Jewish Diaspora
December 16,2014
Fate of Jews in Minsk
Minsk is a very special city in the history of Jewish people of the 20’s century because of it’s historical location at the heart of the Pale of Settlement, region of Imperial Russia, beyond which Jews were allowed permanent residency. Minsk became a historic Jewish center centuries before the establishment of the Soviet Union. Comprising of almost half of the city’s population by the beginning of the 20’s century, Jews played an important role in the political, economical and social life of Minsk. Unlike everywhere else in Europe during the Second World War, Jews in Minsk actively collaborated with local Byelorussian Partisan Movement in resistance against Nazis, hence an incredible number of people were able to escape the fate in ghettos. Jewish population dropped from 90.000 in 1941 to 38.000 right after the War. The first and the only memorial of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union was erected in Minsk immediately after World War II. Nevertheless, the Soviet regime remained hostile to Jewry, unofficially promoting overt anti-Semitism and creating discriminatory conditions. When the gates were open, most Jews immigrated to Israel and the United States. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, around 10,000 Jews remained in Minsk according to census information. Contemporary Jewish organizations in Belarus estimate the Jewish population of Minsk to be around 20,000 people due to the fact that a lot of Jews felt comfortable to reveal their identity in a newly formed country.
The history of Jewry in Minsk starts from the immigration of Mikhl Danilevich of Troki, a merchant, who leased the rights of custom duties in the city in 1489. More Jewish families moved after they were massively expelled from Lithuania in 1495. During this time Minsk was a part of Poland-Lithuania commonwealth. Jewry of Minsk for the next two centuries did not enjoy a stable life. Every other king brought new policies, fluctuating from favorable to unbearable. In 1579, Jews were granted the privilege to engage in commerce in the city, which was invalidated in 1606, then reinstated in 1629. Only two decades later Jews were forced out off the city by Russians during the Russian–Polish war (1654–1667), but as soon as Minsk was returned to Poland-Lithuania commonwealth in 1658, the Jewish community was reestablished.
Minsk Jewry gained prosperity due to act of King John III Sobieski, king of Poland, in 1679 that confirmed their right to the ownership of houses, shops, synagogues and cemeteries. Fortunately, subsequent kings did not cancel these rights. Hence the community of Minsk economically prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries. Jews were especially prominent in the fields of commerce, handicrafts, tax collection, and lease holding. The spiritual life of the community was also enriched as a result of the establishment of the first yeshiva (Jewish school) in 1685 by a local rabbi. In 1733 a second yeshiva was established, which made the city an educational center of Jewish studies attracting students from all over Poland and Lithuania. During the 19th century, Minsk was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Russian Empire in the Pale of Settlement that numbered 47,562 people.
Minsk also became a perfect place for modern Jewish political movements. In late 19th century, it became one of the main centers of the Jewish labor movement in the Russian Empire because of a high proportion of Jewish workers. It became a stronghold for the activities of both the Bund and Workers of Zion. Large numbers supported the Zionist Movement. The Second Conference of Russian Zionists was held in Minsk in 1902. Jews played an important role in demonstrations against the tsar and in strikes that took place during the 1905 Revolution. Semen Rozenbaum, a famous Zionist, was elected to represent Minsk at the First Russian Duma in 1906.
In the beginning of the 20th century Jews made up 54 percent of the Minsk population, which is around 57,000 people. They owned half of the factories and plants, comprised half of the city's intellectuals and even political activists, and made up 85 percent of its merchants. Nevertheless, they were still seen as aliens for local people, bielorussians, who defined them as parasitic and heterodox in petitions to authorities from cities of the Byelorussian region. Interestingly, petitions from the Minsk region tended to be more liberal: “We believe that the time is not yet ripe to give equal rights to Jews because we are not educated enough as to coexist peacefully with Jews who are mentally developed and well-educated in all spheres”. It was written by the urban class inhabitants of Rechitsa district of Minsk in 1906 .
