where to eat

You can have a bite to eat in Lepel at the restaurant "Volna", in the bar of the hotel "555", in the cafe "Spring", cafe-dining room of the boarding house "Lode".

Where to stay

The hotel "Lepel" was opened in the city. There is a mini-hotel "555". In Lepel there is a children's sanatorium, as well as a sanatorium "Lode" on the island of Lake Lepel.

Prepared by Yana Braslavskaya

GINZBURG IN LEPEL

The Ginzburgs' interest in Belarus is not accidental. Barry's grandmother, Rivka-Genya Rebecca Borgak, was born in Lepel. In Ulla - grandfather Iosif Gutkovich. Relatives lived in the village of Gorodets - they rented an apple orchard, located on the banks of the Ushacha River; in the town of Kublichi; in the surrounding villages and towns.

In the region, at the end of the 19th century, densely populated by Jews, there lived many namesakes, and, most likely, relatives of the Gutkoviches. The surname Borgak was much less common.

Ginzburgs - father's parents - lived in the Mogilev region in Shklov.

How did Barry Ginsburg's grandfather meet his grandmother? Who today will answer this question that makes historians smile? It was, apparently, at the very beginning of the 20th century. Lepel was a kind of center of the surrounding shtetl world. Both business people and young people from Chashnikov, Lukoml, Beshenkovichi, Kamen, Ulla, Ushachi, Kublichi and other places aspired here.

In Lepel twice a year, according to the established tradition on January 30 and August 29, large fairs were held. They gathered buyers and sellers from cities, towns and villages. The fairs were noisy, beautiful, fun, crowded. Perhaps it was at the fair that the Lepel and Ul parents met and agreed on the engagement of their children. Or maybe they knew each other a long time ago, after all, the Lepel Jews of Borgaki, people from that very town of Ula. But, of course, they used the services of a Jewish matchmaker - a shatkhan, what kind of engagement would be without him. The same, with a cunning in the eyes, as in the famous portrait of Yudel Pan “Matchmaker. Menachem Mendel".

In 1904, a daughter, Esther, was born into the young Gutkovich family.

It was a very turbulent time in Russia. In 1905, two waves of Jewish pogroms swept across the country. The first - at the beginning of the year - as a response to the defeat in the war with Japan and the revolutionary upsurge, the second - in October - after the tsar proclaimed the Manifesto on the granting of freedoms. Jews tried to make responsible for everything.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with the defeat of the Russian army in the war with the Japanese. But the authorities had to find the culprit in order to deflect the blow from themselves. And then, as usual in history, they remembered the Jews.

Many Jews took part in the revolutionary movement in Russia, standing under the banners on which the words: “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” were written. These people were imbued with the ideas of internationalism, and least of all stood up for personal well-being or benefits for their people.

The pogroms affected both big cities and small towns. The authorities not only did not stop the thugs, but vice versa - they pandered to them. Those who had the strength and ability to leave packed their bags.

Joseph Gutkovich was the first to leave for America. Many did this: first, the man left, settled in a new place, earned money so that the family would have enough for the road, rented housing, and only after that, if everything went well, the wife and children set off on a long journey. For two years, tirelessly, Joseph worked as a painter, painted the facades of the house, and, finally, called his wife Rivka-Genya Rebecca and her daughter Esther to America.

In America, new immigrants from Belarus at first continued to work as painters, saved up some money, their business acumen was excellent, and opened a small shop that sold paints. This is how their family business started.

Rivka-Genya always dreamed of being a doctor. The dream came true in part. She learned and began to treat people, only as a pharmacist. The family opened a pharmacy.

Five generations of Ginzburgs live in New York. Now Merle and Barry have more than 30 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In 2005, the year of the centenary of the departure of Joseph Gutkovich from Belarus, they decided to show this country to their heirs and implement the project in the coming years. But they decided to come first.

The meeting was to take place in the "Warm House" at Elizaveta Dekhtyar's and promised to be interesting. The Lepel Jews wanted to see their fellow countrymen, who had become people in distant America. The Ginzburgs are successfully engaged in business and generously donate to the needs of the Jews of Belarus.

Merle and Barry wanted to see, hear and understand what kind of Jews they are in Belarus. Have they been preserved? We went through pogroms, revolutions, a terrible war, Stalin's camps. They did not hide under other people's names, they did not renounce their ancestors. And if you're lucky, maybe their relatives still live in Belarus now. And they will be able to meet them.

They sat at the same table and looked at each other. These views contained both questions and answers.

Propagandists and ideologists of various stripes - some out of fear, and some for money - have said so many absurdities about each other that it seems a miracle to see the interlocutor's normal eyes.

They never found a common language, in the truest sense of the word. The Jews of Lepel remember, and the elderly speak Yiddish among themselves. Ginzburgs are more familiar with English. Their parents knew Yiddish. I had to communicate through an interpreter.

I arrived in Lepel in advance. This is how our routes were formed. I traveled from Vitebsk, and cars with guests drove from Minsk, drove to Khatyn, stopped to admire the forests and lakes. The places here are really great. As if nature itself sought to approach the ideal of beauty.

Even in the names of settlements there is poetry. The city of Lepel is named after the lake of the same name, which in Latvian means “a lake among linden forests”.

The town of Ulla also got its name from the river, and in Lithuanian it means “rock”. True, I didn’t see any rocks, but the terrain is hilly, forests from high hills constantly dive into ravines.

Ulsk landscapes can be seen in the paintings of a fellow countryman, a wonderful artist Ivan Fomich Khrutsky. He was born here in 1810. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts, received the title of Academician. He spent the last decades of his life not far from these places in the Zakharichi estate near Polotsk.

I had time to wander around Lepel, to talk to people.

The city has a rich, more than four-century history. In 2005, it was 200 years since the Decree of the Russian Emperor Alexander I gave Lepel the status of a city. And there are many Jewish pages in this story. Moreover, the pages are bright and interesting.

The story of how Jewish children were taught

The very next year after Lepel became a city, in 1806, by the Decree of the governor's board of August 10, the issue of a Jewish school was resolved.

The authorities did not want to put up with the fact that Jewish children study in heders and yeshivas according to their own rules. Since they live in the Russian Empire, they should study like everyone else. (Although not everyone studied in Russia in those years, the goals and objectives of the authorities were clear). The Lepel mayor received an order to announce to the Jews, “that they, in the absence of a public school in the city of Lepel, should send their children to the public schools closest to Lepel - in Polotsk or in Vitebsk, if they don’t want this, then, according to the power of the Regulations on the Jews (paragraph 6) took measures to build a school in Lepel”.

Lepel Jews gathered in the synagogue and began to think. Of course, both cheders and yeshivas will continue to work. But those who saw the future of children in commerce or science, or just outside of their town, needed to get a formal education. Leaving children without a future is not Jewish. And sending minors to study in Polotsk or Vitebsk is a pity for the children, and it’s scary for them. Not everyone had relatives in these cities.

They thought for ten days, and on August 20, the Lepel Jews gave a subscription that they would build a Jewish school or a public school in Lepel.

At that time, 1233 people lived in the city, Jews - 624, that is, approximately half of the population.

Jewish education in Lepel for all the years, while representatives of this people lived compactly here, was put on the proper level. In 1888, an elementary Jewish school for men (with a craft class) was opened, which moved here from Nevel. According to the data for 1900, the merchant of the First Guild Ezek Rosenfeld, one of the richest people in Lepel, was the honorary guardian of the school, Mordukh Borukh Yunovich was in charge of the school, Israel Yudov Miron served as an assistant teacher, Osher Katz was the teacher of the preparatory class. All of them were graduates of the Vilna Jewish Teachers' Institute.

In 1898, a Jewish women's one-class school began to function in the city. On this occasion, the press wrote: “It is impossible not to welcome the opening of a public female Jewish school in our country, in which an urgent need has long been felt. It was opened through the efforts of the head of the local Jewish primary school, to whom this matter cost a lot of work. Through his efforts, the well-being of the school he runs was greatly raised (we are talking about Mordukh Borukh Yunovich - A. Sh.). A craft class was opened, an annual allowance of 200 rubles was requested. from the box collection in favor of poor students, and recently a free tea room has been established at the school, in which tea is given to children daily for breakfast. Local ladies participate in the distribution of tea, willingly fulfilling their voluntary duty. Unfortunately, the interest of society in this nice business is so insignificant that the maintenance of the said teahouse is completely unsecured. However, due justice should be given to the local pharmacist and his wife, who are keenly interested in the situation of poor students and provide the latter with active assistance.

(“Future” No. 3, 21/1/1900, p. 49)

Regularity, calmness and some kind of special kindness, which was characteristic of that time and people living in small towns, emanates from this newspaper announcement. And, despite the fact that more than a hundred years have passed, we also decided to restore justice and pay tribute to the Lepel pharmacist and his wife, who took care of the poor students.

An elementary male Jewish school (with a craft class) and a Jewish women's one-class folk school operated in Lepel until the 1917 revolution.

At first, the Soviet government did not prohibit the work of Jewish schools. True, everything in the education of children was now subject to the ruling ideology. And any deviation from it was punishable by law. For example, in 1924 in Lepel, members of the Evsektsiya* found an old man, a melamed, doing his usual Jewish business - he was teaching a child the Torah. But times were different in the yard - and a protocol was drawn up against the old melamed man and submitted to the court.

The Jewish seven-year school, in which teaching was conducted in Yiddish, still held out in Lepel until the end of the thirties. There were not enough textbooks in Hebrew, but the main reason for closing the school was different - the parents understood that the children had no prospects for continuing their studies at institutes and technical schools, where, naturally, teaching was conducted in Russian. Yes, and the state pushed for the closure of Jewish schools. And soon new signs "Belarusian", "Russian" school appeared on them. The teachers, for the most part, remained the same. But now, with a large Jewish accent, they taught in Russian or Belarusian.

The oldest burials (of those that I found) at the Lepel Jewish cemetery date back to the beginning of the 19th century. Most likely, there were also older ones, but matseivs (tombstones) during this time have sunk into the ground so much that it is difficult to see them, let alone read the inscriptions on them.

The cemetery is located on the very shore of Lake Lepel. In this picturesque place, the Jewish community bought land. On some monuments made of local stone, Jewish folk ornaments have been preserved (there were skilful masons in Lepel). The history of the Jewish community can be recreated from the inscriptions on matseyvas.

Merle and Barry Ginsburg on Lepelsky
Jewish cemetery. Photo 2006

The Lepel ancestors of Barry Ginzburg, the Borgaki and Gutkovichi, found their eternal home in this cemetery.

The Borgaks have lived in Lepel since 1874, in any case, it was here this year that Dov-Ber Borgak and his wife Esther had a daughter, who was named Rivka-Genya Rebecca (this is Barry Ginzburg's grandmother).

We do not have an exact date when the Ul Gutkovichi moved to Lepel. We can only assume that this happened around the same time. The first to move to Lepel was the son of Zalman-Yakov (great-grandfather of Barry Ginzburg), Girsh. And numerous other relatives followed him.

When big water rises in spring, it floods a part of the Lepel Jewish cemetery, and a fantastic picture arises before your eyes - tombstones growing out of the water. Particularly striking is the matseiva, which depicts an inverted jug with water pouring out of it. It seemed to me that a whole lake poured out of this jug - a lake of tears. However, this is fantasy.

And the fact that some of the monuments are under water all year round is a reality. In 1953, the builders began to build the Lepel hydroelectric power station. The object was, and is now, extremely necessary for the life of the entire region. When it was built, they did not take into account that the water level in the lake would rise by several tens of centimeters, and “snip off” a couple of meters of the coastal territory. The banks began to urgently strengthen, but no one paid attention to the Jewish cemetery. Yes, and was there before him the builders of a new life...

The cemetery is active. Burials are still being made. The new section of the cemetery has been inspected, the graves are well-groomed. Old graves exist on their own, no one looks after them, but they are not demolished with bulldozers, they do not clear areas for a kindergarten or a stadium in these places. On warm days, old burials are visited by lovers of alcohol. Matseyvas for them serve as tables on which drinks and snacks are placed.

Among the thousands of Lepel residents buried here are Boruch Rabinder and Abel Abezgauz.

About how Lepel was rebuilt after the fire

The fires did not spare Lepel. Built up mainly with wooden houses, it has been attacked by the elements more than once. Either houses caught fire during a thunderstorm, or someone inadvertently knocked over a kerosene lamp, and there were arson. The wind quickly carried the fire around the town. But one of the worst fires happened on the night of April 27-28, 1833. It began in the barn of the Lepel tradesman Jew Lurie. What Lurie was doing in his barn at two o'clock no one found out. But they wrote down the reason - "from careless handling of fire." Almost the entire city burned down: one Uniate church, one church, two Jewish schools, one government office, one almshouse, 102 residential buildings, 33 shops, 48 ​​sheds, 56 barns, two bathhouses, etc. The victims were 235 men and 318 women. The total loss reached a huge figure of 950 thousand rubles.

No one accused the Jews of deliberate arson. The commission investigating this fact reacted objectively and wrote down that "fire protection is poorly equipped to the point of comicality." The provincial lawyer officially asked the mayor: "How many and what kind of fire-fighting tools were there in the city?" And the mayor answered in all his uniform: "No more fire tools, except for two hooks and two pitchforks ...".

Strong winds quickly spread the fire to other buildings.

Lepel had to be urgently rebuilt and, naturally, businesslike and enterprising people got down to business. In 1837, the commission for assistance to the fire victims accepted 12 built brick shops through the mayor and the mayor. Seven of them were made by contractor Boruch Rabinder, and five more by Abel Abezgauz.

In 1921, a fire of the same terrible force fell upon Lepel. A significant part of the city burned out again. The descendants of Rabinder and Abezgauz, like other wealthy people, still lived in Lepel, but during the years of the revolution they lost their fortune and were now unable to rebuild the city. The state provided all possible assistance to the victims of the fire. On behalf of the city council, appeals and appeals were drawn up to the population of the city, with a call for help, which met with a response and support, as they said then "in the broad working masses." In the same 1921, half of the victims of the fire began to put up new wooden log cabins. But in the next two years, not a single house was completed, there was not enough money, and boarded up doors could be seen everywhere.

Famine clamped the city in its iron vise. People were not up to housewarming, not to construction. If only the children did not die of dystrophy, and the old people did not swell from hunger. Of course, the poor, large families, who did not have reserves for a rainy day, had the hardest time.

At this terrible time, American Jews were sent to Lepel, at the disposal of the Jewish community for distribution among the poor, 1000 pounds of flour. Help in America was collected among all the Jews, but the most active part in this noble cause was taken by fellow countrymen of the starving, those who had relatives overseas. Iosif Gutkovich was one of the most active members of the community and, of course, took an active part in raising funds to help starving people.

True, the help did not reach the right addressee. In any case, it was not Lepel's Jewish community that distributed American flour to the poor.

“Everywhere and everywhere the Yevsektsiya is trying to lay its hand on the cause of help.

... The Jewish commissariat appeared and demanded that they give him flour. The Jews decided to submit a written statement to the "executive committee" - a protest against the actions of the Jewish Commissariat and began to collect signatures for this purpose. Then the Jewish Commissariat announced that everyone who signed the statement would be immediately arrested. It worked. "Sedition" was suppressed, and the Jewish Commissariat received flour.

(“Dawn”, No. 16, 07/30/1922, p. 14)

Merle and Barry Ginsburg at the building of the former
Lepel synagogue. Photo 2006

At the end of Volodarsky Street there is a house that once housed a synagogue. The building was built under Soviet rule in 1924, when the street had not yet been named after the revolutionary and associate of V. Lenin, but had a poetic name - Prudovaya. This is one of the last synagogues built in Belarus before the atheistic frenzy of the 1930s.

