(Authors: Bennie Rabinowitz, Gwynne Schrire, Veronica Belling, Vol. 70, No. 3, Chanukah 2015)
Birzh. Few people have heard of it. It is a town forgotten, partly through the great gulf of time separating this generation from the Holocaust and partly through the even greater gulf between ourselves and those who managed to leave Lithuania before South Africa and America closed their doors to East European Jewish immigration.
Birzh is located in Northern Lithuania, seventy kilometres from Ponevezh and near the Latvian border. To Lithuanians, it is well known for its beer and breweries. To Jews, whose families had lived there since the end of the 16th Century, it is the town where their Lithuanian neighbours helped massacre its entire Jewish population of 2400 in 1941. The present day residents are unlikely to have ever met a Jew, let alone know that at one time half the population used to be Jewish. Out of sight, out of mind – but no longer, if a group of descendants of former Birzh Jews have anything to do with it. The group was assembled by Cape Town’s Bennie Rabinowitz, with the help of Glenda and Abel Levitt and Dr Veronica Belling. Their forebears were amongst those who had the foresight, ambition and luck to leave Birzh as part of the Eastern European Jewish migration between 1880 and 1929.
An account of the journey from Birzh to Cape Town has come down to us from a letter written by one of those immigrants in January 1900:
To my well beloved wife Taube Kretzmar, I left Birzh on a Sunday Rosh Chodesh Elul and arrived in Ponevezh on the Monday from where I took a train to Sadorah. There I hired a car to go to town but at that moment I was approached by a man who looked very decent and asked me, ‘Young man, where are you going?’ As an inexperienced traveller, I had a rule to be very careful. I gave him a good look, scratched my ear, and answered coldly, ‘What difference does it make, I am going to town.’ He understood, however, that the transport was going further, so he said to me, ‘You are going to an agent, please tell me to whom you are going because he is from our company. I am also going there.’ I told him that I was not a man to tell lies. I told him that I was going to Hirsch Katz, so he said, ‘That’s good as I am his brother and we can go together because we are leaving tonight by train so you can go immediately.’ That night we left by train. I was very afraid lest we should meet with a goy who would ask where we were going that night but the agent must have taught the goyim and replied with an excuse that they should not ask questions – so we travelled until Abel1 where there were another two persons on the other side (of the border and we crossed) without any problems. From Thursday to Saturday night we were together in a house that was not very big and there were 200 men. There was no room to sit or stand or sleep and the noise was up to high heaven in a house without a ceiling and a draught from all the windows and doors so I caught a cold from which I suffered for the next three weeks until I arrived at the big boats in London. My heart was sore enough … I have also left children at home and who is going to bring them up with character and good manners and belief in G-d?
Your ever loving husband,
Tevya Kretzmar2
Another immigrant who came from Birzh to Cape Town was Fivel Rabinowitz, who arrived at the turn of the century and opened a grocery store in Long Street. He brought out his wife Dora (nee Eilberg), two sons, Adolph and Abraham Lazar (AL), a daughter Pauline (Stern) and a Sefer Torah written in splendid calligraphy. A fourth child, Cecil (Bennie Rabinowitz’ father) was born in South Africa in 1907. The family lived above the shop. Bennie never met his grandparents – Dora was one of the casualties in the 1918 Flu Epidemic and Fivel, now called Philip, died in 1926. A devout and highly respected man, his coffin was taken past the synagogue on its way to the cemetery so that the worshippers could pay their respects, an honour given to few.
Philip Rabinowitz’ children had opportunities that would not have been available to them in Birzh. Cecil and AL both became attorneys, practicing in Goodwood and Bellville respectively, while Adolph became a pharmacist. Bennie’s father would tell him that their family had come from Birzh and that, as an attorney, he would be sent by the Jewish Board of Deputies to meet landsleit off the boat to help them through the dockside bureaucracy and find them accommodation. Among the latter were Abe Shapiro of Birzh and industrialist Philip Frame – people who never forgot the help he gave them. To Bennie, however, apart from a photograph of its main street in the early 1930s given to him by Dan Rabie, Birzh was just a name. More than that, he did not really know until he met Abel Levitt and his wife, Glenda, now living in Israel, in 2014.
“We’ve just been to Lithuania”, they told Bennie. On learning that Bennie’s family had come from Birzh, Lithuania, they said that they had been there only the previous week. There, they had seen the mass graves and the Birzh Museum in the fort that had records of Catholic and Protestants, but none of a Jewish presence. They also told him of the Birzh High School, whose headmaster wished to turn a classroom into a Tolerance Centre to teach the children about their vanished Jewish neighbours.
The idea interested Bennie. For people whose roots were in Birzh, this was an attainable legacy to put together in memory of their ancestors – both those forbears whose graves were in Birzh and those who had been cut down before their time.