The revolutions of February and October 1917 took over the Tsarist dominion, including the city of Minsk. The Bolshevik Party created by then a one-party political system, enacting state-control of the economy and proclaiming scientific atheism a part of Soviet ideology. It brought about major changes to lives of Jews. The new system radically altered the socioeconomic structure of Minsk Jewry, at the same time providing Jews vast opportunities of equality. If in prerevolutionary times the proportion of merchants among the Jewish population had been 24 percent, this number gradually fell to nonexistence by the mid-30s because merchants were banned as subversive, along with private enterprise. Though the number of Jews occupying public positions rose from zero to 3,000 people in 20 years, by 1926 Jews numbered 2,918. In post-revolutionary Russia, Minsk kept its uniqueness. It was the only city with major Jewish community that became the capital of a newly formed Soviet Socialistic Republic with Yiddish recognized as an official state language Still remaining a very ordinary Jewish city, Minsk as a capital began attracting Bolshevik authorities, spreading Communist ideology around Belorussia. As a result, due to higher levels of education and politicization in comparison with Belarusians, Jews entered in the new administrative, economic, and cultural sectors of the new state. Becoming a Soviet person implied full acceptance of the new ideology. Luckily the path to Sovietization did not involve a complete denial of self-identity. Jews had to adjust to new realities, though still could coexist in harmony.
The Jewish population of Minsk was not heterogeneous. Some conservatives stuck to their culture and religion, while others actively supported Bolsheviks. Evreiskaia was a prominent section of the Communist Party. Even though they supported the functioning of social institutions in the Yiddish language and vigorously supported the new ideology, they systematically persecuted Jewish religious and Zionist groups, closing down synagogues, which numbered more than a hundred back then, and organizing trials against local rabbis and teachers. Their goal was to bring communist ideas to the Jewish population, illuminate religion and assimilate culture.
An interesting historic event clearly portrays the confrontation between two opposing Jewish groups of Minsk. The Jewish quarter of Minsk, Nemiga, home to numerous pre-Revolutionary Jewish religious and communal institutions became an arena of a violent clash in the spring of 1922. The conflict broke out between two factions of the local Jewish population. The Communist side represented the students and faculty of the Jewish Pedagogical Training College, or Evpedtekhnikum. The other participants in the strife were ordinary residents: workers, artisans, small peddlers, and committed religious people angry at Communist officials for closing down synagogues. They protested against the use of Talmud-Torah classes for spreading communism. The Nemiga strife can be seen as a microcosm of the civil war that erupted in the Jewish urban population between supporters and opponents of the new Soviet system.
The future of this Jewish political movement was threatened, because it was seen as a threat to Bolshevik power in Belorussia. Jews composed a significant, politically active portion of Minsk population. Jews formed majorities among nonagricultural laborers, artisans, and producers of Minsk. Also, Jews made up a considerable portion of the Bolshevik party ranks. According to a 1921 report, some 60 percent of all Bolshevik party members from the 26 largest factories in Minsk were Jews. Finally, most Jews who entered the Bolshevik Party began their political lives as members of specifically Jewish political parties.
When the Second World War hit Minsk, the Jewish population had already consisted of more than 100,000 people (more than 50% of total population), because of numerous refugees from Western Belorussia. Majority was imprisoned in the ghetto, which had been established on 20 July 1941 at the outskirts of the city, close to the Jewish cemetery. Only a few Jews managed to escape from the city in the six days after Nazis attacked Brest before the conquest of Minsk on 28 June 1941. Luckily, Minsk's ghetto was easier to escape, because rather than a brick wall, Germans constructed a barbed-wire fence around the rim of the ghetto and assigned patrols instead of fixed sentries. Nevertheless, many Jews were killed during the attempt to escape. Another favorable factor was the proximity of partisan units in forests. Germans expected locals to anonymously betray Jews, which did not happen in the case of Minsk. Jews and Belorussians formed secret underground groups that were able to help an estimated 10,000 Jews escape the Minsk ghetto, a proportion without parallel in Holocaust history (10% of all ghetto population). One of these groups organized the assassination of the governor-general of Belorussia, Wihelm Kube, in September 1943. At the liberation, 13 Jews survived the ghetto and about 5,000 Jewish partisans were able to return from the forests. In 1945, the first and only memorial in the USSR to Jewish victims in Minsk was erected in the corner of Melnikayte and Zaslavskaya street. In 2001 a sculpture by Belarusian artist, Leonid Levin, and a sculptor from Israel, Elsa Pollak was added to the memorial. The story of Jewish and Belorussian collaboration against Nazis was the most successful in the history of the Second World War, because of the tolerant nature of the Belorussian people. Located in the center of Europe and surrounded by powerful nations, the Belorussian territory had been invaded numerous times. During the Second World War, full villages like Khatyn were massacred and burnt to ashes. Every third Belorussian was killed in the war. In order to survive they chose to collaborate with Jews instead of using an opportunity to help Nazis wipe out the alien nation. Unfortunately, after the war Stalin was very suspicious of surviving members of the Holocaust and the entire partisan movement. Chasya Pruslina, a brave woman and a former leader of the Jewish ghetto underground was arrested in suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Solomon Mikhoels, leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and a director of State Jewish Theater, was murdered in Minsk on 13 January 1948. Many Minsk Jews were dismissed from their jobs and arrested in the course of the state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign of Stalin. In 1959, when population left was around 40,000 Jews the only synagogue in Minsk was closed down, and in the late 1960s the Jewish cemetery was destroyed.