Once it was one of the liveliest places in Lepel. Nearby were the shopping malls of the bazaar. Neighborhood, in today's view, is not the most suitable. It seems that somehow the spiritual and the material, the conversation of a believer with God, and a buyer with a seller, do not fit together. But let's remember how the towns were traditionally built. On the central square, which was usually located on a hill, there were market stalls, a synagogue, a church, and a church.

The market is not just for buying and selling. The market provided work for artisans, tenants of gardens and orchards, millers, fishermen, local peasants, “people of the air,” as Sholom Aleichem called them, who bought something, resold something, negotiated with someone - in general, a significant part local population. It was, in today's language, an information center, here they learned news, exchanged opinions, local philosophers and homegrown politicians argued "for life". Public opinion was formed in the markets. The town often lived on rumors, used "word of mouth" and, God forbid, get into the language of local gossips.

And the synagogue was engaged in education, supported traditions, followed (I beg your pardon, along with the market) morality. So the neighborhood, if you delve into the depth of the issue, is not at all accidental.

The Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg stores the funds of the Jewish section, formed in the same year to collect exhibits and study the position of Jews under tsarism and Soviet power. The famous ethnographer I.M. Pulver. His “Travel Notes” about his trip to Lepel in 1924 have been preserved: “The carpenters building the synagogue work on Saturdays, and in fact earlier hired goyim* could not work on that day. And everyone understands this and is not indignant, then, if you walk along Lepel without a hat or carry something on Shabbat, then sometimes you will hear sighs, and even curses and cries of “goy”.

(SEM, F. 2, op. 5, d. 1, pp. 28–29)

Much has changed in these years in the traditional Jewish life of the town. And this is especially noticeable in relation to the family, to marriage. Several mixed marriages took place in Lepel in the seven post-revolutionary years. The Jews have become more relaxed about this. In 1924, a Jewish woman from a respectable and wealthy family, with the blessing of her mother, married a Russian communist, and no one in the town was outraged by this. True, there were cases that today seem curious. A Jewess, the daughter of a rabbi, having married a Russian, persuaded him first to be circumcised, arguing that since he loves her, he must love both her people and her faith. (What Jewish women are capable of when they want to achieve their goal!). The Jewish youth of Lepel began to recognize more and more often a trip to the registry office for a wedding, and rarely anyone made a chupah.

But let us return to the synagogue, which in those years was called “new” in Lepel. It was made according to all the canons of wooden synagogues: a two-story building (for women to pray on the balcony), with a high sloping roof.

Lepel is looking for a new rabbi. The community receives proposals from a dozen rabbis from the surrounding towns and cities of Belarus.

And although the time is such that, as they say, “I’m not up to fat, if I were alive,” the community carefully considers candidates, sends its people to cities and towns to learn more about those who want to be rabbis, and then, of course, people are arguing (how can the Jews do without arguing!), who should take this place. The main criterion is comparison with previous rabbis. In Lepel they knew a lot about real rabbis.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Lepel community was headed by the brother of the founder of Chabad, Reb Shneur-Zalman, Rabbi Moshe ben Baruch. And although it was a long time ago, solid traditions were laid down, the bar was raised high. And it was kept at such a height in the following years by the rabbis of Berka Volosov and, of course, Joseph Bogatin.

From the petition filed by the Jews of Lepel to the local authorities in 1934, we learn that once there were 11 synagogues in the town. Of these, 7 burned down during fires.

(Museum of the History of the Jewish People. Jerusalem, RU 183)

Merle Ginsburg. Photo 2006

At the end of the 19th century, there were four synagogues, and in one of them Joseph Bogatin was a rabbi.

He was born into a family of hereditary rabbis, thirteen generations devoted themselves to the cause of spiritual enlightenment. Joseph studied at the Vilna Yeshiva, then at the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology of the University of Berlin. He receives a university degree with honors, and chooses the city of Lepel for his future activities.

Many Jews lived here, who needed his support, his knowledge. Wulf Itskovich Rabinovich was the state public rabbi of Lepel for some time. And then Iosif Bogatin began to combine the duties of a spiritual and government rabbi. His house was always full of people. Everyone had urgent matters for him, and he sought to lend a helping hand to everyone, help, including materially, although the money was barely enough for the needs of his own family.

“After the revolution, in the troubled times of the civil war and pogroms, Rabbi Joseph saved many Jews from persecution. He succeeded in this thanks to the good and business relations that developed in “quiet times” with the heads of the Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the city, writes his grandson, academician, doctor of medicine and philosophy Boris Benkovich. – Once the rabbi persuaded the bandits not to touch the Jewish family. The officer who commanded them bowed to the rabbi at the end of the conversation ... Great was the power of the preacher, embedded in the soul of Joseph Bogatin, if different people were subject to it. **

In 1918, Bogatin left for Saratov, where he was invited by the local community to become a rabbi. Several Jewish families, deprived of their means of subsistence, leave Lepel together with him. Not only Jews, but also Belarusians, Poles, and Russians came to the station to see Joseph Bogatin off.

The invitation to Saratov was not accidental. In 1915, during the First World War, when the Russian army suffered defeats on the fronts, its command, supported by the royal court, blamed all the troubles, as usual, on the Jews. Like, they are spying for the benefit of the German army and therefore they must be expelled from the frontline zone.

The lie was obvious. The royal entourage, and even military officials, knew the history of the country quite well. And, of course, they read that during all the wars, the Jews were not only loyal, but also actively helped the country in which they lived. For example, during the years of the Napoleonic invasion, Jews contributed to the Russian army everywhere, including in Lepel. When the French, having occupied the city, “threw out” the wounded Russian soldiers from the hospital, Jewish families took them for treatment. The Jews saved one lock of the Berezinsky water system from fire, which allowed the Russian army to carry out the crossing without great losses.

Barry Ginsburg. Photo 2006

And during other large and small wars, which were rich in the 19th century, Russian Jews showed themselves on the battlefield as patriots of the country.

But treachery and lies know no bounds. The Jews were evicted, and carts with refugees from the western provinces moved deep into Russia.

Dvosya Yakerson (Avgustevich), who lived until 1915 in Lepel, recalled such a convoy, stretching for many kilometers. The Lepel Jews settled in Pokrovsk, a small town on the Volga not far from Saratov. Dvosi's father, Moses Yakerson, kept a "factory" for the production of carbonated water in Lepel. With the equipment of this plant (some kind of boiler and gas tank), he arrived in Pokrovsk, which helped him at first to open his own business and somehow survive. I put the word "factory" in quotation marks, because Moses and his wife completely provided for all production. Many Lepel Jews settled in Saratov and Pokrovsk. Including families bearing the surname Gutkovich.

This was written to me by my grandson Dvosi Yakerson, associate professor of Saratov University, writer Semyon Avgustevich.

Saratov rabbi Iosif Bogatin died in the late thirties in the Stalinist camps.

Of course, it was not easy for the community to find a rabbi who would replace Joseph Bogatin, and in such years, it was not easy for the community.

Abram Ruvimovich Lubanov, who arrived in Lepel and took the post of rabbi, left a good memory of himself. We know about his Lepel period of life, unfortunately, not much. But even those facts that have come down to us, bypassing the repressive "slingshots", testify to the deep faith and courage of a person.

He was born in 1888 in the town of Sverzhen, Rogachevsky district, Mogilev province. He came from a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim. His youth and years of study in the Hasidic yeshiva came at a time of the heyday of Hasidism and the highest tolerance in the Jewish religious world.

In Lepel, the forty-year-old rabbi had to serve in much more difficult conditions than all his predecessors. Official propaganda, the ideology of the country, convinced people that religion is the opium of the people and that it serves the class of oppressors. These "loud" words brought results. Schoolchildren threw garbage into the open windows of the synagogue (they also behaved near churches, churches), staged atheistic marches, the state took away property, and considered the clergy themselves to be hostile elements.

The believing Jews of Lepel write a letter to the authorities of the city: “In 1923 (one in 1923, the other - on Volodarsky Street - in 1924 - A. Sh.) two synagogues were built by believers with active support from abroad. In 1929, most of them were taken to the House of Culture. The rest of the little one was heavily taxed. Then they captured her. At the same time, religious scrolls and books were thrown into the street” (MIEN, Jerusalem, RU 183).

Probably, this “capture” was still temporary, because by 1934 the synagogue along Volodarsky Street was still operating. And believing Jews write a new petition to the authorities asking them to leave the synagogue.

“We have only one small wooden synagogue left. She is also going to be taken away. There are more than a hundred believers in Lepel who come to the synagogue every day.” (MIEN. Jerusalem, RU 183).

In fact, there were much more believing Jews in Lepel. But not everyone demonstrated their adherence to Judaism, fearing trouble for themselves or, more often, for their children and grandchildren.

Rabbi Abram Ruvimovich Lubanov, of course, did not hide his convictions as best he could, resisted the atheistic frenzy, and, consequently, was a disgraced person.

On December 30, 1930, Lubanov Abram Ruvimovich, a minister of a religious cult, was deprived of voting rights. Together with him, his wife Tsilya Mendelevna Lubanova was also disenfranchised. In official documents confirming this fact, she is recorded not as the rabbi's wife, but as "his kept woman." The clerks of the new government were sophisticated, trying to humiliate a person. Another clergyman, Simon Movshevich Weiler, was deprived of voting rights. We can only assume that he held some position in the synagogue.

These people were on the same list of “disenfranchised” along with former merchants, smuggler Moses Zalmanovich Rabinovich, a former policeman, bailiff, collegiate assessor, kulaks, and the former owner of the plant, Nohom Shteingard.

For some time, Rabbi Abram Lubanov "lost sight" and we have not found documents about his fate in the late thirties - early forties. True, the time of the “thirty-seventh year” suggested where the disgraced person could go, “against his own will”.

Albeit indirectly, our assumptions were confirmed. In the same years, or even a little earlier, the Lepel synagogue was closed by the authorities, and a cinema was made in its building.

In 1943, a new rabbi, Abram Lubanov, appeared in besieged Leningrad. They tell such a story. Shortly before the rabbi, a new commissioner for religious affairs arrived in Leningrad. He noticed that the synagogue was open, but the rabbi was not. Deciding that this was a disorder, the commissioner remembered one rabbi who was serving a sentence in the camp, of which he had once been the head. They say that this is how Abram Lubanov ended up in Leningrad.

In the late 1940s, Abram Lubanov was arrested again and spent several months in the infamous Kresty prison. There he went on a hunger strike and obtained permission to receive daily kosher food parcels from home. In the 1950s and 1960s, the persecution of religion and its ministers did not stop. And, nevertheless, wedding ceremonies were performed in Leningrad, circumcisions were made. The rabbi himself was a rare unmercenary and, being content with a small salary from the community, he gave the payment for the performance of rituals and donations to those in need. Abram Lubanov lived with his wife and two daughters in a small room in the synagogue building. The rabbi died in 1973 at the age of 85.

How the Jews occupied the best street in Lepel

On July 31, 1835, while in Alexandria near Peterhof, the Russian autocrat Nicholas I approved Lepel's plan, writing the following resolution obliquely on paper: in 1788, but probably forgotten or released."

The bureaucratic machines then and now differ little from each other. Instructions go down the service ladder, and each official adds something to them (which is beneficial to him), and throws something away (if he does not want to fulfill it, or is not profitable).

In August of the same 1835, the Governor-General of Vitebsk ordered the establishment of separate quarters for Jews in all cities of the province according to plans approved by Empress Catherine II on February 21, 1778.

In Lepel, 13 quarters were allotted to Jews (according to data for 1864, the city was divided into 30 quarters), which was immediately reported to the Governor General. He approved the division and added the following: “Prohibition of Christian Jews having houses in quarters and Christians in Jewish quarters. What should be done should be according to the exact force of the last one drawn up from the highest command. If the buildings turn out to be built before his command, you can leave them there until they are completely dilapidated, forbidding, however, strictly any repair and alteration.

The Jews got Prudovaya Street, today, as you already know, Volodarsky Street. The place is not better, but not worse than others. In a small town, all the streets were both central and at the same time facing the outskirts. But on this street, probably, the number of Jews per square meter was greater than on the others, and therefore in Lepel they decided not to arrange a universal migration of peoples, but to legalize what they had.

Almost thirty years passed, and in 1863 the secretary of the Vitebsk provincial commission A.M. came to Lepel. Sementovsky and left such a review about his visit to the city: “The best streets are inhabited by Jews ...”

It looks like A.M. Sementovsky not only disliked the Jews, but treated them with complete hostility. He writes that they are untidy, careless.

“There are several Jewish houses that bear the names of “visitors,” further reports A.M. Sementovsky. - One of them claims to be a hotel, apparently, because an old billiards table is placed in one of the dirty rooms, and there is a box with the so-called "pie" in the doorway (Sementovsky tries to convey the word "cakes" with a Jewish accent - A. Sh.).

After reading the review of the secretary of the provincial commission, a natural question arises: “How did the streets where “unkempt and careless” Jews live become the best in Lepel?” After all, not the same they went to these people initially. Everyone began to live in equal conditions, when the city was divided into quarters on a national basis.

By the end of the 19th century, a rumor was circulating around Lepel that in the old days the Jews were given the best parts of the city for bribes. And looking at the beautiful shop windows, at bakeries and tea houses, at brick houses with large windows, they talked about this people, some with anger, some with envy, and some with admiration: "Everywhere they will be able to get settled."

The building of the "new" synagogue on Volodarsky Street was preserved during the war years, although it was rebuilt more than once after it. First there was a dairy. They probably decided that he would produce holy milk, which, thanks to the prayed place, would not turn sour.

And although after the war there was a minyan in Lepel, that is, the necessary number of Jews (ten people) to conduct services, and the believers elected Chaim Movshevich Slavin as their rabbi, and Ankhir Kastrinich went to all instances on their behalf, the Jewish community never officially registered and, of course, no one handed over the building of the synagogue to them.

After a more suitable building was found for the dairy, the two-story wooden house became residential.

We came to him with Barry and Merle Ginsburg.

Laundry was drying on the veranda, jazz music was heard from the window on the second floor, a ginger cat was sleeping at the door in the sun. The building of the old synagogue was touched by civilization, as evidenced by the dish antenna attached above the windows overlooking the courtyard.

Nearby, literally thirty meters away, is the Orthodox Church of St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa.

Once there was a law according to which in the Russian Empire it was impossible to build synagogues closer than 100 meters from Christian churches and synagogues should not have been higher ... But the church was opened relatively recently, and the synagogue has not been operating for a long time. And only historians know the law today. Everything was mixed up on the street bearing the name of Volodarsky.

At a time when numerous Gutkoviches and Borgaks lived here, Lepel was a half-Jewish town. So that my words do not seem empty, I will cite statistics for 1897, which states that 3379 Jews lived in Lepel, this amounted to 53.8 percent of the total population. Of these, 1,566 were men and 1,813 were women. According to the same data, 1,566 men and 1,813 women considered the Jewish language to be their mother tongue. That is, every single Jew considered Yiddish their native language. And what else could they count? For them, this question sounded simply strange and surprising. They spoke Yiddish with their parents, Yiddish with their children, and Yiddish with their neighbors. They simply did not know other languages ​​or spoke them with a large accent.

