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Reflections on Landsmanshaftn and Yizker Bikher

5/22/2016

20 Comments

 
PictureFront cover of yizker bukh, Al betenu she-harav—Fun der khorever heym [About our house which was devastated] (http://goo.gl/naZjA3, accessed 5-22-16).
​Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about landsmanshaftn and yizker bikher, both of which I will define, shortly.  In the last month or so, alone, I have had more than half a dozen meetings and correspondences with clients and acquaintances to discuss the subject of landsmanshaftn in Chicago and New York City, and to translate excerpts of landsmanshaft minutes’ books – handwritten in Yiddish in the 1940s – from a landsmanshaft.  This, and my own personal history vis-à-vis landsmanshaftn and yizker bikher prompted me to write this blog about those two very much intertwined subjects.

A landsman [pl. landsmen] is Yiddish for “kinsman” or “countryman,” while a landsmanshaft [pl. landsmanshaftn] is Yiddish for the organization or society formed by landsmen of common towns or cities, generally in eastern or central Europe.  Yizker bikher [sing. Yizker bukh] are the memorial books, frequently written by a given landsmanshaft to honor and commemorate the historical events and sundry features, characteristics, and personalities associated with its particular city or town.  Many of the yizker bikher were written in the years following the Holocaust in Yiddish and Hebrew, although there are also those containing other languages, including: English, French, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Nowadays, yizker bikher tend to be a treasure trove for genealogists, researchers, and scholars, as they include names of individuals, and very frequently, necrology lists of Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

When I was growing up in Chicago back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was used to hearing about the “Kielcers” and their various gatherings, sometimes taking note of a schedule of events clipped to my grandparent’s refrigerator door.  These were the extended surrogate relatives – or landsmen – who hailed from my grandfather’s city of Kielce (pronounced `Kelts’ in Yiddish; `Keltseh’ in Polish), in Central Poland.  Like my own grandparents, they were all Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Chicago in the wake of World War II.  They bore an important presence at major family functions, such as my brother’s Bar Mitzvah and my grandfather’s 75th and 90th birthday parties. 

When my mother was growing up, the Kielcer landsmen were an even more ubiquitous and dynamic presence in her life, since they were all that much younger, a generation earlier, and had just lost their entire world during the Second World War.  As a result, most of them were eager to move forward, setting down roots in their adoptive city of Chicago, and giving rise to new and future families.   

Picture
Map of Poland, 1933, with Kielce indicated (https://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/map/lc/image/kil79020.gif, accessed 5-22-16).
In light of this milieu of transplanted landsmen in which I grew up, I had an inkling from early-on about landsmanshaftn.  By extension, I was also exposed at a relatively young age to yizker bikher.  Indeed, my grandfather had his own such yizker bukh, written mainly in Hebrew and Yiddish: Al betenu she-harav—Fun der khorever heym [Hebrew and Yiddish for: “About our house which was devastated”] (Tel Aviv: Kielce Societies in Israel and in the Diaspora, 1981), which I recall flipping through from time to time as a somewhat older child.  It was then that my grandparents informed me of the existence of other Kielcer landsmanshaftn around the world – in far-off places such as New York, Toronto, and Israel. 

A few years later, when I worked at the Asher Library, part of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, in Chicago, I once again had regular access to several hundred different yizker bikher.  When I moved to New York City over a decade ago to work for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, I likewise had ready access to literally hundreds of yizker bikher.  As of today, I make frequent use of the yizker bikher that are now accessible online through the New York Public Library, as well as those that are accessible onsite at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Studies and the Center for Jewish History in New York City.  
​
Since relocating to New York, I have translated excerpts and the entirety of many yizker bikher written both in Yiddish and Hebrew, including the following:
  • Pinkas Chmielnik [Memorial book of Chmielnik].  Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Chmielnik in Israel, 1960.
  • Sefer Bursztyn [The book of Bursztyn].  Jerusalem: Hotsaʾat Entsiḳlopedyah shel galuyot, 1960.
  • Sztokfisz, David, ed.  Al betenu she-harav—Fun der khorever heym [About our house which was devastated].  Tel Aviv: Kielce Societies in Israel and in the Diaspora, 1981.   
  • Sztokfisz, David, ed.  Sefer Drohiczyn [The book of Drohiczyn].  Tel Aviv, 1969.
  • Tsitron, P., ed.  Sefer Kielce; toldot kehilat Kielce [The book of Kielce; The history of the Kielce Jewish community].  Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Kielce in Israel, c. 1956.
PictureSouvenir Journal of the Kieltzer and Chenchiner Relief (later renamed the “Kieltzer Sick and Benevolent Society of New York”), January 18, 1941. (Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, NYC, RG 1056, Box 2 (of 2).)
​I have also surveyed and catalogued over 100 different landsmanshaft collections at the YIVO Institute, some of which may be viewed here.
 
