Pinkas Pruzany and It's Vicinity |
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p. 9 - 16 Joseph Friedlaender INTRODUCTION If
Pruzana had been a town with a larger number of inhabitants and a bigger Jewish
population, then it may have deserved to be known by the respected appelation of "a
mother town in Israel" like many other centres. This is in view of its Jewish
vitality, which continued for about 500 years. There are two proofs for this assumption:
one in the past and the other in the present. In the distant past, when the
"Lithuanian State Committee" (1623-1761) held its first
meeting in Pruzana in Av 5388 (1628), its key figures and leaders decided to go on holding
their meetings at Pruzana biennially, as Regulation 192 put it. It should not be forgotten that the
main speakers at the "Lithuanian State Committee" were the leaders of the main
kehilot Brisk and Pinsk (the Vilna kehilla joined later), Pruzana belonging to the area of
Brisk (Regulation 88). We do not know what made our town so attractive to the leaders of
the "Lithuanian State Committee" and why it was chosen as the site for the
meetings of the committee. The reasons were not specified, but the decision itself made it
clear that the committee leaders regarded Pruzana as the most appropiate place for its
sessions on the grounds of safety and other reasons. Incidentally, the conference of the
Lithuanian State committee was one of the most important from the viewpoint of the number
and content of the resolutions passed. There were 93 regulations dealing with political,
legal, economic, religious and cultural problems of Lithuanian Jews. We do not know why the decision was
not put into practice, but no more conferences were held in our city. In fact, it was the
small townlet of Seltz in the Pruzana district which hosted more conferences of the
Lithuanian State Committee than any other Jewish kehila in Lithuania. The other proof lies in the period
of destruction and the Holocaust, during the most terrible days of trial of East European
Jewry in the ghettos, in particular for the members of the Judenrat. There are still
diametrically opposed evaluations of the conduct of Judenrat members from the Jewish, not
the German, viewpoint. Some members were totally innocent and some were guilty; there were
those who were partially innocent and guilty; at the The members of the Judenrat in
Pruzana also courageously resisted German demands, and in light of the terrible conditions
and circumstances of that time, did their duty by their brethren out of a sense of Jewish
solidarity and a consciousness of the joint Jewish fate in the "Planet of
Auschwitz". Apart from one exceptional incident in which 18 Jews were killed at the
beginning of the German occupation, Jews were not killed by the Germans as in other near
and far-off kehillot. It is indeed possible that the strange fact that Pruzana was
attached to East Prussia instead of becoming part of the general government in Poland
contributed to the relatively lighter treatment of Jews by the Germans as compared with
other Jewish settlements. But whatever the motives, it is a fact that in the terrible days
of the German conquest a loyal team of officials acted in the best Jewish tradition to
deal with public needs. Evidence of this can be found in the testimony of Holocaust
survivors from Pruzana, Bialystock and other towns for whom the Pruzana ghetto served as a
temporary refuge from certain death, until the issue of the edict of destruction and the
expulsion to Auschwitz in January 1943, which covered all the Jews in the ghetto in the
framework of the "Final Solution" the Germans determined for East European
Jewry. The two proofs are enough to show
that Jewish life in Pruzana was in the best tradition of the old Jewish centres in Russia,
Poland and Lithuania, which developed deep roots in the soil of Furope and maintained
Jewish life for hundreds of years, struggling against the hostile forces of the regime and
overcoming them. Further evidence is found in the
personality of the Rabbis who sat on the Pruzana rabbinate. At the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, Rabbi Yoel, the son of Rabbi Shmuel
Sirkiss, served in our city. He was famous in the Jewish world for his book "Biet
Chadash - a.k.a Ba"ch - " and for his son-in-law Rabbi David, the son of
Rabbi Shmuel Segal, the author of the "Turay Zahav" Unfortunately, we have
not been able to trace other Among those who served on the
Pruzana Rabbinate were: The great one from Minsk, Rabbi of Minsk; Rabbi Yeruham
Yehuda-Leib Perelman and Rabbi Eliyahu Haim Meisels, who became famous as the rabbi of the
Lodz-Kehilla. Rabbi Eliyahu Feinstein (Rabbi Elinka) was among the luminaries of his age