In the "List of those who have the right to participate in elections to the State Duma in the 1st congress of city voters in the city of Lepel" in 1906, Avsey Borgak, son of Berka, was recorded; Leiba Gutkovich, son of Israel; Elya-Dovid Gutkovich, son of Kopel; Abram Gutkovich, son of El Dovid; Itzka Gutkovich, son of Faivish; Sholom Gutkovich, son of Yankel; Berka Gutkovich, Eli's son; Zusya Gutkovich, son of Hirsh; Yudel Gutkovich, son of Itzik.

Avsey Borgak is the brother of Barry Ginzburg's grandmother, and Sholom Gutkovich is the grandfather's brother. And the rest of the Gutkovichi, judging by the names that are often found in this family, are related to each other.

In a similar "List" only at the 2nd congress of city voters in 1907, Abram Borgak, Berka's son, is listed; Itsko Gutkovich, son of Faivish; Sholom Gutkovich, son of Yankel; Zalman Gutkovich, Eli's son; Abram Gutkovich, son of Eli-Dovid; Zusya Gutkovich, son of Hirsh; Berka Gutkovich, son of Dovid.

And although almost 650 people had the right to participate in elections to the State Duma at the congresses of city voters along Lepel, and more than half of them were Jews, but only people who were noticeable, enjoyed authority among neighbors, those with whom they worked nearby, and at the authorities.

Almost all the old houses of the city are related to the Jews to one degree or another. I am convinced that few people know that there was once a hospital of Dr. Gelfand in the current House of Crafts and the Children's Art School. Even before the First World War, Aron Fraimovich Gelfand, a doctor who had previously been engaged in forensic practice, built a large wooden house on Dvoryanskaya Street and adapted it for the treatment of patients, even equipped an inpatient department with several beds. For treatment, Aron Fraimovich widely used medicinal herbs and various minerals. Several generations of Lepel residents remembered his selfless and disinterested work for almost two decades.

Now everything has grown. True, recently, thanks to the local historian O. Yanush, Aron Fraimovich was remembered on the pages of the regional newspaper Lepelsky Krai.

Did the revolution solve the "Jewish question"?

On March 7, 1917, the provincial commission from Lepel telegraphed: “The troops and the population of the city of Lepel and the county, unanimously joining the newly established order and government, send greetings to the army and government.”

Among those who signed the telegram to the Provisional Government was Alexander Iofe, head of the Lepel city police.

In Lepel, as well as throughout the country, many Jewish parties and various organizations were active at this critical time. And each member of these parties and organizations believed that he knew the only correct path that the country and its people should follow. People gathered for rallies and gatherings, arguing until they were hoarse.

At the beginning of October 1917, at the initiative of the Zionists, a Jewish electoral committee was created for the elections to the City Duma, which united Jewish organizations and parties of Zionists and Bundists. Wealthy homeowners stepped out of this committee and created their own List. The Jewish Joint Committee received 10 votes out of 22. Jewish homeowners received 3 seats. Among the members of the joint committee were 4 Zionists.

And very soon, at the end of the same month in 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in St. Petersburg, and Heine, Dobrovolsky, Naumov and Freiman entered the Lepel Military Revolutionary Committee.

There were quite a few Jews among those who made the revolution in Russia (and other countries), who welcomed it. The Jews believed that the revolution would solve their "national" question. Indeed, the Pale of Settlement was abolished, and (officially) the percentage norms for entering universities and academies were eliminated. Jews entered the government, became generals and directors.

The Jewish language (Yiddish) became one of the four state languages ​​of Belarus, court hearings were held in it, the inscription on it was on the national emblem of the republic, newspapers were published, and various official events were held.

Before me is the program for the celebration of the seventh anniversary of the October Revolution in Lepel. 1924

19-00. Evening at the theatre. Solemn meeting. Greetings from all organizations in Belarusian and Jewish.

November 7th. 12-00. Rally on Freedom Square. Procession to the grave of the fighters of the Revolution. In the evening, there is a performance in the theater - a revolutionary one-act play, a revolutionary staging and a performance by pioneers.

November 8th. In the afternoon - a meeting of handicraftsmen. A report in Hebrew about the October Revolution, in the evening at the theater - a play in Hebrew.

(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, o. 11, d. 4)

By a strong-willed decision of the authorities in the country, Hebrew was withdrawn from circulation, the scope of which was already quite small, and Yiddish was allowed for the time being. Jewish parties that were considered “bourgeois”, “nationalist”, “Zionist” were liquidated and the commissars from the Jewish sections of the Communist Party “straightened their shoulders” ...

However, the country needed Yiddish, Yevsektsii, Jewish collective farms, and national village councils for the time being, until the dictatorship got stronger and took everyone and everyone into its "hedgehog" gloves.

In the late twenties and early thirties of the 20th century, the surname Gutkovich was very common in Lepel. I met with many pre-war residents of the city, asked whether there were Gutkovichi among their acquaintances and received an affirmative answer.

Among the namesakes were wealthy people (by Soviet standards), and the poor, who observed the traditional way of life for Jews, and Komsomol members, communists.

I cannot say which of them was a relative of Iosif Gutkovich, who left for the USA. But I will tell you more about some carriers of this surname.

Zusya Girshevich Gutkovich, together with his wife Bunya and fifteen-year-old daughter Mirra, baked bread. It will be said loudly that he had his own bakery, and, nevertheless, on the day, he baked two pounds of flour (rye and looped) for sale. He had a patent for a personal industrial occupation and has been engaged in it since 1903. The Gutkoviches' bread was considered very tasty, and not only the neighbors who lived along Ozernaya Street, but also residents of other districts of Lepel willingly bought it. A pound of black bread cost 5 kopecks, a pound of semi-white bread cost 9 kopecks.

The state counted 700 rubles of annual income from Zusya Gutkovich.

(Zonal archive of Polotsk, fund 1288, op. 12, file 50)

David Mordukhovich Gutkovich took up shoemaking from a young age and sewed men's and women's shoes at home. He made a pair of boots in two days, it took the master a little more than half a day to make the boots. He worked six days a week, and, as befits a true Jew, he rested on Saturday.

Chrome boots from Gutkovich cost 3 - 3.50 rubles, chrome boots - 2.50 rubles.

And although Leitman's wife Eto Borukhovna also did not sit idly by, but kept a store (shop) that sold iron goods, the family, which had six children, did not amass wealth.

(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, op. 12, f. 49)

Gutkovich Israel Leibovich was engaged in leather dressing. The business was extremely profitable, and brought 36 percent of the profit. His son Samuel sewed horse harness from the skin that his father made.

Israel Leibovich wrote to the District Tax Inspectorate: “I am a working handicraftsman from my birth, there was no hired labor in my former workshop, but I myself worked with my children.”

(Zonal archive of Polotsk, f. 1288, op. 12, file 51).

Of course, it is impossible to write a general description for all the Lepel Gutkoviches. But hard work seems to have been a family trait of these people.

The Vitebsk charitable foundation "Hasdey David" helps 32 residents of Lepel, most of them elderly people. They lived a difficult life (and who had an easy one). These people deserve attention, kindness, participation, help.

I have been to Lepel several times on behalf of a charitable organization. I came with the program coordinator Roman Furman when he visited the wards.

Sara Abramovna Aronina is over 90 years old. Lives alone. The son is a retired military man from Minsk. Sara Abramovna is one of the first pioneers and Komsomol members of Lepel. She still has photographs of the courses of pioneer leaders, which were in 1927.

- Not all children studied at schools then. Educational programs were organized. We identified the illiterate and poorly educated of all ages. Those who could not go to the educational program were taught at home.

Sarah Abramovna has been in the Communist Party for almost seventy years. Apparently, in her youth she was a determined girl. And although now she can hardly move around the apartment, leaning on a stick, firmness is still felt in her character.

Since 1940, she has been at party work, in charge of the district committee sector both in the Lepel district and in the evacuation in the Penza region. And in 1948, when Stalin's anti-Semitic cases swept over the country, Sarah Abramovna was transferred to the social security department of the district executive committee.

…These people are from her generation. Sarah Abramovna knew many of them personally.

Boris Fidelman (1870–1941) and his son Rafail (1904–1984). Photochroniclers of the Lepel Territory. The Fidelman family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took hundreds of photographs of the city, canals, locks, bridges of the Berezinsky water system, and the people of Lepel. These photographs were included in the catalogs, preserved on museum stands.

– Has the photo archive of the Fidelman family survived? - I asked the director of the Lepel Regional Museum of Local Lore Alina Stelmakh.

– After the war, the Fidelman family lived in Leningrad. In the early nineties, we wrote to them, but received no answer. Either they moved out of the old apartment, or they left the country altogether. Maybe with your help we will be able to find out where the descendants of Boris and Raphael live, and whether their family archive has been preserved.

Lepel has always been considered a cultural city. This was facilitated by representatives of all the peoples who lived here. The Jews also contributed. For example, two Jewish orchestras functioned at once, competing with each other. Until 1917, there were two bookstores (they were also libraries) Mordukh Itskov Kapilman and Leiba Leyzerov Shulman. In the 1920s, a Jewish theatrical circle and a literary studio operated.

In 1927, the famous film director, Honored Art Worker of Russia Vladimir Motyl was born here. His film "The White Sun of the Desert" is one of the most famous works of Soviet cinema. Vladimir's father, Yakov, is an immigrant from Poland. In the thirties he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp on Solovki, where he died. The authorities sent the entire Motyl family north. One of Vladimir Yakovlevich's aunts went crazy there.

Vladimir Motyl's mother, Berta, is a graduate of the Pedagogical Institute. Her parents were shot by the Nazis as prisoners of the Lepel ghetto.

Another, perhaps the most famous actress of Soviet cinema, Faina Ranevskaya, also has Lepel roots. Her mother is a Lepel petty bourgeois. This was recorded in the “Book for Recording the Combination of Marriages Between Jews for 1889” by the Taganrog rabbi Girsh Zeltser: “The marriage was registered on October 26, 1889 (January 19, 1890 - according to the new style) between the tradesman of the town of Smilovichi, Igumen district, Minsk province, Girsh Khaimovich Feldman (26 years old) and a Lepel maiden of the Vitebsk province Milka Rafailovna Zagovalova (17 years old). In 1895, their daughter Faina Feldman was born, who later became an actress, and took a pseudonym after the heroine of Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard.

True, neither Faina Ranevskaya nor Vladimir Motyl ever came to Lepel in their mature years. Vladimir Yakovlevich in a television interview recalled his native city, but after the war, as he said, he "had no one to visit."

Lepel "roots" and one of the largest Pushkin scholars Boris Solomonovich Meilakh.

However, its famous countrymen did not influence the culture of the city itself.

The repressions of the late 30s affected the entire country, and there was no Jewish background at that time. It will appear later, in the late 40s - early 50s.

Before me is a list of the repressed Jews of Lepel. Not so big, if you do not take into account that each life is an entire universe.

Israel Aizikovich Levitan - director of the plant. Stalin changed the leading cadres in the Stalinist way. Through death sentences.

What prevented the regime of Leib Samuilovich Levin, I just can’t understand. When he was repressed, he was 82 years old. I don’t know if he understood what was happening ... And, nevertheless, the execution.

All conveniences were created for the Lepel NKVD officers - there was no need to carry the prisoners far. The sentences were carried out in the courtyard of the local prison.

The forty-year-old storekeeper of the industrial complex Samuil Tabiashevich Rosenberg was arrested on June 23, 1941. The Great Patriotic War was already underway, the Germans were rushing into the interior of the country, and the “authorities” were still carrying out the arrest plan.

Let's return to the "Warm House" to Elizabeth Meerovna Dekhtyar. Let's introduce you to the owner. Moreover, the guests are already at the table ...

Elizaveta Meerovna was born in the village of Krasnoluki, Chashniksky District. Her father Meer Simonovich Farbman was a shoemaker. On Lenin's call, that is, after the death of the leader of the revolution, he joined the party and soon became a nominee. (This was the name given to people who did not have sufficient education, but who proved their devotion to the new government. They began to be nominated for leadership positions). Meer Simonovich was appointed director of the local dairy.

The Farbman family had 11 children. It seems now - what a large family ... And then such a number of children did not cause much surprise to anyone.

Mom - Ekha Mikhelevna from the village of Checkers. In the pre-war years, many Jews lived in villages. In the Lepel district - in Gorki, Domzheritsy, Gorodets, and other settlements.

When the war began, two Jewish families managed to leave Krasnoluk to the east: Farbmanov and Shuba, the chairman of the village council. Firstly, they had, albeit horse-drawn, but transport. Other fellow villagers did not want, and could not, leave the Germans. They said: “What will they do to us?”.

After the war, Elizaveta Meerovna returned to her native places, worked as a salesman and accountant. She married Semyon Moiseevich Dekhtyar, moved to him in Lepel.

Semyon Moiseevich, or after all, by birth, Sholom Movshevich, had golden hands. He comes from a family of craftsmen. His father, Movsha Sholomovich, was a house painter. And this profession was inherited by her son. But before that there was a war that he went through without hiding behind other people's backs. Awarded with orders and medals. At the end of the forties, he came to the repair and construction department and worked there for almost 40 years until his retirement. Painter of the highest rank, awarded the title of "Honored Builder of the BSSR".

Semyon Moiseevich and Elizaveta Meerovna have three children. The eldest son devoted himself to military service, the other one lives in Israel. Daughter - Klavdia Semyonovna - from Minsk, teaches at a vocational school, "Excellence in Public Education of the Republic of Belarus." On this day, she was in Lepel - every weekend she visits her mother, often comes with her grandson.

When I was traveling by bus to Lepel, I got into a conversation with a neighbor. He told about his trip, about the “Warm House”.

He did not hide his admiration for the fact that someone takes care of the elderly and unsettled people, comes to their aid. But at the same time I was surprised:

“You don’t have unsettled old people. I have never seen Jews collecting bottles or digging through food waste.

I have no statistics on how many people of what nationality live below the subsistence level. I don't think there are any such statistics. Of course, everyone should strive to help. But if it is impossible to benefit all of humanity, lend a helping hand at least to your relatives, relatives, friends, neighbors.

Lena Isaakovna Lyubina came to Elizaveta Meerovna's house earlier than the others. Helped her with housework. She is a kind person by nature.

As a little girl during the war years, she was able to go east with her parents. I ended up in Samarkand. Papa Isaac Vulfovich made pottery. The family had three children. Mom and children were selling dishes. There were good ceramists in the Lepel region. Isaac Vulfovich is one of them. Back in 1905, the researcher of Belarusian history and folklore D. I. Davgyallo wrote in the essay “Lepel, a county town of the Vitebsk province”: “Pots and earthenware are made in Lepel, Beshenkovichi and Chashniki. It is remarkable that the dishes are sold not for money, but for grain - how much will go into the vessel.

In Central Asia, the Libins often sold dishes not for money, but for bread, or rather, cakes. In 1946 the family returned to Lepel. Everything is destroyed. No stake, no yard. We have to build. Where to get money? It was not about studying. And Lena, with two classes of education, went as a laborer to a regional procurement office. She loaded and unloaded wagons in the wind and in the cold. Husband Ivan Koroban was a submariner and died early at the age of 59. Military service affected health. Ivan Koroban wanted to be buried in the Jewish cemetery.

Now Lena Isaakovna is retired. She's not the type to walk around with outstretched hands or cry for life. But still, I would very much like the retirement years to be more secure and calm, so that there is confidence in the future.

Both Lena Isaakovna and her sister Raisa Yukhnovets, who worked as a salesman in Lepel all her life, did not accumulate wealth, did not make reserves for a rainy day, and today they are grateful to “Hasdey David” for their help: medicines, food rations, firewood.