Among those landsmanshaft collections at YIVO that personally interested me is that of the “Kieltzer Sick and Benevolent Society of New York” (Record Group 1056), organized in New York on January 7, 1905 as the “Kieltzer Sick and Benevolent Society of Russian Poland, Inc.”  The society  underwent a few name changes, until finally changing its name officially to the former title in 1954. 

It is worth noting here that as of 2016, this is one of the few still extant landsmanshaftn in the New York City area – and probably, worldwide – that continues to meet periodically throughout the year for commemorative ceremonies and other functions.  The organization, which today often goes by the more informal moniker, “The Kieltzer Society,” has its own website, which may be viewed here, and a related (closed group) Facebook site, accessible at: “Descendants of Jewish Kielce Province.”

There is a great deal that may be said of the history of Jewish Kielce – particularly, about the notorious pogrom that took place there at ul. Planty 7/9 on July 4, 1946, during which over 40 Holocaust survivors from Kielce and elsewhere were brutally murdered and maimed by local residents that included police and other officials.  Sadly, this is probably the one resonating reason that anybody today has ever even heard of this city.  Nonetheless, it is in Kielce that my grandfather lived the first 30-some years of his life, worked as a butcher, married, and raised two sons, before the Holocaust put a roaring end to all of that.

Picture
Postcard image of the Great Synagogue of Kielce (still standing today at ul. Warszawska 17), early 20th Century (https://goo.gl/H2NG8X, accessed 5-22-16).
Picture
Street scene, Kielce, early 20th Century (http://goo.gl/mFvJks, accessed 5-22-16).
I have visited Kielce twice, most recently in the fall of 2014.  On both trips there, I made a point of viewing the pogrom site and the remains of the Jewish cemetery.  I have also researched and written about various aspects of Jewish life in Kielce, time and time again.  One of my publications on the subject may be viewed here.

Among the most haunting research finds I made while sifting through the aforementioned archival collection, is that of a Yiddish article, entitled: “A bazukh in Kielce” [“A visit in Kielce”] published in Der Kielcer reporter ["The Kielcer reporter"] in June of 1946, only a matter of weeks or even mere days before the previously mentioned murderous rampage took place (on the 4th of July).  The article was written by Sh. Lipshitz, a Yiddish writer for the Vokhenblat newspaper (or “Canadian Jewish Weekly”) who was a native of Kielce’s neighboring city of Radom.  He returned to Poland in the wake of World War II to report on the situation concerning Jewish life there. 

Ironically, although the article patently conveys the vast degree of destruction wreaked on Jewish life in Kielce and in Poland as a whole, at the same time, there are bursts of optimism in Lipshitz’s piece.  In reading his account, one might think that there was a brighter future in store for the Holocaust survivors who had converged on Kielce, just right around the bend.  Moreover, there is certainly no blatant tone of an ensuing catastrophe lurking in the shadows.  ​
​Among the key figures whom Lipshitz highlights with regard to Kielce’s postwar Jewish community, or kehile is Dr. Kahane [Lipshitz refers to him as “Dr. Kahaner”], Chairman of the Kielce Regional Jewish Committee, who operated out of the Committee’s building on Planty Street.  Incidentally, this was the very same building in which many of the pogrom victims – Dr. Kahane included – would later lose their lives under extremely violent circumstances. 

