Parchment Burning

20 June, 1768 Uman, Ukraine Uman was where my great-grandparents, Isaac Wexelman and Libby Gerber, were married, before coming to Canada. On the heals of the 17th century Chmielnicki Massacres, a series of pogroms took place in Eastern Europe, known as the Haidamak rebellions. Disenfranchised cossacks and peasants attacked Jewish communities (as well as Poles), killing hundreds of thousands . The Ukrainian commanders, Maksym Zalizniak, openly encouraged the slaughter of Jews and Poles in the open countryside, so people from all around crowded into the fortified city of Uman. Zalizniak's army set up a siege, but after only three days the city fell when the city commander, Ivan Gonta, switched sides. The Jews fled to the synagogues and attempted to defend themselves. However, the Ukrainians were armed with cannons and obliterated the defenses and then killed those inside. "During the carnage, many Jews fled to the main synagogue. There, they armed themselves and put up ...

Buda, Hungary 2 September, 1686 The Buda synagogue was constructed in 1461. Buda was a hotspot for the confrontation between Christians and the Ottoman Empire. The city was captured by the Ottomans in 1526 (who banished and then re-welcomed the Jews) and retaken by the Christians in 1686. When the Christians entered the city in 1686, they began a widespread slaughter of all the residents. The Jews of the town ran into the synagogue for protection, but the Hapsburg troops battered their way in and killed everyone inside. Only Rabbi Isaac Schulhof was released and he eventually wrote a first-hand account of the attack, Megilat Ofen . The building was torched, with the bodies left inside to rot. Hundred of Jews from the town were captured and held for ransom, including Schulhof. Eventually Samuel Oppenheimer, the Hapsburg Emperor's banker, redeemed them. ( The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation , 269) In was three hundred years later, in 1964, when the ruins...

Tetiev, Ukraine 26 March, 1920 My great-grandmother's family, the Spivaks, were from the shtetl of Tetiev. Hardly any Jews from Tetiev were killed in the Holocaust for the simple reason that the community had been wiped out twenty years earlier, during the pogroms of 1919-1920. While hundreds of communities in Ukraine were affected by the pogroms of 1919-1920, no place was hit harder than Tetiev. An estimated 4,000 Jews were killed, about 2/3 of the overall community. Survivors left to join neighboring towns like Pogrebishche. Of the 4,000 Jews slaughtered, a large number met their end inside the Tetiev synagogue: "In one synagogue, 2,000 persons sought safety. The bandits set fire to it and nearly all perished, a very few only escaped death...whenever anybody jumped out of the window, he was instantly shot at." ( The Massacres of Tetiev in Pogroms in the Ukraine Under the Ukrainian Government, 1917-1920 ) The rabbi of the synagogue, Simon Rabinovitch, hid in the...