Naturally, on Victory Day at the table, first of all, they congratulated a gray-haired yet strong man in an officer's tunic with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel and a full breast of orders and medals on the holiday. When he was given the floor, he said, addressing the Ginzburgs:

– I first met the Americans more than 60 years ago. It was in Germany, on the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, when the encirclement around the Nazis was closed by Soviet and American troops.

Isaac Emmanuilovich Pritzker from a military family. His father Emmanuil Abramovich served in the Kiev military district before the war, was a commander and shared the fate that I. Stalin prepared for many commanders of the Red Army.

Isaac ended up in a special school, then in the Suvorov military school. From the first days of the war, a 17-year-old boy, "attributing" an extra year to himself, ended up at the front. Then he studied at the Ryazan Artillery School and again to the front. He liberated Mogilev, Minsk, ended the war in Berlin.

And after 1945, Isaac Pritzker gave another 18 years to the army - he commanded an artillery battalion.

And then life made, at first glance, a strange zigzag. An officer, a city man, Isaak Emmanuilovich became the chairman of the Zarya collective farm in the Chashniksky district.

True, before that they had been given six months of internship in a strong economy. Isaac Pritzker took over a lagging collective farm and made him a millionaire. Almost like in the film "Chairman", where the main role was played by Mikhail Ulyanov. True, the prototype of the cinema chairman was Kirill Orlovsky. But the farms of Pritzker and Orlovsky at the first stage did not differ much from each other.

Then Isaak Emmanuilovich worked in the Chashniksky district executive committee as a state inspector for the quality of agricultural products.

- Why did you move to Lepel? he repeated my question. - My wife is from Lepel, and the town is beautiful, calm, I liked it.

Pritzker has both a son and two military grandsons - lieutenant colonels. Officer family.

After the "Warm House" we went to the village Chernoruchye. Here, not far from the highway in the forest, there is a monument.

I went to Chernoruchye for the second time. Six months ago I was at this place with Serafima Lynko and her husband. Serafima is a foreman at a home-based labor plant. Her maiden name is Aksentseva.

During the first meeting, I told Serafima Moiseevna that I read in one of the newspapers: “On September 17, 1941, in the town of Kamen, Vitebsk region, the prisoners of the ghetto resisted the Nazis and the policemen. The performance was directed by Moses Aksentsev.

“Moses Aksentsev is my father,” said Serafima. “But I haven't heard anything about it.

Moses Yakovlevich did not talk about his past at home. There was a time when it was better not to remember the ghetto once again. And he did not remember, so as not to complicate the life of his daughter.

Aksentsev was born in the town of Kamen, twenty kilometers from Lepel, in 1900. Here he married and raised his son and daughter. Moses Yakovlevich worked as a procurer in the raisag.

Of the small settlements located far from railways or highways, few managed to escape to the east.

The inhabitants of the Stone continued to work, harvest hay, harvest potatoes even after the war began.

I learned the terrible details of the summer and autumn of 1941 from Hirsch Reichelson, who now lives in the USA. His grandfather, the stove-maker Borukh, lived in the town of Kamen before the war, and Hirsch himself used to come here in the summer months.

At the end of the forties, the Reichelsons met with Moses Aksentsev, the only survivor of 178 shtetl Jews.

He told them that on September 17, 1941, all Jews were driven to the market square and announced that they were being sent to Lepel, where they would live in a place specially designated for them.

“When the Jews who had gathered in the market square were lined up, many began to shout, refused to go, because Lepel is more than 20 km away, and it is clear that old people and children will not reach. This means that they are not being led far ..., - writes Hirsch Reichelson in his memoirs. - The cordon consisted of Germans and policemen. Decrepit old men and small children were put on several carts. My grandmother was out of her mind, she had obviously lost her mind, and my grandfather held her hands tightly. I do not remember what Moses said, whether the pit was prepared in advance, but the fact that he was with a shovel in his hands, I remember this for sure. When the carts began to turn to the right, and a column was driven after them, there was a convenient moment for escape - the lake was nearby. But he still hoped for a miracle, although the plan for how to escape was ripe instantly - to dive into the lake, if he managed to run.

A few minutes later it became clear that they would be shot. Moses, a strong 40-year-old man, did not wait for the execution to begin. "Run away, save yourself!". He hit a policeman standing nearby with a shovel on the head, rushed at another, a panic arose, and teenage boys, and there were many of them, ran in different directions. For the killers, this came as a surprise; a few seconds - and Moses dived into the water, he did not feel the burning cold. I plucked a reed, a few strokes, and now it is already at the bottom, not deep, and the reed sticks out among the thickets. Shooting into the water began almost immediately. Bullets pounded on the water, one of them touched the ear. There was a scream, the sound of gunshots. He did not remember how long this hell lasted. When everything calmed down, he heard how they approached the water, shot several times. The punishers were sure that he was killed, no one began to dive and look.

Moses Aksentsev hid in the village for some time. The Nazis found out about this and shot the peasant who saved him (unfortunately, the last name could not be established), and the peasant's wife was taken to Lepel and subjected to public flogging.

Moses managed to deceive fate again and go into the forest. He ended up in the partisan brigade of the Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Eliseevich Lobank, whom he knew before the war, when he was the first secretary of the Lepel district party committee. Moses fought with weapons in his hands. Then, knowing the skills of Moisei Yakovlevich, the brigade commander appointed him as a partisan cook.

When Belarus was liberated from the Nazis, Aksentsev continued to fight in the ranks of the Soviet Army. After demobilization he came to Lepel. Here he has a new family. Sofya Markovna, she now lives with her daughter Serafima, just like her husband, she worked as a purveyor in a general store.

Serafima Moiseevna recalls that in the fifties Vladimir Eliseevich Lobanok, a major party leader of Belarus, while in Lepel, came to visit them at home.

... We stopped on the highway and went to the monument. The memorial complex in Chernoruchye is well-groomed, it is regularly painted, refurbished, and flowers are planted.

During the war years, more than 2,000 people were shot here.

This is how Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman, a prisoner of the Lepel ghetto, recalls the terrible days of the beginning of the war. In 1941 he was fifteen years old.

“My father worked on the railroad, and my family and I could evacuate. However, my father believed that the Germans would not be able to move inland so quickly through the defenses of the Soviet troops. Our family, therefore, went first to friends in the village of Kazinshchina, and then to the village of Chernoruchye. We hoped that we would wait there for a week or two, and the war would end or be fought on enemy territory. In the meantime, at the end of June 1941, the Nazis occupied Lepel and we were forced, in order not to endanger the people with whom we lived, to return to Lepel.

Traitors began to stir... Upon a denunciation, the Beilin family was captured, and they were soon shot... People were often hanged in the market square and beaten. In the first days of July, they gathered all the Jews in the center of the city and, under pain of execution, forced them to draw large yellow stars on their houses. They were required to wear a green bandage on the left arm with the inscription "Jude". After that, they demanded to sew yellow six-pointed stars on the front and back of the clothes, to walk only on the roadway, not on the sidewalk, they drove to work every day. For disobedience - execution.

The memoirs of S. K. Feigelman are quoted from the book of Gennady Vinnitsa "Bitterness and Pain". (Gennady Vinnitsa, "Bitterness and Pain", Orsha, 1998, pp. 45-46). Orsha teacher, in the nineties published several books about the tragedy of the Jews of Belarus during the Holocaust. He was the first to write a detailed essay on the destruction of the Lepel ghetto. Currently, Gennady Vinnitsa lives in Israel.

In late July - early August, a ghetto was created in Lepel. It was located within the streets of Leninskaya, Volodarsky and Banny lane. 30-40 people were driven into the houses.

Roza Solomonovna Fishkina, a prisoner of the Lepel ghetto, was not only an eyewitness to all the events. Many times she was on the verge of life and death. She wrote down her testimonies in hot pursuit in 1944.

(State Archive of the Russian Federation, f. 7021, op. 84, l. 104).

“All Jews were expelled from their own homes. Only two hours were given for this ... The houses in the ghetto had no doors, there was no floor ... In the houses they were not allowed to turn on the light, go to the well or the river for water, in winter they ordered to drown the water from the snow. Every day they took me to work with a two-word song: "Jude Kaput."

The cold weather in 1941 came early.

Hungry, undressed in a 25-degree frost, the prisoners walked and sang.

In the evening or at night, the Nazis burst into apartments screaming, beaten, raped women, set dogs on children, and took away everything that was. And they said at the same time: “Give Judas everything that you have, you don’t need it, you will be shot one of these days.”

Every day, the commandant, burgomaster, former physical education teacher Nedelko, police chief Voitekhovich, as a ransom from the Jews of the city, collected valuables. The collection was entrusted to the Jewish Committee (Judenrat), at the head of which the Jew Gordon was forced to be. For non-compliance - execution. When there was nothing more to give, the Nazis themselves began to go from house to house and demand expensive things. They were shot for failure to comply. So, after three hours of bullying, Yeruhim Katz was killed.

Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman recalls.

“A special article was systematic checks on the presence of Jews in the ghetto. It was announced that not only the family, but also all who lived in this house, would be immediately shot if at least one person was absent. I remember how, during one of the checks, an SS man came into our house. You should immediately get up and take off your hats. I felt very ill from constant malnutrition and could not get up. The SS man ordered me to go with him. Everyone began to cry and begged, but it had no effect on him. The SS man led me out of the house and walked towards the exit of the ghetto. After passing several houses, he stopped and began to beat me with a rubber club, and when I lost consciousness, he left ... From that day on, I began to think about escaping.

The Nazis set the Russians and Belarusians against the Jews, they wanted to deal with the prisoners of the ghetto with their hands. They announced to the inhabitants of the city that if someone is angry with the Jews, they can come to the German authorities and tell them about it. Shiveko, repeatedly convicted under the Soviet regime for theft and hooliganism, reported to the commandant's office that Lyusya Levitan testified against him at the trial. She was summoned to the commandant's office, they mocked the woman, and then they took her out of the city and shot her. The body was ordered not to be buried. The whole family of Lucy Levitan and her neighbors were shot next.

Those who were younger and stronger made attempts to escape from the ghetto with the whole family. But rarely did anyone manage to escape persecution.

A resident of Lepel, Maria Makarovna Buynitskaya, recalls.

“Somehow going into my shed, I found the Gitlin family hiding there. They asked to be transported across the lake by boat to the village of Stary Lepel. That same night, I sent them over. It's all in vain. I don’t know how this family was later captured by the Germans, but they shot them all.”

The prisoners of the Lepel ghetto knew that fascists and policemen were destroying the ghetto in the surrounding towns and towns. There were even rumors about the date of the execution. These news were sometimes reported to the Jews by the policemen themselves, demanding a special payment for this.

But where to run? In the frosty forest, not knowing where the partisans are, whether you will meet them, and whether they will be accepted into the detachment. To the villages, but everyone knew that they were threatened with execution for harboring Jews, and rarely anyone left them at least for one night. Without help, the fugitives from the ghetto could not survive.

We will turn to the memoirs of Rosa Solomonovna Fishkina more than once. But first, let's talk about how she herself managed to escape. This was told by her daughter Raisa Ivanovna Titarovich:

“My father is Belarusian by nationality, and therefore he was not a prisoner of the ghetto. Approximately a week before the execution, my father persuaded my grandfather Solomon Abramovich that it was necessary to save me and my mother. They had to be persuaded because if an escape was discovered, all the remaining relatives of those hiding were shot. Having received consent, my mother and I secretly left the ghetto at night.

Father, mother, brother, sister, and another daughter, R.S., died in the ghetto. Fishkina. Rosa Solomonovna fought in the Chekist partisan brigade, participated in twelve battles.

After the war, R.S. Fishkina worked as a teacher at the Lepel school.

... "February 28, 1942. The morning is vigorous, frosty. There is dead silence. The gendarmerie with dogs went through the streets of the city. Place positions of German soldiers and traitors.

The population of the city was afraid to leave the house ...

8 am. Cars with fascists appeared on Volodarsky Street, they stopped ...

“The traitors from the houses with butts and boots began to drive everyone out into the street. Here they were picked up and put on cars. There was a noise, the crying of children and women. A shot rang out, followed by bursts of machine guns and machine guns. Everyone began to run in all directions. Those who ran out of their houses were shot, and the troupes were thrown into cars. The cars were guarded by 8-10 armed people from populists and policemen. Then the cars sped off along the streets of Volodarskaya - Lenin - M. Gorky to the southwestern outskirts of the city. During the movement, cries were heard: "Bandits, executioners will avenge you for our blood."

When the raid began, Semyon Feigelman hurriedly, without even having time to get dressed, ran out of the house. His father shouted to him: "Run away."

Semyon Klimentievich Feigelman recalls: “They ran, I saw five more people. Punishers began to shoot ... Either from fright, or instinctively, I fell. He lay down and tried not to move. The punishers apparently considered me dead and went towards the lake, where another group of fugitives appeared. I crawled down towards the river and ran along the bank... Having reached Matyushino, I came to the house of our friend Alexander. Here they rubbed goose fat on my frostbitten legs, fed me well and advised me to move to the front line. My wanderings have begun. People fed me, I had to spend the night in barns, haystacks and baths, if no one noticed. It was not possible to leave the front line. Turned back. Somewhere near the village, Luchaika met with the underground communist Khromy Vasily, who contacted his friend Nikita Vasilyevich Grits, who lived on a farm near the village of Uglyane, Glubokoe district. Grits Nikita Vasilievich, his wife Evgenia Andreevna and seven-year-old son Vladimir, I owe my life. The whole village knew about me, but no one betrayed me. With Grits, I lived to see my release.”

I would like to believe that justice will prevail, and the Grits family will be awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

The Lepel Jews were taken seven kilometers away from the city, to the village of Chernoruchye, where the silo pits were already ready.

Doomed people were forced to undress to the naked, put on the edge of the pit and fired at them from machine guns and machine guns.

More than 1,000 people were shot during the day. Small children were thrown into the pits alive, they could not get out from under the mountain of corpses and suffocated.

The last to be shot was the head of the Judenrat, Gordon.

“The grave, in which the corpses lay, remained unburied for about 1.5 months. The bodies were torn apart by dogs and wolves.

The massacre of the Jews was so terrible that the population that saw this atrocity fainted,” these testimonies were recorded from the words of Yefim Yudovin.

(Yad Vashem, O 41/258, p. 18)

The fascist Einsatzkommandos 8 and 9 of Group B left a bloody trail on Lepel land.

Bandits from the 17th Latvian battalion actively helped them. This formation arrived in Lepel on January 1, 1942 and stayed there until mid-March of the same year. During the deployment of the 17th battalion in Lepel, no notable military operations were carried out. The Latvian battalion participated in the extermination of Jews in the surrounding cities and towns.

Many Lepel Jews, together with representatives of all other nationalities, fought in the ranks of the army, avenging their dead relatives and friends.

Those who could, went into partisan detachments, and, fighting for their native land, brought Victory closer.

Mikhail Aizikovich Tkach was the commissar of the 4th detachment of the Lepel Brigade named after Stalin.

In the partisan formation of the Hero of the Soviet Union Anton Brinsky, a partisan detachment operated, in which there were many Jews who fled from the Lepel, Mstislavl, and Baranovichi ghettos.

In a mass grave in the village of Chernoruchye, the descendants of everyone we wrote about in this essay found their last refuge: Levitans, Abezgauz, Levins, Gelfands.

Here they were shot and buried:

Gutkovich Zyama, 70 years old, son of Leiba, and grandson of Shmuyla. Grandfather lived in Ula;

Gutkovich Bunya, 50 years old;

Gutkovich Zlata, 58 years old;

Gutkovich Velka, 60 years old.

They are namesakes, and most likely relatives of Barry Ginzburg.