Jews and Karaites had settled in Birzh in the late 16th or early 17th Centuries. In 1683, the residents obtained an official resolution prohibiting Jews from buying the right to settle there or acquire property. That resolution was revoked, but in 1700 and again in 1711, the civil rights of Jews in Birzh were cancelled by the church. Six years later, Jews were forced to pay a “skull tax” of 1500 roubles, in addition to the special tax of 350 roubles they already paid the Great Hetman of Lithuania.3 By 1766 there were 1040 Jews in Birzh.4
Even then, the Birzh Jews were keen Zionists and travelling meshulachim would arrive soliciting funds for poor relief in Israel. In 1784, the community agreed to donate money “until Mashiach arrives” to two funds for the poor in Israel, the one just for those living in Jerusalem.5
The main street in Birzh, early 1930s.
By 1804, Birzh had a Chevrah Kadisha that attended to its own poor and sick. There were 1685 Jews there by 1847, and in 1897, 2510 of the town’s 4413 (57%) were Jewish. By 1934, Birzh had 9000 residents – because of emigration, the Jewish percentage had dropped to 36%. The Jewish community supported five welfare organisations, including an aged home, attended Zionist congresses where they supported five Zionist parties, had five Jewish youth movements,6 and a Maccabi and a Hapoel sports club. When minorities were granted autonomy in Lithuania and community committees were elected, most were elected on Zionist platforms. When elections for the first Parliament took place in 1922, the Jewish votes in Birzh went to the General Zionists (426 votes), Ben Gurion’s Achdut HaAvoda (125) and Democrats (13).7 In the 1931 municipal elections, three Jews were elected onto the 12-man town council.
Jews were part of the Birzh economic fabric, trading in flax – Birzh was famous for its white linen – and timber, crafts, farming, light industry and peddling. There were weaving and knitting workshops and two Jewish-owned flour mills whose flour was sold throughout Lithuania. Jewish involvement in the Birzh economy could clearly be seen in a 1931 government survey showing that they owned 77 of its 99 businesses. These included the only ones dealing with flour, grain and flax, heating materials, tool and steel products, radio, bicycles and electric equipment, machinery and transportation, books and stationary, food products, watches, jewellery and optics. Jews owned 12 out of 14 groceries, 9 out of 12 butcheries, 11 out of 12 textile and fur products, 7 out of 8 leather and shoe businesses and 3 out of 4 haberdasheries. They also owned 28 of the 45 factories in Birzh, including 11 leather works, 5 dealing in clothing and shoes and 7 flour mills and bakeries. There were 63 Jewish artisans – tailors, woolworkers, shoemakers, bakers, butchers, wigmakers, saddlers, tanners, hatters and tinsmiths, two Jewish doctors, two lawyers and two engineers.8There were also Jewish musicians with barrel organs who would visit markets and fairs using copper cymbals to attract audiences. Rabbits and white mice would be removed from the barrel organ and, for a fee, these would bring out a fortune-telling note.9
But does it make sound business sense to wipe out the economic competition by massacring all the Jews? One month after the Nazi troops entered Birzh in June 1941, the Jews were moved into a ghetto. Fifteen were shot by German soldiers in the Birzh Jewish and Karaite Cemetery in July 1941; on 8 August the remainder – some 2400 people, including 900 children – were stripped naked and shot into two pits in the Astravas forest, 3.5 kilometres north of the town, by Gestapo officers with 30 Lithuanian helpers from Linkuva and 50 others from Birzh. They were shot in groups, starting at 11 a.m. The pits had been dug the night before by 500 Jews and prisoners.10 Having completed the task by 7 p.m., the killers returned to the town, singing.
In a 2013 visit to Birzh, in which she had roots, Natalie Ginsberg wondered how the local helpers had felt when killing their Jewish neighbours:
And when the church bells rang on Sunday morning did the church bells ring while the Germans and Lithuanians killed their victims? Did they maybe stop to cross themselves? Did they go to church in the morning after they had shot thousands in cold blood? Did they confess to the priest… and did he give them absolution time and again?11
Sheyne Beder escaped from the killing field and gave her testimony after the war in 1946. Bennie was sent a copy of her harrowing statement.12 Sheyne reported that four thousand Jews lived in Birzh before the war. There were three synagogues, two elementary schools – one Yiddish and one Hebrew – a large Yiddish-Hebrew library, a community bank directed by Lifshitz and a joint stock bank directed by Elye Kaplan. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union and invaded Lithuania on 22 June 1941, two thousand Jews from outlying districts poured into the village seeking refuge. Three days later the Germans entered and went with the Lithuanians to find and rob the “rich Jews”. Antisemitic laws were passed. Able-bodied Jews were conscripted for forced labour. Sheyne’s teenage cousins Sore and Miriam Zelkowitz were sent to clean toilets; they were forced to use their underwear for this and to put the filthy garments back on afterwards. A few days later, they were raped and killed. Sheyne’s brother and father were shot, as was Dr Avrom Levin while Rabbi Bernshteyn was ducked in the lake, his beard set on fire and shot. Such brutalities conducted by the Lithuanians were common. Sheyne fled to a Lithuanian engineer and married him, hoping that thereby she could save her parents, but was betrayed and returned to Birzh. There she found that all the Jews had been herded into the synagogue with armed Lithuanian guards outside and she joined them. The following day, the prisoners were driven out of the synagogue, beaten, robbed and herded into the Ostgravos [sic] Forest. There, they were forced to strip naked and shot into the pit, first in groups of 16, then of 25. Sheyne told a guard that she had hidden gold with an acquaintance and a drunken Lithuanian was sent with her to collect it. She grabbed some clothes from the pile to cover her naked body, walked with the guard and managed to run away while he was distracted. She was arrested later, but fled and returned to the engineer, who rejected her. She was in the Siauliai ghetto, several camps, Dachau and on a death march before being liberated.