Since 1970, around 30,000 Jews have emigrated from Minsk to Israel, America, and Germany. Since the Iron Curtain was lifted and communism banished from Minsk, the interest in Judaism was renewed. ``People are coming out of the woodwork and announcing they are Jewish,'' says David Lerner, a British educator who helped found a Sabbath school in Minsk, for Time Europe in 1995. ``Six years ago, Jews were still being beaten up in Minsk. Now there are three religious congregations, the Sabbath school, a youth movement and a voluntary welfare organization.'' The Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Organizations and Communities was founded in 1991. The 1999 census recorded just 10,141 Jews remaining in Minsk. In March 2001, a Jewish communal center was opened. By 2003, there were three synagogues in Minsk, one under patronage of Lubavitch Hasidism, one a non-Hasidic Orthodox synagogue with a yeshiva, and one affiliated with the Progressive Movement.
Nowadays, most prominent Jewish organizations that are politically supported in Minsk are the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities (SBEOOO), Union of Religious Jewish Congregations of Belarus (OIROB), the Judaic Religious Union in the Republic of Belarus (IROB), and the Association of Progressive Judaism. Judaism is protected by the law on Freedom of Religion and Religious Organizations, passed in 2002, as a traditional confession. As of April 2010 5 Belarusian enterprises have obtained Kosher certification for some of their products. There are 2 Jewish schools in Minsk: the Jewish Bi-L gymnasium and the Or Avner school in Minsk (opened in September 2005). Special attention is rendered to Holocaust studies in secular schools among all population. A. G. Lukashenko, the current president of Belarus who has been for 20 years in office, always emphasizes that “Jews will never again be outcasts in this land.” It’s important to note that he is considered to be the last dictator of Europe, and the question on human rights and economic freedom remains controversial. Be He is the only official figure to have mentioned the role of the Jewish partisan units in the years of World War II. In compassion with other post-Soviet countries, Belarus remains the most tolerant state that corrected Soviet history with the respect to real Jewish influence on major events of 20’s century.
Biblography
Bemporad, Elissa. Becoming Soviet Jews: the Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013 Bemporad, Elissa. “Behavior Unbecoming a Communist: Jewish Religious Practice in Soviet Minsk.” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 1-25.
Bemporad, Elissa. “Minsk.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Minsk (accessed October 10, 2014). “Belarus.” World Jewish Congress, accessed October 11, 2014 http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show?id=83 Bukhovets, Oleg G. "The Image of Jews in Byelorussia: Petitions as a Source for Popular Consciousness in the Early Twentieth Century." International Review of Social History 46, (12, 2001): 171-184. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu:2048/docview/203590597?accountid=7286 ( accessed October 10, 2014 from Brooklyn College Library Webcite) Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. “General Information On Belarus Jewish Organizations.” Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. http://eajc.org/page425 (accessed on October 11, 2014) Jackson, James o. Jeremy Frankel. “More than Remembrance: Neither the Holocaust nor Communism Could Wipe out the Jews of Eastern Europe. Now Their Faith is Flourishing.” Time 145, no. 5 (2/6/1995): 36.
Sloin, Andrew. “The Politics of Crisis: Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 1 (2014): 51-76. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu:2048/journals/kritika/v015/15.1.sloin.html ( Acessed on October 8, 2014 from Brooklyn College Library webcite) Slutsky, Yehuda, and Reuben Ainsztein. “Minsk.” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006), 17 vol., 293-297

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[ 1 ]. Stutsky, 294
[ 2 ]. Slutsky, p.295
[ 3 ]. Bemporad 2010
[ 4 ]. Bukhovets, p.179
[ 5 ]. Bemporad 2013, p.39
[ 6 ]. Bemporad 2013, p. 51
[ 7 ]. Slutsky, p.296
[ 8 ]. Sloin,p.55
[ 9 ]. Epstein,67
[ 10 ]. Epstein, p.70-84
[ 11 ]. Slutsky, p.297
[ 12 ]. Bemporad 2010