Then, in this place, gypsies, underground workers, and partisans were shot.

Ulla - an old town

From Lepel we went to Ulla. Distance - forty-five kilometers to the most beautiful places. The American guests looked out the car windows, admired the forests and lakes. This region is rich in water bodies. The road passed through the villages of Staroe Lyadno, Sokorovo, Poluozerye.

Seventy or eighty years ago, Jews lived compactly in these places. And local old-timers recall stories about Burke, who traveled through the villages and exchanged products for manufactory. Jews kept an inn not far from Poluozerye, but their names have been erased by memory. They say that the owner's daughter was very beautiful, and the local landowner hit on her. Because of this, a big scandal erupted, and the owner of the inn sent his daughter to relatives in Poland.

On this road, along the neighboring dirt and country roads, Jews traveled daily: booths carrying goods; traveling salesmen hurrying on trade business; wandering preachers-magids, who traveled from town to town, on which God will send, tenants of gardens, who carried their goods to bazaars and fairs. The Jews were with and without sidelocks, with beards and clean-shaven, in yarmulkes, hats, caps, in traditional Jewish clothes and linen girdled caftans. And no one pointed a finger at them, did not look after them, was not surprised. They were an organic part of the landscape of the Belarusian Poozerie.

A few years ago, I was returning from Minsk in the same car with three young Hasidim who were going to Vitebsk to help local Jews spend Pesach. Naturally, the Hasidim were dressed in traditional Jewish clothing. We drove along the Lepel road. Since dry closets are rare in our country, we stopped at the edge of the need. The Hasidim relieved themselves and left the forest. At that time, five or six cars were driving along the road. Passengers began to look out the windows, drivers began to honk. The Hasidim coming out of the Belarusian forest seemed to them no less exotic than the aliens who arrived on earth.

It would be interesting and, I think, economically profitable to open the Museum of the Jewish shtetl in Belarus. Make this an open-air museum: several streets built in the traditional Jewish architectural style. Shops and taverns should work for tourists, but costumed Jews walking along the streets of the town are not needed at all. All the inhabitants of the Jewish town have long lived in heaven. There is a similar museum in Israel. But the memory of the shtetl should be immortalized on Belarusian soil, and I'm sure there will be no end to tourists.

Today there are no Jews in any of the villages on the road from Lepel to Ulla. And in Ulla itself, the regional center and urban settlement of the 50s, there are only two wards of the Jewish charitable organization "Hasdei David" - Mira Davidovna Melnikova and Anna Mikhailovna Vinokurova.

Mira Davidovna for 75 years. She worked as a vet. Anna Mikhailovna is a little younger, and she also worked tirelessly all her life.

Ulla is an ancient town on the banks of the Western Dvina. On its coat of arms, on a red field, there is a castle with towers and loopholes, as a reminder of medieval history. Ulla, twenty years earlier than Vitebsk, at the end of the 16th century, received the Magdeburg Right, that is, the right to self-government.

Jews have lived here since ancient times. In the "Inventory Book" for 1764, it is written that in Ulla there are 10 main parts of the city, of which 187 courtyards, up to 600 inhabitants, up to 20 Jews.

The 19th century became golden for Ulla. At the very beginning, the construction of the Berezina water system was completed, the Berezina and Ulla rivers were connected. We started rafting timber from the Minsk province to Riga. Barges sailed with leather, grain. In Ulla, in the place where the river of the same name flows into the Western Dvina, a pier was built, honey, hemp, wax were loaded on barges - what these places are rich in and what was in demand in Europe.

One of the most prominent figures was the merchant of the 1st guild Berka Itskovich Rapoport. His business plans went far beyond the borders of both the Lepel district and the entire Vitebsk province. The “Military Statistical Description of the Vitebsk Governorate” in 1852 (apparently not possessing information that Berka Rapoport died in 1848) indicates that “... The main objects of foreign trade in the Vitebsk Governorate are the shipment of timber and flax. Among the merchants of timber materials, the largest trade is carried out by the Lepel merchant Rapoport of the 1st guild, ... buying up commercial and raw trees in the provinces of Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk and rallying them into rafts, in the spring along the river. [Western] Dvina is sent to the city of Riga and abroad. His sons trade in flax and flaxseed...

Professor of the Mining University, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Dmitry Lvovich Shirochin lives in Moscow, who is interested in his family tree, ancestors, including the merchants Rapoport. In his study, based on archival materials, Dmitry Shirochin writes: “The trade in timber, flaxseed, hemp, various kinds of bread, tobacco and lard, delivered along the Western Dvina to the port of Riga, sets in motion large capitals for purchases for free sale abroad and for supplies to the treasury. Goods purchased in the autumn and brought in in the winter are loaded onto rafts, barges and plows in the spring; logs are knitted into rafts, 4-log firewood is stacked on horse-drawn horses and rafted with water in the spring flood. The main places of delivery and warehouses of goods for their shipment along the Dvina to Riga are in the cities of the Smolensk province of Bely and Porechye. In the Vitebsk province - in Velizh, Vitebsk, the towns of Beshenkovichi, Ulla, in the city of Polotsk, the towns of Druya ​​and Kraslavka. Merchants, through their clerks, have been trying since autumn to buy these goods from the landlords of the provinces of Vilna, Courland, Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk and Smolensk.

At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, during the liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II and the widespread rise of the Russian economy, the ancestors of Barry Ginzburg settled in Ulla Gutkovichi.

Zalman-Yakov, Barry's great-grandfather, moved here with his family; from the village of Balbinovo, the family of the tailor Yudel Gutkovich moved from the Augustberg estate; in 1860 - the large family of Faivish Gutkovich from the village of Dobreika; in the same year, the no less numerous family of Hirsha Gutkovich.

At this time, the population of Ulla grew significantly, and Jews began to play a prominent role in the life of the town. The townspeople were engaged in trade, timber rafting, were good potters, fishermen, and made beautiful boats. People from the surrounding towns and cities came here specifically to buy comfortable multi-oared boats.

In 1867, over 2.5 thousand cubic meters worth of 700 thousand rubles were sent from Ulla to the Baltic States in large and small rafts of commercial timber.

The family of Zalman-Yakov Gutkovich lived in their house on the banks of the Western Dvina. And since almost the entire Jewish population of the city was one way or another connected with the “water” professions, this fate did not escape the Gutkoviches.

When I talked about it, Barry Ginsburg remembered: “Some of my ancestors caulked boats and made a living doing it.”

Working in the archives, I found the name and surname of the tar-maker - a man who tarred river ships - Hirsh Gutkovich - the brother of Barry Ginzburg's grandfather.

But still, the profession of a styrnov, or in today's language, a pilot, was considered the most scarce. They specially studied for the pilot at the courses that operated in the Smolensk province. For the wire of one barge from Ulla to Riga, the pilot received 25 rubles in silver, and the rower - 8-15 rubles. Big money in those days. To Riga sailed 11-12 days.

In the article about Ulla, placed in the Big Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus F. A. and Efron I. A., a separate line is highlighted: “There are pilots among the inhabitants who guide ships through the Dvina rapids.” This was one of the main advantages or attractions of the town.

The Western Dvina fed the Jews since ancient times. Back in the 17th century, Jewish merchants sailed along the river, trading in Vitebsk, Surazh, and other cities and towns. Among the Dvina fishermen, Hasidic stories tell about this, there were many Jews. As well as among the raftsmen. And even the Dvina barge haulers were most often Jews. Someone fought out among the people, became the owner of a barge or a steamer, and already in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century there were quite a few Jews among the captains of the Dvina steamers.

In 1881, the Vitebsk steamer made its first voyage along the route Vitebsk - Ulla. Downstream, he swam at a speed of 20 miles per hour, and against the current - 8 miles per hour slower.

The steamer “Vitebsk”, as well as the steamers “Dvina”, “Toropa”, “Dvinsk”, “Kasplya”, “Mezha”, sailing along the route Vitebsk - the village of Ustya, belonged to R. Eman. His competitors Z. Gindlin and L. Rakhmilevich, whose steamships sailed from Vitebsk to Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils), had a more artistic or circus nature, which was reflected in the names of their steamships: “Giant”, “Athlete”, “Hope”, "Hero", "Strongman", "Wrestler".

According to the data for 1924 among the Ul Gutkoviches, in the town by this time this was one of the most common surnames, several families were associated with timber rafting along the Western Dvina. Moreover, apparently, this difficult profession is passed down here from generation to generation. The rafter was Sholom Yankelevich Gutkovich, who lived to a ripe old age, his son Mendel. Esel Girshevich Gutkovich and his sons Elya, Faivish and David were engaged in the same business.

When Joseph Gutkovich and Rivka-Genya Borgak were celebrating the wedding of all relatives: both close and distant, and even those who are called “seventh water on jelly”, they were invited to the celebrations. So it was done, the whole place celebrated the wedding, and the celebration stretched for several days. Parents gave all the best, so long as no one said that their children were worse than others.

Gutkoviches knew how to live with people in peace and they were respected, valued for their responsiveness, for coming to the aid of those in need, they were wise and God-fearing people.

Chuppah was made for young people in the Ul synagogue. According to the old tradition, the bride was taken to the groom. But they sailed from Lepel to Ulla on a steamboat along the Berezinsky water system, or the carriage was harnessed by three horses and rode along the highway, one can only guess.

Wedding tables were placed in the courtyard of the house. A fresh breeze from the Dvina added strength to the guests, and they sang, danced, drank and ate, wished the young people health and many children ...

In 1905, 2975 people permanently lived in Ulla, of which 2050 were Jews. Jewish speech could be heard everywhere: on the pier, and in the workshops, and among the children, and among those who looked into the wine shop. Jews, Belarusians, and Poles spoke Yiddish. In the fifties and sixties, old-timers still lived in Ulla, who understood the Hebrew language well. True, they heard him very rarely, sometimes in the summer one of the Jews came to rest or go fishing on the Dvina.

What else was the place famous for at the beginning of the 20th century?

There were 4 Jewish prayer schools (as synagogues were officially listed), 2 Orthodox churches, and a Catholic church.

Every spring there was a big horse fair in Ulla. Merchants and buyers came from different provinces. At the fair, a herd of horses up to 100 heads was sold in the amount of 2-3 thousand rubles.

Three tanneries, small workshops and a water mill, 2 wine shops, 6 shops, a pharmacy and a post and telegraph office worked in the town.

In Ulla there were 30 brick and 200 wooden houses, the total length of the streets paved with stone was 340 fathoms. Such statistics of those years.

Well, of course, the place knew its celebrities.

The children were told about the artist Ivan Fomich Khrutsky. And although, among the small-town public, drawing was not considered a profession, but a whim of not quite normal people, and the artists themselves were often considered drunkards, Khrutsky was said differently: “Of course, you can draw with his money. He has an estate,” and the Ul intelligentsia invariably emphasized that he was an academician.

Religious Jews spoke with reverence about the Talmudist and Hasidic leader Elijah Joseph from Dribin. His father, a God-fearing man and connoisseur of sacred books, Reb Leib lived in Ulla.

Elijah Joseph was close to the Lubavitcher Rebbe Dov-Ber. For some time he was a rabbi in Polotsk, and then he moved to Jerusalem. This was at the beginning of the 19th century. About Elijah Joseph with respect they said that he was a great scholar, wrote books on Kabbalah, Halakha, Hasidism. And the halachic work "Ohobe-Joseph" was considered one of the pinnacles of Jewish thought.

Small-town youth, among those who believed in the ideas of Zionism, certainly remembered the name of Menachem Sheinkin. By this time, their countryman managed to create Bnei Zion, a Zionist organization in Odessa, participated in the second Zionist congress in Basel, actively promoted Hebrew, visited Eretz Israel. And during rare visits to parents in Ulla, youth gathered around Menachem. Since 1906, Sheinkin lived in Eretz-Israel, headed the Palestinian Bureau of Hovevei Zion, and dealt with aliyah of Russian Jews.

By the beginning of the twenties of the XX century, the Ginzburg-Gutkovich family had already firmly settled in America, as evidenced by many facts, including a family photograph taken across the ocean during these years. It depicts people who have already achieved something in life and are satisfied with their position.

However, in America the surname Gutkovich sounded in the local manner - Gudowitz, or even Goodwin. A young family had two sons here - Frima and Abram.

How did their relatives who remained in Ulla live and what did they do?

The State Archives of the Vitebsk Region store documents of the Ulsk District Executive Committee. After a trip with the Ginzburgs, I became interested in the history of the family and came to the archive. They brought me several dozen folders. Virtually all pre-war office work was done by hand, and today reading words written in faded ink, not quite legible handwriting is sometimes a superdifficult task.

You experience strange feelings when you sort through shabby archival documents yellowed from old age and read the names and surnames of people. They have been gone for a long time, many of them did not even have graves, roads were laid in their place, houses were built. But on sheets of paper, people who have gone into oblivion still live, submit tax documents, justify themselves to the authorities, sign money statements ...

The fates of the Ul Gutkoviches developed so dramatically and were unlike each other that it is just right to write a novel. Or maybe there was such a time: post-revolutionary, a turning point, when everyone was tested for survival, for humanity.

Dobba Girshevna and her sister ran a shop. Dobba, as an alien element, was deprived of the right to vote by the new government.

Faya Itskovich was engaged in burning lime.

Borokh Rafailovich was a labourer, and by the sweat of his brow he earned food for himself and his family.

Brothers Isaak and Leiba Movshevichi were tailors. There was little work, but there was no competition between native people, and they lived in peace.

Leiser Abramovich was a shoemaker and spent the whole day repairing old shoes.

Rokha Zalmanovna-Yankelevna, the sister of Joseph Gutkovich, was a beggar and lived in a strange house on the Western Dvina embankment. She was allowed to live free of charge, and for this she heated someone else's house.

Sholom and Faya Gutkovichi, together with S. Sheveko and F. Kozik, opened a tar factory on the Shostaki farm, registered their industrial cooperative artel.

And another Faya Gutkovich, as in the old days, was a cab driver, carried goods from Ulla to Lepel, Bocheikovo, Kamen, sometimes even to Polotsk. He loved his horse more than anyone in the world, and in the evenings, after a hard day, he silently drank a decanter of vodka and looked thoughtfully out the window.

Archival documents preserved the tax report of the shop owner Elya Sholomovich Gutkovich. Today, with interest and curiosity, you look at the figures of ninety years ago. And you understand that the life of Eli Sholomovich consisted of these figures:

“Renting an apartment - 3 rubles per month; heating and lighting - 9 rubles per six months; servants - no; family expenses - 15 rubles per month; children's education - no; insurance - no; donations - 2 rubles per six months; entertainment and cultural purposes - no; treatment is not. Total personal expenses - 119 rubles per month.

Expenses for the enterprise - 48 rubles per six months; heating, lighting - no. Taxes: patents - 32 rubles; uravsbor - 68 rubles; basic income - 25, 50 rubles; additional income - 10, 50 rubles; target - 1, 80 rubles. Small expenses - 7 rubles per weight; expenses for trips for goods - 17 rubles per six months; the cost of delivery of goods - 50 rubles. Total expenses for the enterprise - 259.80 rubles.

Availability of goods at a selling price - 400 rubles; what cash capital is invested in the enterprise - 300 rubles; the rotation of the cash goods per month is 300.

The average percentage of gross profitability for trading is 18%. The average percentage of net profitability on trading is 7%.

Eli Sholomovich Gutkovich was one of the richest people in Ulla during the NEP (New Economic Policy) of the Soviet state, or one of the most honest, reporting the real figure of his business to the tax authorities. He forgot about the Jewish tradition of donating a tenth to the needs of the community, or to charity, and allocated only 2 rubles a half year for these purposes.

