-An interview with Pawlina
Ukrainian Jewish Heritage is a series that has been ongoing here at Nash Holos for several years now, sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter of Toronto.
The series … for me and also, I hope, for Nash Holos listeners … has opened a window into the fascinating, centuries-old yet little known, history of Jewish life in Ukraine.
It has also presented opportunities for dialogue between people of Ukrainian and Jewish descent who are working to make this history better known.
Recently I received an email from Allison Zivin of the Felshtin Society in New York. The Felshtin society is named after a Ukrainian town called Felshtin, which today is called Hvardiyske. It began as a benevolent society organized in 1905 in New York City. After a brutal pogrom in February of 1919, in which some 600 Jewish Felshtiners were massacred, the society provided refuge and relief to the survivors.
A hundred years later the Felshtin society is still active and is planning commemorative events to mark the centenary of this tragic historical event. On the line to tell us more about them, the society and the history behind it is the president of the Felshtin Society, Alan Bernstein.
Pawlina: Alan, welcome to Nash Holos!
Alan Bernstein: Thanks very much, Pawlina.
Pawlina: It’s great to find out about this story and about your society. I had no idea about it! So tell us a bit about the Felshtin Society.
Alan Bernstein: The Felshtin Society was begun in 1905 and it was known as a Landsmanshaftn organization which was formed to provide fraternal and other support to people who came from Ukraine, from this part of Ukraine, and they got together as a group of neighbours and a group of family and other connections, business connections, and formed organizations to help themselves manage in the New World and also to have the opportunity to purchase burial plots because there were no cemeteries available to many of the immigrants who came from eastern Europe at that time. So there were many reasons why these societies were formed, but those were the primary goals.
Pawlina: And so in 1919 when these horrible pogroms started this was an added service the society provided?
Alan: Yes there were additional things… Once the pogroms occurred many of the people who were part of the society at that time became very active in providing relief to the people who had survived the pogrom. They were very active in establishing orphanages for the children who were left without parents, in a variety of different places in eastern Europe. In Proskurov, a town that is now called Khmelnitsky, and other places where there were groups of children that were left alone. So there was a tremendous amount of relief effort that got carried on after 1919 by our society as well as many others that were formed from the many other towns—more than 1200 towns—that were affected by these events.
Pawlina: And they were horrific events. A lot of people got killed and the world doesn’t know about this very much. Allison told me that your society is working hard to commemorate this event because it’s the centenary coming up next year. So would you tell us a bit about the events that are coming up?
Alan: Well it’s true that these topics are not as popularly discussed as the Holocaust, and the Armenian genocide and many of the other terrible things that unfortunately man does to man. So we have decided several years ago, probably about six years ago we started working on this and thinking that the hundredth anniversary of the pogrom was an important date that we should memorialize and try to use as an opportunity to shine some light on these events in history, not only for our town but for the more than 1200 other towns that were affected by these events.
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