At the time of Lipshitz’s visit, Kahane informed him the following regarding the then current state of Jewish life in Kielce:

“There are around 300 Jews in Kielce.  Some of them work, others trade/bargain, [and still] others receive help from the Committee.  The Committee has a good kitchen where hot meals are served for all those who are in need.  There is a kibbutz.  We must have help … The situation of the Jews is difficult.  From such a large Jewish settlement that there once was in Kielce, there remained only 300 Jews, and not all are Kielcers.  Some of the 300 are from the surrounding towns…”
PictureDer Kielcer reporter ["The Kielcer reporter"], published by The Committee for the Resettlement of Kielcer Jews, New York, [vol.] 2-3, June, 1946. (Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, NYC, RG 1056, Box 2 (of 2).)
​And yet, even with this less-than-sanguine image, Lipshitz remarks that Dr. Kahane, who was himself incarcerated during the war in a camp in Lemberg [Lwow], [he] “does not speak with any bitterness.  But in his eyes burns the fire of hatred for the barbarians, themselves.  A German who falls into Dr. Kahane’s hands will not have a Garden of Eden.”
 
However, the following description of the series of events that unfolded on July 4, 1946 makes plainly clear the tragic reality: that there was no way that Dr. Kahane would ever have any such opportunity to demonstrate the hatred that Lipshitz illustrates in his article:

​“At about 11 o'clock three lieutenants of the Polish Army entered the room in which Kahane was located at that moment. When the officers came into the room, Dr. Kahane held the telephone receiver in his hand. . . They told him they had come to remove weapons. . . One of them walked up to Dr. Kahane, told him to keep calm because soon everything would be over, and then approached him from behind and shot him straight in the head” (Bozena Szaynok, "The Pogrom of Jews in Kielce, July 4, 1946." Yad Vashem Studies 22 (1992), p. 216).

PictureSh. Lipshitz’s “A bazukh in Kielce” [“A visit in Kielce”], from which some of my translated excerpts in this blog appear. (Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, NYC, RG 1056, Box 2 (of 2).)
​In the aftermath of the Kielce pogrom, there was, perhaps not surprisingly, a dramatic increase in the number of Jews emigrating from Poland.  Many of those émigrés headed westward, while others eventually made their way to what would soon become the Modern State of Israel.  The Kielce pogrom was the final test of survival – the proverbial “last straw.”  My grandfather was among the “luckier” ones, since he never even returned to Kielce, following his liberation by the American Forces at the end of World War II.  Had he returned, I shudder to think whether I would be here today, writing these very words.    

Bearing this history in mind, I ask, that come the next yortsayt [Yiddish for “anniversary of a death”] of the Kielce pogrom – the 70th – on July 4, 2016, that you please take a few minutes out of your Independence Day celebrations (if you are American, that is) to remember those, like Dr. Kahane, who died tragically on this day, while trying to protect and defend themselves and their fellow landsmen.
​
I also ask you to please consider the immense value that landsmanshaftn and yizker bikher had  and continue to have for those who contributed to them, as well as for future generations.  Should you have a yizker bukh or any landsmanshaft material that you would like translated, please do not hesitate to contact me at rivka@rivkasyiddish.com.

Picture
Building at ul. Planty 7/9 in which the Jewish kehile functioned post-World War II and in which the Kielce pogrom broke out on July 4, 1946. (Summer 2015)(https://goo.gl/lGku2p, accessed 5-22-16).
Picture
Close up view of building at ul. Planty 7/9, Kielce. Affixed to the wall is a commemorative plaque for the Jewish pogrom victims who were murdered here on July 4, 1946. (Photograph taken by Rivka Schiller, September 2014.)
20 Comments
Thomas Rosenbloom link
5/29/2016 11:47:51 am

Beautifully written - but - so sad to read.

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 11:28:52 am

Thomas,

Thank you for your nice, as well as observant remarks. Indeed, this is a sincerely tragic chapter in the history of the Jewish People, as well as of Mankind. It is all so unfathomable that words simply do not suffice...

Kind regards,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Rabbi David Blumenfeld link
5/29/2016 08:18:28 pm

Rivka,

Keep up your superlative postings. Kol Ha-kavod!

Rabbi David Blumenfeld, Kieltzer Rabbi

Reply
Manny Bekier
5/30/2016 12:43:40 pm

Thank you for your blog article on Kielce. It is a well worthwhile read.