Anna Mikhailovna Vinokurova met us in Ulla. Together with her, we continued our acquaintance with the urban village.

The day turned out to be cloudy, it was drizzling, and this made the mood a little sad. The rickety fences, the market square with a large puddle and an empty long counter made of long unpainted boards seemed to come from black-and-white films about the post-war years.

A few days later I found out that my mood was somehow justified. Ulla lost its city status in those days, and instead of “settlement committee”, the sign of the local administration already had “village council” written on it.

Anna Mikhailovna worked for more than 50 years as a paramedic at the ambulance, was repeatedly elected a deputy of the village council, chairman of the Ulla Council of Veterans. An honored person, highly respected.

“In 2005, one child was born in Ulla, and six veterans of war and labor died,” she cited gloomy statistics.

Vinokurova came to Ulla in 1949 after graduating from the Kyiv Medical School. Parents from Ukraine. Father Mikhail Efimovich Dimentman was repressed in Stalin's time as an "enemy of the people." He served 17 years. In 1954, he was released from the camp, and he came to his daughter in Ulla. I worked as an accountant for a couple of years. The camps undermined health. Mikhail Efimovich soon died. They were first buried in Ulla at the old Jewish cemetery, and then they were reburied in Vitebsk.

We drove up to a wasteland located near the farms. Some goats were grazing nearby. Interspersed with pieces of rebar, broken bricks, household rubbish and pieces of rusty iron, the monuments of the old Jewish cemetery were lonely hiding in the grass, potholes, bushes.

It became clear why the children of Mikhail Dimentman decided to rebury their father, although Jews rarely do this, and religious Jews can only rebury their loved ones in the land of Israel.

“We ought to fence off the cemetery, clean it up,” Anna Mikhailovna said guiltily.

But it was clear to everyone that no one in Ulla would do this. There is no money in the local budget for such actions.

A nationwide program for the preservation of old cemeteries, which are located in small towns and villages, should be adopted. Nobody is going to demolish them, and for centuries they will look at people with silent reproach. Representatives of all confessions, including Jewish organizations, should take care of the preservation of these cemeteries: to find sponsors so that they would not be ashamed of either their ancestors or their descendants.

“Now everyone is buried in a common cemetery,” said Anna Mikhailovna. - There's order.

We walked around the cemetery, trying to read the inscriptions on matseyvas. Barry Ginsburg's ancestors may have been buried here. Our searches yielded no results. Many monuments have grown into the ground, and it is necessary to carry out excavations in order to open the inscriptions, other gravestones are overgrown with a thick layer of moss, because of which it is impossible to read a single letter, in some places the letters have been erased from time to time and you can only feel by touch what they were when were carved in stone.

… Archival documents helped to recreate the lost world. True, the folders smelled not of antiquity, but of dampness. And this prose brought back to reality.

According to the 1923 census, 1970 people lived in Ulla, of which 1068 were Jews. 34 Jewish families were engaged in agriculture. There was a Jewish elementary school and a seven-year school with 5 groups of students. Vera Borisovna Khotyanova rented out one of the rooms for the elementary school. And her duties included heating stoves, bringing water, cleaning the premises, and the district executive committee paid her 35 rubles a month.

There were 36 students in the two-complete school, all Jews. Compared to the four-year Ulsk school, where teaching was conducted in Belarusian and Russian, it was a very small educational institution. By the way, more and more Jewish parents sent their children to regular schools to study. Here is the national composition of the four-year school: Belarusians - 148, Jews - 114, Russians - 2, Poles - 2.

And I would certainly like to mention one more interesting fact from that time. Little Ulla had her own theatre. True, in 1926 the district executive committee gave the house to Genya Zelikovna Khaikina for him. And despite her complaints, he did not return it, since the house had already been entered in the Book of Communal Buildings.

In 1930 Ulla had one Orthodox church, one church, one evangelical Christian church and two synagogues. The rabbi of Ul was Gdalia Movshevich Azman. Since there are no other names of rabbis in the list of clergymen compiled by the regional police department in 1927, it turns out that there was no rabbi in the second synagogue, there was only a headman - but a gabe. Apparently, the old rabbi died, or left, or he was exiled (today one can only guess about this), but they could not find a new one for such a position in those years. The small Ul community had nothing to pay (at least for bread and water) for the service of a rabbi, and I'm sure there were few daredevils who agreed to such an act. But two butchers, as in the past, remained in Ulla. These are Berka Davidovich Manusov and Izak Movsha Berkovich. There was also a carver in the neighboring town of Kublichi - Elya Simonovich Fisher.

The local authority in Ulla was the national Jewish shtetl council.

I often write about Jewish towns in Belarus, but this is the first time I have encountered such a state of affairs. Not a single photograph of the old pre-war Ulla has survived: neither from collectors, nor in museums, nor in archives. No one compiled a list of Ulla's Jews who died during the Holocaust. Often people who survived the tragedy of the Holocaust and miraculously survived were engaged in such a noble and very necessary work for posterity. Or the children of those who died did it in memory of their parents. There are no such lists in Jerusalem in the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum, they are not published in the books “Memory”, which are published in Belarus for each district, neither in the Beshenkovichi Regional Museum, nor among local historians. Yes, and the pre-war residents of Ulla, those who remember the history of the town, was familiar with Jewish families, I found only two. I understand that a lot of time has passed since then, and yet I was haunted by the feeling that in retaliation for our collective indifference, some unknown force decided to erase the memory of the past of this place.

Sofia Lipovna Rabukhina lives in Vitebsk, she is 82 years old. To my questions related to surnames, names, dates, they answered: “I don’t remember, you know, it was a long time ago.” But with all the details she told about the events that seemed to her the most significant in life. About how a thin nineteen-year-old girl, an accountant with seven classes of education, was summoned to the military registration and enlistment office and assigned to a six-month driver's course. It was in the winter of 1945. The Rabukhins lived in a village in the Mongolian-Buryat Autonomous Republic, where they managed to get during the war years. And then she was a driver and, when the war with Japan began, she drove the wounded and dead from the battlefield to the rear on a truck. And after the end of the war, for a few more years, she had to turn the “steering wheel” of the car.

Sofia Lipovna told how after the war they returned to Ulla. Father built a house on a high bank. She went to work. And one day, returning home and crossing the Dvina, she fell through the ice. She was hardly saved, and then lung diseases began. In Ulla, they could not help, and an air ambulance plane from Vitebsk was sent for her. “Now no one would send a special plane for me,” she said.

I always tried to turn the conversation to the topic of interest. Sofia Lipovna answered my questions and could not understand what was interesting in her pre-war life.

– She was born in August 1925 in Ulla. Lipa Erukhimovich's father was a carpenter. And his brother was a carpenter. They are from a working family. They had good hands. Everyone was able to.

My father had a sister and seven brothers. Two of them went to America when their father was still young.

I interrupted the conversation, with such difficulty, and began to ask clarifying questions.

What year did you leave? Who went with them to America? Did she hear the names Borgak and Gutkovich at home?

Sofia Lipovna remembered for a long time, and then said:

- Father said that they did not want to live here and left. They got to Riga by steamboat, and from there they went to America ... I don’t know if their parents corresponded with them or not. When I became independent, there came a time when they were afraid to tell even their children about it.

- Which of the paternal relatives remained in Ulla? I asked.

“Two brothers, their families. With one of them we lived next door on the street near the Western Dvina. Nearby was the river Ulla, and often in the spring during the flood, a whole lake formed in this place. We moved out of the house during the flood. Water sometimes reached the windows. Lived with an uncle or other relatives. Not once did anyone break into our house and steal anything, although the house was sometimes empty for two weeks. There was no theft in the towns. Mom could go to milk a cow and not close the door with a latch.

The manners in the town were different, and the morality was different. We bought the house at the end of the twenties from people who were leaving Ulla. We were lent money and relatives, and neighbors, and colleagues of the father. And no one wrote any receipts, and did not take interest. They were sure that they would pay the money on time.

Our mother is from a very poor family,” Sofia Lipovna continued the story. Her name was Haya. She is also Ulyan. My grandfather died young of consumption. They did not have money for treatment, and he "burned out" quickly. There are five daughters left. One moved to Latvia. A lot of Ul people left to live in Daugavpils, Riga. The second sister and her family went to America.

This topic interested me, and asked me to tell you more.

– The market in Ulla was open every day, but the best was on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Peasants from many villages came to the bazaar, there were so many people that you could not push through. And you can buy whatever your heart desires. If my mother bought meat, she usually took the back quarter from the calf. Carried home, butchered and put in the cellar. We had a deep cellar, my father lined it with bricks, and food could be stored there for a long time.

In 1932, Sofia Lipovna went to study at a Jewish elementary school. It was located next to the Church of the Holy Spirit, and during the big break, girls from the Jewish school sometimes ran into the church. They were interested to see how the candles burn, how people pray. Moreover, there was talk in Ulla about the local priest Stanislav Tsybulevich. He was an independent person, did not bow to the authorities, and people assured him that he would soon be arrested. They were right, however, at that time such predictions most often came true. Stanislav Tsybulevich was arrested as "the leader of an anti-revolutionary nationalist group that organized mass demonstrations of the Polish population." The accusation was far-fetched, but the verdict was real - the highest measure of "execution".

– Did you go to the synagogue? I ask.

– I remember the wooden synagogue that stood opposite the pharmacy. We also went there with the girls out of curiosity. My father started every morning with a prayer, went to the synagogue, tried to go there every day, but my mother didn’t go there even on holidays.

On Pesach, matzah was baked at home. They prepared for the holiday ahead of time, from the beginning of spring. My father whitewashed, painted, repaired something, especially after another flood. Mom prepared flour, sifted it so that even a crumb of bread would not get there. She invited two or three poor women. They rolled out the dough, and then my mother put the matzo in the oven. We baked only for ourselves. It seems to me that at that time in Ulla every family baked matzah on their own. Dad was getting Easter dishes from the attic. We had guests for dinner.

Just before the war, Sofia Rabukhina managed to finish seven classes of the Belarusian school. After four Jewish classes, they were transferred to Belarusian, and then, in 1937-38, Jewish schools were completely closed.

Until September 1939, Ulla was in close proximity to the western border of the Soviet Union. And, of course, strategically important facilities were built here, military units were deployed. During these years, a new bridge was built across the Western Dvina, a small cement plant was opened, a military airfield was built behind the bridge, aircraft hangars and pilots' houses were built. This place in Ulla is still called "The Town" today.

But to the nearest railway station Lovzha had to walk, if there was no horse or passing car, 17 kilometers.

On June 22, 1941, the Rabukhins were in a village near Ulla. The family of one of the leaders of the village council was also here. Sophia Lipovna recalls that he came to his people and said to collect the essentials and leave. He said the same to Khaya Rabukhina. But she answered: “We have such a house, such trees in the garden, such a garden, everything is done with our own hands, how can this be left unattended.” She was sorry to leave a new chandelier, which they bought shortly before the war. Lipa Rabukhin did not take part in this conversation. He, as usual, spent his free time sitting in the fire department. Lipa Rabukhin was a member of the local voluntary fire brigade and was very proud of this occupation. As soon as the firefighters learned about the war, they immediately gathered and declared readiness No. 1. It was expected that fires would start in Ulla. They could not even imagine that the fire of war could not be put out with the help of the local voluntary fire brigade.

The Rabukhins left Ulla a few days later. Behind the bridge, they began to wait for a truck, in which they were supposed to be taken to the railway station. But there was no car. And they decided to spend the night with a woman friend. They let them in and even gave them tea in the morning, and then the woman said: “The Germans will come, they will see that I am keeping Jews at my place, and I will not be happy. Go away and don't hold a grudge against me." People, even far from politics, from power structures, probably knew from the Polish refugees that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews and everyone who helped them.

The Rabukhins reached Orsha on foot, and only there, by the efforts and will of Khaya, did they board the train moving east.

Boris Lieberman, a pre-war resident of Ulla, now lives in the Israeli city of Ashdod. And, unfortunately, after his illnesses, he cannot remember everything, and often his wife, who knows about Ulla only from family stories, answered questions instead of him.

Boris Mendelevich's grandfather was a rabbi in Ulla. His name was Hirsh Farbman. But Hirsch died relatively young, and Boris, who was born in 1929, does not remember him.

The eldest son Itzik informed the Liebermans about the beginning of the war. He was 25 years old. He also served on the village council.

The head of the Mendel family, who worked as a procurer, and probably did not live in poverty, did not want to leave Ulla. He said that the Germans were here during the First World War and did nothing wrong to anyone. He is not a communist, not an activist, which is what they are afraid of.

But Samuel, who recently turned 18, said firmly: "We must go." And they obeyed him.

The Liebermans moved to the opposite bank of the Western Dvina by boat. Then we went to the village. There was a group of the Ul kindergarten with teachers. They also said: "We must leave." And the Liebermans went east. They were bombed. We got on foot to Vitebsk, and there we boarded the train.

- Few people managed to leave Ulla. There are no more than twenty families, - says Boris Lieberman.

His older brother Itzik died at the front. Yasha, Samuel and Joseph fought, returned home with wounds.

By the beginning of the war, 516 Jews lived in the town. Men of military age managed to be taken into the army. On the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, more than 200 Ulchans died, and among them Alshevsky Monas Abramovich, Gitlin Zelik Davidovich, Lieberman Itzik Mendelevich and other Jews.

Much was said about the patriotism and internationalism of Soviet citizens in the pre-war years. But in reality, these words often did not stand the test of strength. Ulla stands apart: during the war years, none of the inhabitants of the urban village became a policeman. Of course, the German occupiers could not do without traitors, but in the village these heinous duties were not performed by local residents.

As in many issues, there are no established and documented dates for the fact of the creation of the Ul ghetto. Rather, the dates appear in the documents, but different. And you have to compare, analyze, and sometimes, and speculate.

Of the Ul Jews who remained in the occupied territory, only a few remained alive.

They want rumors that some woman paid off and saved her children by giving the Nazis the gold she inherited from her parents. I do not believe this, there are many similar examples when the Nazis took gold and, when they were convinced that people did not have more wealth, they killed them. And whom did they have to be ashamed of, before whom to keep this word? They did not consider the Jews to be people, and, consequently, what agreements could be with them.

Boris Lieberman told me that the Russian husband Ivan Alekseev, who was the bridge guard, somehow managed to save his wife Sonya. In the 41st year she was 22 years old. In a place where everyone had nicknames, she was called "Sonka the redhead."

Sofia Alekseeva lived in Ulla after the war. In the book of Gennady Vinnitsa "Bitterness and Pain" a short interview with her was published:

“The ghetto was created in December 1941 on the site where vocational school No. 3 is now located. There was a wooden building of the district executive committee, where they drove all the Jews. The police guarded them. Jews wore yellow stars...

The ghetto was not surrounded by barbed wire. Jews were let out in search of food. They went to neighboring villages. We had to return in the evening."

The first mass executions took place on a frosty and clear day on December 5, 1941. The Nazis selected those who could resist them, those who could be followed by people. These were representatives of the small-town intelligentsia, young girls and women, men who, for some reason, were not taken into the army. They were sent to work in the area of ​​the military camp and they did not return back. The Nazis were good psychologists. They shot those who could become leaders, and the rest were deprived of the will to resist. Bullying, hunger, illness, death of loved ones completed this picture. Old men, women, the sick - the prisoners of the Ul ghetto - were waiting for death as a deliverance. They stopped dreaming of freedom.

The Ulsk ghetto existed until the autumn of 1942.

