chosen the groom. Mina was a more progressive woman, as shown by her actions, when she later encouraged her youngest daughter, Bruria, to leave Vishey and study nursing in Germany. My grandmother, Mina, may have shared my mother’s dismay at the choice of groom. So it may not have been the sudden fleeing of a young girl, as I have been told, but perhaps planned ahead, for Bruria remembered Gitel coming to her just before she left with a gift she had knitted for her. Not only was such a gift unusual, for Bruria had never received such a gift before, but my mother also told her it was a secret.
The only photograph of my grandmother Mina, taken after my mother had left. With her daughters Rivka and Malka beside her and Bruria holding the ball in front.
Days after this giving of the gift my mother was gone, and as a result Bruria didn’t see her favourite older sister again for another thirty-five years.
5
I know my mother travelled over 200 kilometres to get to Bielsk Podlaski in Poland. This town is 40 kilometres past Bialystok, so it must have been her destination, for Bialystok was a much larger community and therefore a more logical place to seek work and shelter. How my mother got there is a mystery for she would have needed money for transport and the idea that a young, Jewish girl travelling alone across a border between two anti-Semitic peoples and for that distance without any help is hard to imagine.
Once in Bielsk Podlaski, my mother found an uncle who took her in. This uncle, I am told, had three daughters, all older than my mother, and he had a haberdashery shop. So she moved into his home and worked in his shop. She was so capable she was soon promoted and after a time managed the shop on her own.
In the passing of time and perhaps as much a result of my not asking, I don’t know the name of this uncle, and knowing what I do of the family tree, he is not easy to find. There is no uncle in either the Lazovski or Kannengiser family with three daughters, nor is there an aunt whose husband may well have been called an uncle.
My mother fled Vishey in 1924. I have found the 1928 and 1930 business directories for Bielsk Podlaski. This was a much larger town than Vishey, with 2,500 Jews and many businesses.
Could these reveal the name of the uncle with the three older daughters?
Haberdashers sold ribbons, buttons, needles and thread and similar sewing goods. The 1928 directory list the thirteen galanterja or haberdashers, of which eight are all in the same street, Mickiewicza Street. The 1930 directory had reduced the list to twelve haberdashers.
Bielsk Podlaski business directory 1928
The owners of these haberdashers are listed alphabetically as:
Bielski
Borensztyn
Chalulta
Drydak
Gorfinkiel
Lewkowski (but in 1930 listed as Lowkowski)
Sanicka
Surazska
Szyfman
I. Wasser
M. Wasser
Zundelson
Could Lewkowski or Lowkowski be a misspelt Lazovski? Spelling isn’t the strong suit in this directory, nor is it in other documents. I have found the family name alternatively spelt as Lazanski and Lozovskis. If so, the uncle could be from her father’s family and perhaps was from an undocumented generation earlier. This could explain the older daughters.
In Bielsk Podlaski, my mother learnt of the consequences of her actions. Angry words are likely to have followed her disappearance, for not only the groom, but also his entire family were humiliated. Her parents, Chaim and Mina, may have felt they had no choice but to no longer speak to their daughter if they were to stay members of the community, and it seems this may well have occurred. What I do know is that they didn’t see their eldest daughter, Gitel, my mother, for seventeen years.
Bielsk, like Vishey, had nearly a century of Russian rule. The town Bielsk only became part of Poland after the end of the First World War. The Podlaski was added to its name in 1919 because Poland already had another town called Bielsk. Bielsk Podlaski, being larger than Vishey, had four synagogues and, like Vishey, over half its population was Jewish.
This town had one of the oldest Jewish communities in eastern Poland with nearly a thousand-year history; by the fifteenth century it was firmly established, as Jewish traders in the forestry industry were shipping large amounts of timber to Riga in Latvia. So successful was the community, it became known as the ‘Land of Bielsk’ and the ‘Pearl of Podlaski’, with the Jewish population numbering 4000 by 1900. When my mother arrived in the 1920s, the Jewish population had dropped to under 2,500 due to the disruptive effects of the First World War. It is, however, possible that the census of 1921 may have undercounted the Jews for there were over 5000 living there prior to the next war.
Bielsk Podlaski was an organised Jewish community with its own charitable institutions: hospital, a home for wayfarers which was open to the passing non-Jew as well, a burial society (chevra kadisha), an orphanage for twenty-five children and, while it had multiple synagogues, there was only the one rabbi overseeing them all.
The community was mainly Chassidic, the form of religion my mother practised, but during her years there, there were many other viewpoints: Zionists looking to emigrate to Palestine, Bundists (a Jewish secular socialist movement promoting Yiddish and opposing Zionism), and to a lesser degree, the Communists. There were sports leagues including Maccabi and Hapoel, libraries, discussion groups, lecture clubs, drama clubs, a local Jewish firehouse, and a Jewish cinema which in the late 1930s was barred by anti-Semitic youths who forcibly ejected patrons, but the Jewish youth organised themselves and fought back.
Right until the war the community was divided by a vigorous debate between those who preferred the traditional Yiddish schools (the Bundists) and those who espoused Hebrew schools as teaching the language of the future (the Zionists). There were active youth groups such as Hashomer Hatzair and Betar which still continue in modern Melbourne all these years later. Most of the younger people were Labor Zionists, wanting Hebrew education and assisting those going to Palestine, usually against the wishes of their parents. During the inter-war years the population of Bielsk Podlaski fell by nearly half as the young people left.
They were keen to leave; the anti-Semitic Poles were equally keen to get rid of them.
My mother lived in Bielsk Podlaski with this unknown uncle and his family. As a newcomer, she would have been unlikely to have been involved in anything apart from the religious practices of her immediate family. There would have been work and synagogue and, being an Orthodox home, there would not have been much opportunity to meet the fermenting youth of those years.
My mother Gitel was an attractive young woman, as we can see from her photos. She told of a tall customer coming in looking for a button; something about this man caught her attention. He must have noticed her as well, for the next day he was back seeking another single button. Over the next few weeks he seemed to have had a lot of bad luck with buttons. Let me assume there was another motive in his returning to look through the entire button stock. The attraction was more than haberdashery and the young couple was soon in love.
Yitzchak
Gitel
It wasn’t long before this man, Yitzchak Lewin, asked my mother if he could speak to her uncle. The uncle with three unmarried daughters, all older than his niece, Gitel, refused the offer for my mother’s hand, as he felt this young man should consider marrying the eldest of his daughters first. Quite a biblical response,