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 12:50:04 pm

Manny,

Thank you very much for your nice endorsement, which means a lot to me, given your major involvement with the Kieltzer Society (NY)!

Keep up your wonderful work on behalf of the Kieltzer Society!

With much appreciation,
Rivka Schiller

Betty Poznanski Hirsch link
5/29/2016 08:46:00 pm

Thanking for writing about this event that occurred on July 4, 1946. Horrifying to think about this. My family was from Sosnowiec. My aunt Klara had run to Russia during the war and was trying to return home after the war. Based on a letter she had written, she was heading back home. When she heard about what happened in Kielce, she stated that if the Nazis didn't kill her, she was certainly not going to let the Poles kill her....so she turned around and ran back to Russia (we think).... never to be heard from again. My mother desperately wanted to find her ( sister). Even with today's resources, I still cannot find anything about what happened to her. Sad story.

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 11:37:13 am

Betty,

Thank you very much for writing me and sharing your own family history. I am very sorry for your own sad account, and hope that some day you and your family will be able to learn what actually happened to your aunt and have some form of closure.

Indeed, many Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Russia were horrified by the news they heard after the war coming out of Poland. Numerous Jews were murdered even after World War II had come to a close. The Kielce pogrom is simply the most well-known and grand scale case of murder perpetrated against Jews in Poland following the Holocaust.

For example, there was also a pogrom in Krakow, the previous August of 1945, but the scope and repercussions of that rampage were nowhere near those of the Kielce pogrom, nearly one year later.

Many thanks, again,
With all good wishes,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Debra Fogel Lewis
5/30/2016 04:53:01 am

First, through your research and obvious connection, you are keeping the memory of the Kielce community alive. My father was from a shtetl close to Kielce, Opatow (Apt in Yiddish). Although a vibrant landsman shaft once flourished in Toronto, Israel and NY, it has dwindled, and in NY, it's a whisper of what it once was. The cemetery is maintained, however, and copies of the Yizkor book are at the museum in DC. Thank you for your work, it's quite inspiring!

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 12:22:45 pm

Debra,

Thank you very much for your words of recognition and appreciation. I am grateful to you and those like you who take the time to read my posts. They may not always have "happy endings," but I do think that they shed light on important matters that one would not find just anywhere today.

I am certainly familiar with Opatow/Apt, which is where the Chasidic and rabbinic Heschel family had roots (to the best of my knowledge).

You may want to look at the book, "They Called Me Mayer July" by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, which pertains to Dr. K-G's father's hometown of Apt. Here is more info. about the book, which contains lovely illustrations by "Mayer July" himself, from the book publisher:

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520249615

I'm sorry to hear that the Apt landsmanshaft is no longer all that it formerly was, but at least, as you stated, the cemetery is maintained, and there is a yizker bukh for the town. That is often not the case for many of these lesser known towns in Poland and elsewhere.

With much gratitude,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Peter Kubicek
5/30/2016 09:27:10 am

Rivka, Your story touched a nerve in me. I was born in the former Czechoslovakia and the grew in the Slovak town of Trenčin. There I attended a Jewish elementary school and was a boy soprano it the synagogue choir. The situation for Jews gradually deteriorated until I was deported on November 1, 1944, to a concentration camp in Germany. After I was separated from my mother, further five concentration camps followed.

I arrived in the U.S. on November 13, 1946.

You can read my story in a published book entitled, "Memories of Evil-- Recalling a World War II Childhood." (Available on Amazon.com/books)

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 11:24:33 am

Rabbi Blumenfeld,

Thank you so much for your positive remarks! As the Kieltzer Society's rabbi, I genuinely appreciate your endorsement.

Many thanks for all of your devoted service over the years to the Kielcers and to the Jewish People as a whole.

Best wishes,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Esther link
5/30/2016 10:02:18 am

Thanks so much!!!! Wow chock full of so much interesting research and so many articles. Your work is amazing and fascinating.

Thanks again!
Regards,
Esther

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 11:17:33 am

Esther,

Thank you so much for your kind and appreciative remarks! I would like to think that I am providing a special service -- to educate, inform, and share my passion for Yiddish and Jewish history -- with the broader world.