From the protocol of interrogation of Franz Silvestrovich Kozik, born in 1921, a native of the village. Bortniki. The interrogation was carried out by an investigator of the Extraordinary State Commission for the identification and investigation of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices in the temporarily occupied Soviet territory on March 31, 1945. Only three years had passed, and all the details of the terrible tragedy were still fresh in my memory.

“When the German troops occupied our territory, I, as a non-conscript, remained under occupation. Not far from our village there was a camp of the Jewish population. In 1942, I was at home just that day, from the Jewish camp, where there were 365 people, the Germans began to drive people out to the fields to the "fox holes", as the people called this place. When the entire Jewish population: children, old people, women and men, was driven by the Germans to the “fox holes”, shots were soon heard. The shots lasted about six hours, after which they began to blow up the pit, in which many corpses lay.

The pit was blown up because there was not enough space for them in the shell crater, where they initially decided to drop the troupes. And then the sappers were called for help.

From the protocol of interrogation of Shevyako Adam Bonifatovich, born in 1903

“When the Germans occupied our territory, I was captured by the Germans, from where I escaped and lived at the place of residence (the town of Ulla). The Germans forced us nine people to guard the property of the military camp. This was in 1942. Somehow the Germans did not let us go home, they gathered everyone in a designated place and ordered us not to disperse. After some time, the Germans drove a column of the Jewish population, among which were children and the elderly, who themselves could not walk and were brought in carts. We were not allowed outside. When the entire Jewish population from the camp was driven to the military camp, volleys of shots were heard. The people screamed and we were very sad. The executions lasted for about two hours, after which we were driven out with shovels and forced to bury the troupes. When we came to the pit, it was six meters long and five meters wide, the pit was already a little covered with earth, but human legs and heads were still visible - all bloody. By order, we dug the hole. The Germans also shot a lot of Soviet citizens, for example, they shot the entire Sinkevich family, because one of them was a commissar of a partisan brigade. There were also frequent mass executions of Russian prisoners of war.

There were a lot of old people and infirm people who themselves could not walk among the prisoners, because it took seven wagons to bring them to the place of execution. This was reported to the investigators by Garelik Ivan Vasilyevich, born in 1894, who lived in the town of Ulla.

“Somehow the roadmaster Yushkevich gave me an order to drive a horse to him at seven o'clock in the morning. When I drove the horse, a German approached me and ordered me to go to the Jewish camp. I had six more carts with me. Having approached the camp, they put the old men on our carts and ordered them to drive to the military camp, which is located not far from the town of Ulla. They brought them to a wooden house, the Germans ordered the Jews to enter the house, and they sent us back ... In the camp, they put three suitcases on my wagon and ordered me to take them there. When I arrived at the appointed place, citizen Ulla Chekan told me that all the Jews had been shot.”

The Jews were first herded into the canteen on the territory of the military camp. Then they were taken out in batches and shot at the vegetable store.

The invaders were practical to the smallest detail. They did not even forget about three suitcases with the things of the prisoners, and a driver was specially sent for them.

Then these things were given or sold to the local population, calling it an act of charity and triumphant justice. More cynicism is hard to imagine.

Relatives of Barry Ginzburg were among those residents of Ulla who were shot by the Nazi invaders on the territory of the military camp.

On the monument, which was erected at the site of the execution of the prisoners of the Ulsk ghetto, it is written:

“Comrade, bare your head before the memory of the dead. 320 inhabitants of Ulla are buried in this place: children, women, old people, brutally tortured and buried alive by Nazi executioners…”.

Local residents believed that more than 360 people were buried here.

A monument at the site of the death of ghetto prisoners was opened in 1974.

Around was the pioneer camp "Eaglet". Pioneer lines, all-Union “Memory Watches” were held at the monument.

In the 90s, after perestroika, fellow countrymen who had lived in Israel for many years arrived in Ulla. They placed a black granite slab near the monument, on which it is written in Hebrew that Yakov Sholom was buried here. Most likely, this is one of the prisoners of the ghetto.

When we arrived at the territory of the town, construction was going on around. A recreation park was made on the site of the children's camp. The monument was well maintained, the fence was painted, flowers were planted.

... When Vinokurova arrived in Ulla in the late forties, about a dozen Jewish families lived here. These were those who returned to their homeland after demobilization, evacuation. Yudasin worked as the chairman of the district executive committee.

Sofia Lipovna Rabukhina said that believing old people, including her father, gathered at someone's house and prayed. There was a minyan, that is, ten adult men needed to perform public worship. By the way, Sophia's father, Lipa Erukhimovich Rabukhin, lived for 102 years, and while he had enough strength, he was an exemplary parishioner of the Vitebsk synagogue.

Mikhail Rutkin, my old friend, told me about those times. There was an orphanage in Ulla, where in the difficult and hungry post-war years, as best they could, they warmed and fed orphans. Among them was little Misha Rutkin. Everything happened in the orphanage, especially among children angry with life. But Mikhail Rutkin always remembered with gratitude the people who worked here.

According to the 1970 census, 12 residents of the village of Ulla identified themselves as Jews.

Do Jews know how to work on the land?

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Gutkoviches and Borgaks lived mainly in cities and towns. They mastered various crafts, tried to find happiness in commerce. Some families remained to live in the villages, to engage in agriculture. Their parents lived here, their children were born here.

Literally a few kilometers from Ulla is the village of Bortniki. I did not manage to go there with the American guests, although the landscapes in Bortniki are the most beautiful and there would be something to tell about.

In the early autumn of 2000, I came to this village. For a long time I wanted to get to the place where once there was a Jewish collective farm, to meet with the old-timers, to talk with them, to find out their opinion about the Jewish farmers. I've heard so many jokes about this topic. They were told not by pathological anti-Semites, but by the Jews themselves. Willy-nilly, you begin to think: maybe we are a people unsuitable for agricultural labor. (Where did the highly developed agriculture come from in Israel?).

Jews lived and worked in Bortniki and in the neighboring village of Sloboda long before the founding of collective farms, before the revolution.

Sloboda was a native place for the family of the farmer Leib Berkovich Gutkovich. In Tsuruki, not far from here, in the Sokorovsky village council, Iosif Abramovich Gutkovich was considered a strong owner. He had 6 acres of arable land, a horse, livestock, poultry. In addition to him, there were two able-bodied men and two able-bodied women in the family.

In the thirties of the 19th century, Sloboda became one of the first Jewish agricultural settlements in the Western Territory. In 1831, Jewish families bought (rather than rented) 223 acres of land and settled here. Probably, these were not poor people and until that moment they lived somewhere nearby in the towns of Ulla, Ushachi, Kublichi, Lepel.

The Russian autocrat in those years made many decisions concerning the fate of the Jews. Sometimes they contradicted each other, sometimes they were simply impossible. Part of the decrees concerned the employment of Jews, their employment in agricultural labor. They wanted to establish Jewish agricultural colonies in the Astrakhan province, the Novorossiysk Territory, in Tavria and even Siberia. People got up from their homes, set off on a long journey, and then flew a decree suspending the resettlement.

Attempts were made to secure the Jews on the ground and in the Western Territory. In 1847, the state even adopted a special regulation. They threatened to recruit those Jews who did not develop their economy to a sufficient level within six years. What was meant by the word “sufficient”, and who was the judge in this case, I never found out.

In the very first years, the Jewish settlers of Sloboda managed to become strong masters and independent people.

In 1898, 28 families, as they were called, "the indigenous Jewish population" lived here. The families were big. The population is 185 people.

The Jews of the agricultural settlement met the revolution without much enthusiasm, but also without unrest. They believed that if they earn their bread with hard work, their political passions cannot be touched.

But when the time came for general collectivization, the national collective farm "Rotfeld" ("Red Field" - Yiddish) arose on the site of the Jewish agricultural settlement. It simply could not be otherwise, whether the inhabitants of Sloboda wanted or did not want it.

Of the old-timers of these places, who remember the pre-war life, I met Evdokia Lavrenovna Sapego (Sadovskaya).

- There was a Jewish collective farm here. Jews also lived in the neighboring village of Tsuruki. The collective farm had a flax spinner, an oil mill, a pig farm, and a brick factory. They made brooms and took them to Gorodok to sell. Jews are business people. They lived richly. The entire population of Sloboda, young and old, worked in Rotfeld.

In 1933, a cattle yard for 100 cows and a granary were built in Rotfeld.

The chairman of the collective farm was Matvey Timkin.

Evdokia Lavrenovna named the names of her pre-war girlfriends: Khaika, Dora, Bentya ... And then, as if apologizing, she said:

- With memory something, I do not remember the names. You will talk to Fruza Gritskevich, since 1926 she must remember the Jews.

Fruza Nikolaevna Gritskevich was harvesting potatoes not far from her house.

Why are you suddenly interested in Jews? she asked.

And having learned that we were writing a book and were not going to demand or ask for anything, she began to tell:

“I have lived among Jews since childhood. The village was Jewish. Only a few houses near the highway were inhabited by Belarusians before the war. Our family lived in these houses. Now only one pre-war hut has been preserved. Of course, after the war, other people live there. I worked at the Rotfeld collective farm every summer. We were well paid and given one liter of milk a day.

– Who else can tell about the Jewish collective farm? I asked.

“Dobrovolsky,” answered Fruza Nikolaevna. - He is at home now.

We entered the bright and spacious house of Arkady Alexandrovich Dobrovolsky. He sat at the table, shod in felt boots.

“My legs hurt,” he said. - Maybe for bad weather, or maybe for old age, - and laughed. - Before the war, I did not live in Sloboda, but in the village of Bagretsy. It is not far from here. There was a Komsomol organization in Rotfeld, and we often met here. I was friends with Borey Timkin.

I found interesting facts about the Sloboda Jewish School in the State Archives of the Vitebsk Region. It was a four-class school, opened in 1924. Classes, of course, were in Yiddish.

School reports indicate that there were 1.3 square meters of floor, 2.6 cubic meters of air per student. The educational institution had 10 triple benches, one blackboard, one table and one chair. Not rich, but at that time not the worst version of a rural school. In 1924, Sonya Peisakhovich was in charge of the Sloboda Jewish School (she was also the only teacher). The young teacher was 20 years old, and it is also known that she was the daughter of a handicraftsman.

The Jewish school was attended by 23 Jews and 4 Belarusians - all children of primary school age who lived in Sloboda. Note that Belarusian parents did not write letters of complaint about why their children study in a Jewish school, no one found out which titular nation and in what language should be taught. Everything was natural and did not give rise to conflict.

In her annual report, Sonya Peisakhovich writes: “When I started work, there was a shortage of Jewish books. The first half of the year passed without books. In the second half of the year I went to Polotsk and brought the necessary books. But the school does not have a children's library, which greatly affects the development of children ... The school, together with the pioneer detachment, publishes a wall newspaper (once every two months). Children get a lot of hygiene skills. The school conducts social work, performances are staged for revolutionary holidays ... ".

I don’t know for what reasons, but teachers often changed at the Sloboda school. Probably, in those days, as now, young people, especially those who received a special education, are drawn to big cities.

In 1926, Etka Solomonovna Asovskaya was already working at the school, and the next year, Mikhail Yalov. The school rented the newly built house of Mendel Kagan for classes.

... At the end of June 1941, fascist troops came to Bortniki, Sloboda, and neighboring villages. Rather, the German troops passed through these villages, and the new government was represented by their assistants: elders, policemen.

We had to collect the terrible chronicle of 1941-42 literally bit by bit, talking with the inhabitants of Sloboda, Bortnikov, Sokorovo.

In early August 1941, the Germans and their henchmen drove the Jews from all the surrounding villages to Sloboda.

“Among them was my school teacher Anna Arkina,” Evdokia Sapego recalls.

Old-timers remember that a Jewish family lived in a large house next to the forest. Parents with their sons (for some reason they were afraid for them) went east, and left the house, the cow and the rest of the household to their daughter Haiku. Like, the Germans will not do anything with the girl ...

People lived in inhuman conditions for almost a year. They were mocked, they were driven to the most difficult and sometimes useless work. Food was a little easier than in other ghettos. There were small stocks of potatoes and vegetables left in the cellars. They didn’t eat well, but they didn’t die of hunger.

... It was in the autumn of 1942, no one could remember the exact date. 12 people of the Sonderkommando from the town of Kamen arrived in Sloboda. Together with them were the policemen and the headman.

“The headman was a filthy man,” recalls Fruza Gritskevich. - He spoke German quite well, and he tried to curry favor with the Nazis.

The Sonderkommando gathered all the Jews of Sloboda in the house near Mushka - such a Jewish woman lived in the village. Who did not fit into the hut, was waiting for his fate in the courtyard of the house.

First, men were led into the forest under escort. There were few of them. They ordered to take shovels. They said they would build a road. People had a presentiment of evil, but they had no idea that they were being led to execution.

The men dug two trenches in the forest. And at that moment a machine gun fired. People fell into the freshly dug earth, the wounded were finished off and immediately buried.

Among those who were driven to Mushka's house was Frida Gritskevich.

- I was black. They took me for a Jew. I was standing in the yard with my friend Dora. After the men were shot, they began to take women and children into the forest. Ten people were taken away. Usually four policemen were escorted. They were brought to the trench, and at that time a machine gun began to fire. When it was my turn to go, the headman said that I was Belarusian, and they let me go.

Few were saved that day. They say that the doctor Zarogatskaya and Anna Gurevich were hidden by Ivan Semenovich and Anastasia Stepanovna Zhernoseki. A boy and a girl hid from violence. But we did not know their names.

The ground moved at the place of execution for several days. Dogs ran into the forest to that most terrible place for a long time, and people bypassed it.

Now, a modest and neglected monument stands at the site of the execution. A rare person who finds himself in the forest comes up to him ... There is no tablet on the monument with the names of the people who were shot here. But we know from archival documents the names of the pre-war students of the Sloboda Jewish School. Many of them lie in this land.

Kogan Rokha, Timkin Zislya, Aksentseva Braina, Dubman Khava, Khaykina Mira, Kogan Isaak, Gershansky Freyna, Aronson Riva, Kogan Bush, Rappoport Sholom, Timkina Brayna, Akishman Manya, Kogan Riva, Natarevich Fantya, Gershansky Gersh, Khaykina Khanya, Natarevich Sholom , Gershanskaya Galya, Natarevich Mulya ...

According to the biographies of the Borgaks - Gutkoviches - Ginzburgs, one can study the history of the Litvaks - Jews who lived in Lithuania, Belarus, and eastern Poland. Their family chronicle can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century, and not a single significant historical event has bypassed this family.

Dov Ber Borgak was born in Polotsk in 1819 in the family of a tradesman Ovsey Borgak.

At a young age, he joined the Russian army. Under the autocrat Nicholas I in 1827, recruitment was introduced for the Jews. Its goal is not so much to strengthen the army, but to convert as many Jews as possible to Orthodoxy, and thereby contribute to the solution of the "Jewish question". For 25 years of barracks life, where naturally there were no conditions for the observance of religious laws, the Jew had to move away from his faith. They were recruited from the age of 18. Each Jewish community was given a mandatory recruitment plan. It is possible that 15-year-old Dov Ber was sent to the recruits earlier than the prescribed age, ascribing three years in the documents in order for the community to fulfill the plan and not remain in debt. Or was Dov Ber sent to serve instead of the son of a wealthy neighbor who managed to pay off?

But the most terrible was the fate of underage 12-year-old Jewish boys, who were also taken to the Russian army under Nicholas I. Many simply did not survive in the very first years, others were mocked by "uncles" - educators. Until the age of 18, young conscripts were in battalions or schools of cantonists "to prepare for military service", and then - 25 years of recruitment. Children were forced to accept Christianity, change their surnames, and rarely any of the cantonists, having gone through all the circles of this hell, returned home without losing their faith.