and served for 45 years on the Pruzana rabbinate. The fact that he was twice asked to
serve as the Rabbi of Jerusalem speaks for itself. The struggle of Pruzana Jews to get
privileges from the kings of Poland should also be mentioned. As the pinkas shows, these
privileges were first confirmed by Queen Anna Jagellonka (1586), and the kings: Jan
Kazimierz (1649), Michael (1669), Jan the Third (1683), August the Third (1748) and
Stanislaw August (1776). The Jews strove to extend their rights and sometimes they
succeeded. The editors of the first Pinkas,
which appeared in Pruzana in 1930, examined important certificates and documents that were
preserved in Pruzana and other places, which provided evidence of the kehila's important
past. This fact highlights the awareness of the community leaders who took care to record
the history of the kehila for posterity. Not all the kehilot had this sense of history. In
Pruzana were preserved the pinkas of Hevra Kadisha the "Book of
Life" , the Community pinkas and a small pinkas of the 1831 cholera
plague. The cover of the Hevra Kadisha
pinkas records 1785 as the start of entries, but the same pinkas recalls a former one
going back to 1450. The cover of the "Book of Life" notes 1808 as its beginning,
but has records from 1721. The community pinkas covers the years 1801-1850. The first
historic document mentioning Pruzana refers to 1433, when it is to be supposed Jews were
already living there. In 1473, there is mention of the Pruzana synagogue ("Boznica
Zydowska"). All this evidence proves a long
Jewish history in Pruzana from the middle of the 15th century to the middle of the 20th
century: a period of about 500 years. The memoires of the Pruzana
survivors-not merely those who lived through the Holocaust, but all the townspeople who
immigrated to Israel or went to The vitality of these groups
received expression in two weekly papers: "Pruzener Lebn" and "Pruzaner
Sztyme", each of which served its camp and struggled for its ideals. There were few
such communities blessed with such ideological battles.
One should also not forget the part
played by the Heder, the Yeshiva and the government schools: the elementary school, the
gymnasium and the teachers' seminary. Reference must be made to the religious, social, and
professional institutions which also embraced the public work of many officials, who were
concerned to improve the lot of their brethren and help them in the increasingly
difficult, material struggle for existence which became harder during the years.
A wonderful structure of organised
Jewish community life was constructed out of all these "bricks" and in addition
to the struggles of "this world", it was also concerned about the "future
world" in view of the trends towards the Zionist solution in Eretz Yisrael and the
Socialist solution of struggle for "Doism" and the national and civil rights of
the Jewish national minority in the state of Poland.
Most of the survivors belonged to one of the rival camps and the
zeal which they invested in fighting each other is well remembered. Today, after the
tragedy that engulfed all the Jews of Pruzana, things are regarded in a different light in
retrospect. Everyone knows how to value and respect the views of opponents, because all
worked for the public good.
* * * Our Pruzana pinkas, a book of
testimony and reminiscence to a kehila that existed for 500 years, was written in Hebrew,
in addition to the two Yiddish pinkasim that appeared: in 1930 while Pruzana still existed
and in 1958 in Buenos Aires. What purpose did the third Pruzana register serve? As already
mentioned, there were two old community registers of the kehila and Hevra Kadisha. Both
were written in Hebrew, even though they contained many Yiddish words. It was the custom
of many Jewish kehilot to write their pinkas in Hebrew from the start of the Exile to the
present day. It is therefore the duty of the survivors to endow their town with a pinkas
in the Holy Tongue for future generations and not merely be satisfied with the pinkasim in
Yiddish, without in any way wishing to denigrate, G-d forbid, from their value or their
linguistic importance. Another reason is that the editors
of the two pinkasim belonged to the Yiddish camp and did not always take pains-perhaps
they were unable-to throw light on the Jewish life of the other camps. They were naturally
close to their own. The same thing might have happened had the Zionist and Hebrew camp
published the two pinkasim. However, this should not in any way be regarded as an attempt
to detract from the value of the work of the editors of the two Yiddish pinkasim, which
has existed for generations. They supplied most of the material for the Hebrew pinkas and
constitute not only its foundation but much of its body and mould as well.