Warm regards,
Rivka

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 11:03:01 am

Peter,

Thank you very much for your comments and for sharing a bit of your own personal story with me and my readers. Indeed, this account seems to have touched a nerve in many of the people who are writing in to me (here and elsewhere), regardless of whether they have any connection whatsoever with Kielce, Poland.

Sadly, this and other forms of anti-Semitic violence are nothing new, and continue to occur up until the present day, worldwide.

What was all the more shocking and horrific about this pogrom was that it took place AFTER the Holocaust, at a time when the small pool of Jewish survivors of that atrocity were attempting to reclaim their lives -- and, at a time when it was believed that there would be no more (sanctioned) mass killings of Jews. Clearly, though, history proved otherwise...

I appreciate your informing me and my readers about your autobiography. I hope to read it in the near future.

Many thanks,
With all good wishes,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Debbie Silverstein
5/30/2016 05:13:18 pm

Rivka, this is an excellent and informative piece, with very interesting comments as well. I look forward to reading more posts.

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
5/30/2016 05:52:40 pm

Thank you, Debbie, for your very nice words.

I do hope you will consider subscribing to my blog, which I aim to publish on a monthly basis. That may be done by going to the Home page of my website:

www.rivkasyiddish.com

and signing up on the bottom of the page.

Kind regards,
Rivka Schiller

Reply
Susan J. Gordon
6/1/2016 12:16:59 pm

Hi Rivka,

Your work is powerful, important, and amazing!

Soon after I discovered the landsmanshaftn organization for Zbaraz, (my grandfather's town) I met Herb Pattin, the last president of the "First Independent Zbarazer Relief Society."

Herb gave me copies of papers filled out by my grandfather and other relatives when they signed up with the society in the early 1900s. The papers list information such as their home addresses, wives' and children's names.

A few years ago, I convinced Herb (now 92) to donate all his Zbaraz papers to YIVO at the CJH in Manhattan. (I made the special delivery for him!)

Now, he has encouraged me to speak about BECAUSE OF EVA to seniors at the Riverdale YM-YWHA, which he attends regularly. I will be speaking there next Thursday... and so it goes!

Take care, dear Rivka!
Best regards,
Susan

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
6/1/2016 12:33:34 pm

Susan,

Thank you so much for your glowing and much appreciated remarks! They mean a great deal coming from you -- a published author.

I wish you much success in your recent publication of BECAUSE OF EVA

http://www.becauseofeva.com/

and hope you have a wonderful turnout at your talk next week! Here are the details for anyone who would like to attend your book talk:

June 9, 2016, 10:30 am
Riverdale YM-YWHA, 5625 Arlington Ave., Riverdale NY 10471

I'm glad to hear about your landsmanshaft donation to YIVO, and hope that it provides much needed information for descendants of Zbaraz's Jewish community, genealogists, laypersons, and scholarly researchers alike.

Warm regards,
Rivka

Reply
Kalman Kivkovich
6/5/2016 06:10:09 pm

Thank you, Rivka Schiller.

My father served in the Polish Army and was stationed in Kielce (1936). He later was drafted to fight the Nazis, captured, but escaped from the train near Krakow. He walked all the way to Sosnowiec, collected my mother (then his new fiancée) and together they managed to escape to the Russian side . . . after a few Gulags away from each other, they reunited and returned to Poland in 1946 (yes, with me). Israel was their next and last stop.

I mentioned Kielce in my book “In the Vise of Evils.” The notorious 1946 pogrom in Kielce triggered a massive flight of Jewish Holocaust survivors from across liberated Poland, and ironically into Germany . . . among others.

Reply
Rivka Schiller link
6/5/2016 06:18:01 pm

Kalman, thank you very much for your informative remarks. I appreciate your sharing your personal history and imagine that your book must be quite compelling.

I was told that my grandfather (born in 1904 in a small hamlet outside of Kielce and raised in Kielce) was also in the Polish Army, but that he fled from the army when he saw the modern and far more sophisticated German tanks. The Polish Army -- still riding around on horses -- were obviously no match for the German panzers.

Best wishes,
Rivka

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