EAST BRUNSWICK–Striving to educate residents about the history of organized massacres against Jews in Eastern Europe, the Hadassah organization served as the host to a lecture about pogroms.
The Felshtin Society President Alan Bernstein spoke to a group of 20 residents during the lecture on March 5 at Temple Bnai Shalom. A pogrom is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular, that of Jews in Russia or eastern Europe.
“I am a descendant of a people who came from a town called Felshtin, which is in the middle of Ukraine about 250-300 miles northwest of the City of Odessa, Ukraine. It was the wave of pogroms that occurred beginning in 1919 after the Russian Revolution,” Bernstein said.
“The pogrom in our town was the second of this wave of pogroms, the first being the pogrom in Proskurov; however, because of the way the Jewish people in that part of the world lived, there was very little documentation of who was in the town and who died in the town and who was born when in the town,” he said.
Since there was very little well-organized record keeping about births, deaths and census, the precise number of people killed in these pogroms is hard to pin down, according to Bernstein.
“The documentation about the totality of the slaughter is really up for historical grabs and there are widely varying estimates from 100,000 certainly and documented people who were slaughtered to 250,000 people in more than 1,200 towns throughout Belarus, Ukraine and all over eastern Europe,” Bernstein said.
Primarily people were slaughtered as a result of a few warlords who managed to gather militias who went into towns, according to Berstein.
“Symon Petliura was a famous one and he was the one that was responsible for the slaughter in Felshtin and Proskurov in that area,” Bernstein said. “There were other people that did the murdering that was in fact mostly local people who were egged on to kill, destroy and steal. They were promised the property of the Jews that they killed and they did get the property of the Jews that they killed.”
Bernstein said the rest of the people who weren’t killed left, hid, or somehow managed to survive until the Holocaust.
“Then the Nazis came in with the Einsatzgruppen [squad] and then again based on the formula that had begun during the pogroms, managed to stimulate the locals to finish the job on the rest of the Jews, and many of the rest of the Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust,” Bernstein said. “In our town in Felshtin, there were another 600 people who were slaughtered when the Nazis came in.”
The Felshtin Society was created in 1905 and was started by the people who had come to the United States in the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century, who got together and formed what was called Landsmanschaften group. Primarily, the process was to put together resources so they could procure burial sites, according to Bernstein.
“Our particular burial site is in Staten Island in a place called the Baron Hirsch Cemetery and there many landsmanschaften groups that did that go together and bought cemeteries and somehow cooperatively managed to put together these societies,” Bernstein said. “If you go through the Baron Hirsch Cemetery there is probably more than 100 of these groups that are represented.”
Bernstein said these societies were formed all over the United States and The Felshtin Society is one of the few that actually survived to this day. The society has about 250 members that are scattered throughout the United States, mostly in the northeast.
This year marks the centennial of the pogrom that took place in Felshtin where an estimated 600 Jews were slaughtered, according to Bernstein.
Bernstein said the society will sponsor the Centennial Memorial Reunion Program to commemorate and celebrate the Jews of Felshtin from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 14 at the Center for Jewish History, located at 15 West 16th St., New York.
“I count amongst the slaughtered my two great uncles and my great-grandfather. We took it upon ourselves to try to do whatever we could do to spread the word and help people understand that this was a genocide that is really not recognized anywhere,” Bernstein said. “We felt very strongly that our town and the possible 200,000 other people that were lost should really be remembered.
“It never ceases to amaze me … how many people are unfamiliar with their heritage, unfamiliar with the towns were their parents or their grandparents lived and came from, unfamiliar with the kind of life they lived and what they did for a living or how they got here,” Bernstein said. “It was really our hope to be able to simulate people’s interest in their own heritage.”
Bernstein said the society also collects as many oral histories from people who are the first generation whose parents actually came from areas where pogroms had taken place.
“If you are a first-generation person here, we encourage you to sit down and make a video of your story of your family’s story, because it’s amazing how many details and how many things you will be able to recount that will be lost and not preserved,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein said the society also began the Who Will Light a Candle campaign where it approaches synagogues from all over the United States and asks them to light candles and have remembrance services to honor and remember the people who were killed during the pogroms.
“About 10 years ago, our society raised money and went back and put up a memorial [in Felshtin]. There was no memorial for the people who died in the pogrom and there was no memorial for the people who died in the Holocaust. So we put up a stone in the cemetery for both groups and we went back in 2010 and dedicated that memorial.”
For more information about The Felshtin Society, visit www.felshtin.org/the-felshtin-society/.
Contact Vashti Harris at [email protected].