If Dov Ber Borgak ended up in the army, it means that he was from a low-income family, unable to pay off and far from the leadership of the Polotsk Jewish community.

Forty-year-old soldier Dov Ber Borgak returns to his native places in 1859 and settles in the village of Gorodets. How did Dov Ber or Berka turn out to be, what was his name at home, in this village forgotten by God and people?

Maybe he did not want to return to Polotsk, because his resentment against those who for many years tore him away from his home, from his usual life did not go away?

Or no one in Polotsk was waiting for him, and life had to start from scratch. Dov Beru married a twenty-year-old girl Esther. Her father Abram rented an apple orchard, located in the village of Gorodets on the banks of the Ushacha River, and transferred this business to his son-in-law.

A year later, the first-born appeared in the family. They named the boy Ovsey, in honor of the Polotsk grandfather. Most likely, by this time, Father Dov-Ber was no longer alive, and according to Jewish tradition, his name went to the baby.

Seven years later, the son Abram appeared in the family, named after his maternal grandfather, then the daughter Pesya.

For some time the family moved to Lepel. Rivka-Genya, Barry Ginzuburg's grandmother, is born there. And then the girls follow in succession: Genya, Nekhama, Ida.

The first wife dies. Dov Ber was apparently a strong man. He not only outlived his first wife, who was twenty years younger than him, but also married a second time to Kayla, Leib's daughter.

It is difficult to find out all the nuances of his life. But in his old age in 1894, Dov Ber again found himself in the village of Gorodets. He not only, as in previous years, rents an apple orchard, but also engages in tailoring.

The genealogical tree of the Borgakov - Gutkovich - Ginzburg family is so strong and branchy that it hangs over many cities and towns of Belarus with its crown. Here are the already mentioned Lepel, Ulla, the settlements of the Ulskaya volost, the village of Balbino, the estates of Ogustberg, Borovka, Dobreika, the towns of Kublichi, Shklov, Golovchinsk, Knyazhin. cities of Polotsk, Mogilev, Gomel.

But in family memories, in home conversations at the Ginzburgs' festive table, the name of the village of Gorodets was mentioned first of all. This settlement has become for the American family a symbol of distant Russian antiquity, an image of a serene and calm age.

And during any conversations, negotiations, discussions of upcoming trips to Belarus, Barry always said that he wanted to visit Gorodets.

What did I know about this village? On the map of the Lepelsky district, I found several settlements with the same name. And if you add neighboring districts to the search, then there will be as many as six Gorodtsov. The names of the villages Sloboda, Mezha, Gorodets are among the most common in Belarus.

I asked for clarification, to give some additional information, and finally I received it: Barry Ginzburg remembered the words “Gutovskaya volost” in his memory.

I breathed a sigh of relief, although it did not bring complete clarity. The Gutov volost was liquidated in February 1923 and its territory was included in the Ushach volost of the Bocheikovsky district.

Studying old books and maps in the archives, I got to three small villages called 1st Gorodets, 2nd Gorodets and 3rd Gorodets. In fact, these were three farms of one village.

In the 1st Gorodets at the beginning of the 20th century there were 5 households and 41 inhabitants; 2nd Gorodets was the largest - there were 16 households, 55 men and 42 women lived, and in the 3rd Gorodets there were only 4 courtyards, and 27 people lived here.

But it was in the 3rd Gorodets that the Jews lived. In 1926, these were the families of Zlata Moiseevna Sverdlova - 5 souls, Benz Khaimovna Sverdlova - 5 souls, David Berkovich Reles - 4 souls and Yankel Berkovich Rivman - 2 souls.

During the next visit to Belarus, Barry and Merle Ginzburg, we went to Gorodets. Loit Westerman traveled with us to places connected with their family's past.

He also lives in New York, is engaged in the construction business, and came to Belarus for the first time.

I asked the Ginzburgs:

- What is Loyt to you?

And Barry and Loyt began to find out the degree of relationship. I noticed long ago that in shtetl Jewish families this is always an intractable issue. And not at all because we are "Abrams who do not remember kinship." It’s just that the Jews who lived in shtetls in Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland adopted intra-clan marriages, that is, cousins ​​and sisters or more distant relatives could become husband and wife. And the branches of the family tree were so intertwined that it is very difficult to make out who and who belongs to whom.

In the end, after many minutes of conversation, we found out one of the family lines: Loyt's grandmother is Barry's cousin.

The ancestors of Barry and Loyt emigrated to the United States at the same time, only, judging by the memories, they reached the goal by different routes. Some of them traveled along the Western Dvina on a steamer to Riga, others arrived in Europe on a bed and from Hamburg sailed on a steamer to the United States.

And so we are going to the village of Gorodets, only not to the archival or bookstore, but to the real, today's one.

The road rises up, then we roll down, which our mobile phones instantly feel, they stop communicating in the lowlands. Either to the left or to the right of us are the most beautiful places. We pass by the Lesnye Ozera Rest House. Once upon a time, pilgrims from many provinces of Russia gathered in these parts, they walked for tens and hundreds of kilometers. Rumors spread everywhere about local healing mud, which cures almost all diseases.

And finally, the road sign "Zvonsk - 1km". I take out a notebook and read the extracts made in the archive: "Gorodets belongs to the Zvonsky rural society." So we are on target.

Barry Ginzburg recalls that his relatives lived in the town of Kublichi. The nearest post and telegraph office to Gorodets at the beginning of the 20th century was located in the town of Kublichi. Everything converges.

We drive along a gravel road for a couple of kilometers and read “Gorodets” on the road sign.

Barry and Merle Ginsburg, Loit Westerman cheer. The goal to which they have been striving for many years has been achieved.

We got out of the car. A small village surrounded by a pine forest. On a sunny day in summer, no doubt, it is a very beautiful place, when even old rickety fences and outdated houses seem picturesque and attractive. But on a gray November day, when sleet is falling and dirty slurry is squelching underfoot, it looks dull and bleak.

We took pictures against the backdrop of village houses, against the backdrop of a well-crane. The American guests asked: "What is this?" Barry asked: “Where was the apple orchard that the Borgak family rented?” According to family legend, one of his relatives worked in Gorodets at a water mill.

I asked a local woman about the mill. She shook her head. In her lifetime, and she is sixty years old, she does not remember this.

We went down from the mountain, and in front of us was the river Ushacha. A suspension bridge swinging like a clock pendulum, old car tires thrown into the water. Perhaps the mill stood right here. And somewhere nearby on the shore was an apple orchard.

The village of Gorodets is living its life. Houses that are more like "cine" scenery and are afraid of any wind, fences that are kept "on parole" and sheds that have developed like houses of cards. As our driver Ilya said: "The road through Gorodets leads to a dead end."

Barry Ginsburg did not see what was expected and commanded: "Let's go back."

We asked a passerby how best to go to Ushachi. He looked at our comfortable cars and decided that we were the next metropolitan summer residents who buy up the local wrecked houses, demolish them and build completely modern cottages in their place, in which they live a couple of summer months.

We were leaving Gorodets. Silence hung in the car, and I said: "Dreams are always more beautiful than reality."

The next day, Barry and Merle at the opening of the reconstructed charity center "Hasdey David" were waiting for a meeting with members of the Vitebsk Jewish city community. The Ginzburgs made generous donations, thanks to their help, the charity center increased its space, changed its architectural appearance, purchased modern equipment, and was able to open new programs. As the white canvas was removed from the commemorative plaque bearing the names of the benefactors, Barry said, “I am also from your congregation. My ancestors are from here, from the Vitebsk land. Therefore, I donated money with understanding. Today I listened with admiration to how your artists sang Jewish folk songs. We are with you."

There was, of course, festive pathos in these words, but they touched everyone who came to the opening of the charitable center.

Barry and Merle Ginsburg wholeheartedly help the Jews of Belarus. They have established nominal scholarships for those who decide to get a higher or second higher education. They provide financial assistance to a Jewish kindergarten in Minsk. Allocate funds for additional nutrition, treatment and health promotion for people in need.

Another surprise awaited the Ginzburgs ahead. Among those who receive a nominal scholarship assigned by them is Nastya Batenko. Studying in Minsk, future designer. Her grandmother's maiden name was Gutkovich. She is from the Beshenkovichi district, that is, from those places where the ancestors of Barry Ginzburg lived, and, possibly, their relative.

When a scholarship was awarded on a competitive basis, the grandmother's surname did not appear anywhere. This is a coincidence. But it has a lot of symbolism.

Community program manager Raisa Kastelyanskaya told about her family: her father's sister was married to David Gutkovich from Ulla. And she told about the children of David Gutkovich, who fought at the front, died a heroic death in battles with the Nazis, were shot in the Beshenkovichi ghetto, survived the blockade in Leningrad. Life scattered the family, and now grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in different countries of the world.

The posters hung in the Vitebsk charity center were written in Russian and English with touching words: “Dear Merle and Barry! You have come home." This causes both a smile and tenderness. We are brought together by the past, but separated by thousands of kilometers, we are different in the perception of the world, tastes, mentality.

But it's still nice to know that somewhere on the opposite side of the Earth, there are people like Merle and Barry.

I would like to believe that their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will come to the Belarusian cities and towns where the Ginzburgs' ancestors once lived. They will be interested in and know the history of their family, people, our traditions. And the famous "golden chain" of generations will never be interrupted.

The legendary Tsmok, the cool "Piglet", a giant oak, a stone with traces of legs and paws in the "land of yellow water lilies and gray boulders"

Summer holidays are different for everyone. Who goes to soak up the waves of the warm sea abroad, who attends concerts and exhibitions, and who is not averse to getting to know them better. Moreover, the latter option is becoming more and more popular: it does not require special financial costs, vivid emotions and unforgettable impressions are guaranteed, and sometimes it is even possible to find something interesting.

One of these routes can be "the land of yellow water lilies and gray boulders" - Lepel. The city was first mentioned in historical chronicles in 1439, although human settlements appeared here in the Mesolithic era.

The history of the city is inextricably linked with the name of the Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who founded a new one (on this place today the regional center is located) and transferred the center of the settlement from Stary Lepel (today - a village in) to it.

Monument to Lev Sapieha at the entrance to the city park. Photo by Sasha May

The very origin of the name of the city is of interest. Some associate the toponym "Lepel" with the Belarusian word "lepi"; others - with pottery, common in this area (modeling, sculpting); the third - with the Lithuanian "lepe" and the Latvian "lepe", which means "yellow water lilies"; the fourth - with the Fino-Ugric origin of the word "leppa" (alder) ...

Today we offer five reasons why you need to visit this cozy regional center.

Reason one. lakes

What could be better than a summer vacation on the lake? Only rest on Lake Lepelskoye - local residents are sure. And no matter what you choose: a well-maintained beach, rental of catamarans and boats, a boat trip or fishing - a great pastime is guaranteed.

By the way, Lepel, after Braslav and Glubokoy, is also called the Lake District. There are about 140 lakes on the territory of the region, the largest of them - occupies an area of ​​​​more than 10 square kilometers, and the length of its coastline reaches almost 40 kilometers.

Lepel Lake is the pearl of the region. Photo by Sasha May

The sculpture of the Mermaid adorns the city park. Photo by Sasha May

The two-meter Lepelsky Tsmok is distinguished by enviable good nature: it is photographed with a smile with all the tourists and even invites you to the international festival of mythology, which traditionally takes place in August.

Good-natured Tsmok on the shore of Lake Lepel. Photo by Sasha May

By the way, Tsmok in the city park is not the only dragon-like character in Lepel. A year ago, a sculpture of a dragon appeared at the building of the local city gas station (RGS).

Such a cute dragon "lives" near the Gorgaz building. Photo by Sasha May

Reason four. Natural monuments of the area

Perhaps the most famous natural monument of the region can be called the "Tsar-oak" in the village of Tadulino. The height of the giant oak, which, by the way, is and is protected by the state, is about 26 meters, and its age is 300-400 years.

Lepelshchina is famous for its boulders. In the village of Toronkovichi, on the site of a pagan temple, a stone-altar was found, the length of which exceeds four meters.

And not far from the village of Bolshoy Polsvizh there is the so-called Holy Stone, which is the only one found in the Lepel region. It is remarkable that on the stone you can see prints of animal paws and human feet.

Reason five. Museum of Local Lore

The local history museum was opened in the 1950s. Today, residents and guests of the city can visit six exhibition halls. Among them: the hall of nature, where stuffed animals and birds are exhibited, and the hall of the historical past, which presents materials from archaeological excavations, coins, medals, seals, tools, musical instruments, dishes and other items. A special place in the museum is given to materials dedicated to

The building of the local history museum in Lepel. Photo by Sasha May

One of the most unique exhibits is the horn of the aurochs, an animal that became extinct in the 17th century. A future exhibit 60 centimeters long was found at the bottom of Lake Okono.

Getting to Lepel is not difficult. The city is located a little away from the Vitebsk-Minsk highway. The road will take no more than an hour and a half (the distance to Lepel is about 110 kilometers). And minibuses and buses run from the Vitebsk bus station almost every hour to the regional center.

LEPEL, a city (since 1802) in Belarus, a district center of the Vitebsk region (see VITEBSK REGION), near Lake Lepel. Railroad station. Population 19.1 thousand people (2004). Mechanical engineering, food, woodworking, linen industry. ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

City (since 1802) in Belarus, Vitebsk region, near the lake. Lepel. Railroad station. 19.6 thousand inhabitants (1991). Food, woodworking industry. Regional Museum. Known since the 15th… Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

City, district center, Vitebsk region, Belarus. Known since the 15th century, located at Lake Lepel, after which it is named. Hydronym from Latvian. liepa linden from balt. suffix el. Geographical names of the world: Toponymic dictionary. M: AST. Pospelov E.M. 2001 ... Geographic Encyclopedia

- (Leppel) county. Vitebsk province., near the lake. Lepel and R. Essy and Ulyanka. Not far from present-day L. is an ancient village called Old L.; L. was here before. In 1563, Russian troops burned L. In 1568, King Sigismund August ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron

Lepel- Sp Lèpelis Ap Lepel/Lyepyel’, Lepel’ baltarusiškai (gudiškai), rusiškai L C Baltarusija … Pasaulio vietovardziai. Internetinė duomenų bazė

Lepel- city, district center, Vitebsk region, Belarus. Known since the 15th century, located at Lake Lepel, after which it is named. Hydronym from Latvian. liepa linden from balt. suffix el... Toponymic Dictionary

Lake in the former Vitebsk. lips. From other Russian. *Lepl with l epentheticum. According to Bugi (RS 6, 30), from Lett. *Lerja; cf. ltsh. lẽpa water lily, water lily, Numphaea, lit. lėpis Сallа palustris, marsh calla… Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language by Max Fasmer

A city in the Vitebsk region of the BSSR, near the lake. Lepel. Railway station. 13.6 thousand inhabitants (1972). Milk canning, bread, industrial plants; repair, fish factory, excavator repair plant. Regional Museum. L. for the first time ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Catholic Church Church of St. Casimir Kascel St. Casimir ... Wikipedia

Main article: Administrative division of the Republic of Belarus Contents 1 Cities in the BSSR 2 Cities in the Republic of Belarus ... Wikipedia

Books

• Partisans accept the fight, V. E. Lobanok. It was one of the largest battles between partisans and Nazi invaders in the Great Patriotic War. Six months (from December 1943 to May 1944) the front-line Vitebsk ...