First and foremost, it is hard to
exaggerate the historical value of the work of Gershon Urinsky, Meir Wolanski and Noah
Zuckerman, the editors of the first pinkas. Without them, there would have been no Pruzana
pinkas. They created something out of nothing and turned a small experiment by the seventh
grade pupils of the Y.L. Peretz school under the guidance of Noah Zuckerman to gather
material about the town's past into a mighty enterprise of the publication of the Pruzana
Town Pinkas, 1930. The three editors invested a lot of toil in finding historic material,
determining facts and dates and investigating the old people of the town. In their
introduction to the
Perhaps Pruzana's good fortune lay
in the fact that the editors felt time was running out and that tragedy was impending, as
the flood of bloodshed could already be seen on the horizon, a flood that would encompass
not only living Jews, but all the documents of inestimable value in studying Jewish
history. Therefore, every person browsing through the register in the near and distant
future owes them gratitude, admiration and esteem for their historic enterprise. Otherwise
the whole past of the town would have drowned in the depths of the sea of grief and
bereavement that engulfed the Pruzana Jews. The three editors looked at the sources at
their disposal, checked them and saved their contents from oblivion. Thanks to them, the
history of the town and the Jewish community was preserved. In addition, the editors
carried out full demographic and statistical researches, processed the findings and drew
the necessary conclusions. The articles on the first years of the 20th century, the First
World War and Jewish life in the 1920s are a storehouse of documentation and valuable
information. The minor blemishes in their work, which cannot be avoided, do not detract
from its character and quality. We drink from their wells and remember them with feelings
of gratitude and esteem. Two of the editors of the Pruzana
pinkas, G. Urinsky and M. Wolanski have died, the former in Pruzana in 1940 before the
Germans came and the latter in Argentina after the Second World War. Noah Zuckerman, who
stayed in the Soviet Union during the war, is now in Israel, living with his wife and
daughter in Netanya. We thank him for his agreement to the Hebrew translation of the
Pruzana Pinkas and his cooperation with us, as well as his account of how the register was
compiled. The second pinkas: "A Chronicle
of the destroyed Jewish Communities of the towns Pruzana, Bereza, Malch, Scherschev and
Seltz, their origin, development and annihilation". Editor: Mordecai W. Bernstein.
Co-Editor: David Forer, Buenos-Aires, Argentina, 1958, includes the whole of the first and
important material about the later periods. The pinkas was a lavish publication of 950
pages on fine paper and pleasant print. The editors did excellent work expanding the
picture to include the history of five towns closely linked with Pruzana both before and
during the Holocaust, as well as Pruzana's history. We thank Mr. David Forer for giving
his agreement to use the copious material in the pinkas and translate it into Hebrew
(Mordecai Bernstein is dead). Our pinkas includes material of the
two Yiddish pinkasim and extra things added by us, but it proved impossible to add
historic material prior to the 19th century. Among the material we added are: A.
Biographical details of the rabbis serving in Pruzana in the 19th century. B. A
detailed biography of the last rabbi David Faigenbaum, by his daughter Dr. Hannah
Krakowsky. C. Excerpts
from "Hamaylitz" and "Hazefirah" at the end of the 19th and beginning
of the 20th century, which include reports about Pruzana life. D. Memoirs
on Zionist and Hebrew activity in the twenties and thirties. E. A detailed biography
of Dr. Olia Goldfein, by her son-in -law Alexander Rabey. She was the most impressive
personality of Pruzana in the last 50 years of its existence. F. In the public and cultural personalities section, we have striven to bring details about prominent public officials, but unfortunately we were unable to find information on Eliyahu Birnbaum, who was deputy mayor for many years, Dr. Moshe Finegold, who was very active in public affairs and also deputy mayor for a short while, and other personalities. G. Our general of survivors. In view of budgetary limitations, we
had to cut down in this section, like other sections as well and we apologise to those
writers whose work was not published.
As a result of the lack of
documents, some personal stories about public work were included and it was impossible to
avoid using them. I am grateful to the writer Moshe
Chinovitch of Tel-Aviv for his participation in the work of the pinkas and his great help
and important advice in getting hold of historic material about our town. I did the whole
work of Hebrew translation of the material in the two Yiddish pinkasim. At the end of each article from the
first pinkas which appeared in Pruzana, the digit 1 appears in brackets (1). At the end of
each article in the second pinkas, which appeared in Argentina, the digit 2 appears in
brackets (2). Haifa, Elul 5741-September 1981. Editor's address: POB 7245, Haifa 31072. |
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