Once the decision had been made to get involved in restoring the memory of the lives and destruction of the 400 year-old Jewish community in Birzh, Bennie and the Levitts contacted historian and Yiddishist Dr Veronica Belling, who had just published a book of translations of Yiddish articles, including one on Birzh, that appeared in the Afrikaner Idishe Tsaytungbetween 1952–1954. She had subsequently gone to Lithuania and visited Birzh (where she had found the lake as beautiful as her Birzh grandmother had described it).13
The question was what would be the most appropriate form for such a commemoration to take? The number of monuments and memorial spaces dedicated specifically to the mass murder has begun to reach into the thousands, some occupying the former sites of destruction and including hundreds of unofficial memorials erected by Jewish families to mark the killing fields in the forest. James Young, who has examined and analysed the meaning and significance of such memorials, believes it likely that as many people now visit Holocaust memorials every year as died during the Holocaust itself. Memorials by themselves, he contends, remain inert and amnesiac. Whatever memory they finally produce and how viewers respond to them depend on how they are used politically and religiously in the community, who has seen them and under what circumstances. Memory is never shaped in a vacuum. Some memorials are erected because of the Jewish injunction to remember. Others are built to educate the next generation and to inculcate a sense of shared experience and destiny while others are designed to expiate guilt – even to attract tourists.14
Bennie and his group did not want their contribution just to be another heap of stones visited by families on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to der heim. Or, in the words of the French philosopher Pierre Nora, “Under the illusion that our memorial edifices will always be there to remind us, we take leave of them and return only at our convenience. To the extent that we encourage monuments to do our memory-work for us, we become that much more forgetful”.15
Lithuania has done more than any other country to distort the history of the Shoah and the role of its nationals. Its government has rewritten the past, considering themselves to be the victims of a double Holocaust – firstly by the Soviets, who occupied the Baltic States through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact at the outset of the Second World War, and secondly by the Nazis, who invaded in 1941. With Germany’s defeat in 1945, Russia took over again. It erected memorials to acknowledge the massacres, but classified the victims as Soviet citizens, not as Jews.
There are no Jews living in Birzh today. One lone Jew returned to Birzh and continued to live there, dying in the town a few months ago. He was Sheftel Melamed, who escaped by fleeing across the border into Russia with some friends in a car belonging to one of their parents. He joined the Russian army and returned after the war.
In 1991, Lithuania regained its independence and a Vilna Museum of Genocide Victims was established. But its genocide victims are the Lithuanians; the perpetrators are the Communists. Lithuanian perpetrators who killed Jews have been hailed as national heroes, with statues erected and schools named in their honour. The current government emphasises Soviet crimes. Horrible as the Soviet occupation was, the largest group of genocide victims in Lithuania were the Jews murdered by the Nazis with the help of the local population. These, of course, were Lithuanian citizens and had been for centuries. The government fails to acknowledge the scale of the Holocaust in Lithuania or the role of Lithuanians in the mass shootings on Lithuanian territory.16
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has complained about the ongoing efforts of Lithuanian governments to minimize the role of Lithuanian Nazi collaborators in Shoah crimes, including the nearly total annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry – 96.4% were killed, more than in any other country. He points out that every single Lithuanian government has failed to acknowledge the complicity of their own citizens in the killing of the Jewish citizens or to punish a single Lithuanian war criminal, including any of the more than dozen deported there from the United States. In addition, a list of 2055 local perpetrators compiled by the government’s Center for Genocide and Resistance Research Center three years ago, which only named a small number of the criminals, has been suppressed, rather than being acted upon.17
Knowing this, the team decided that any memorial they erected in Birzh should be designed to contribute to educating the Lithuanians themselves about the Jews who been living among them for centuries before their grandparents had helped to murder them. Abel and Glenda had seen and established tolerance education centres in schools and met with the co-ordinators of the Birzh Ausra High School. Students at that institution had collected names of former Birzh Jews and painted them on stones, which they took in a procession, accompanied by the deputy mayor, from the Birzh ghetto to the mass grave, where they were solemnly placed. The school had also been engaged in cleaning the old Jewish and Karaite Cemetery together with a Christian-Jewish society from Lippe, Germany, and members of the Lippe Reformed Church. The Ausra School had identified a large classroom that could be used for such a tolerance centre. It would require multi-media facilities to enable the students to be taught about the Holocaust and life in the town before the war. The Ausra School co-ordinator had mentioned to the Mayor that it was a pity that in the Birzh Town Museum was no mention of the Jewish community who lived there from the 16th Century; the mayor agreed that this was not normal.18
What was decided then was that the Birzh commemorative project would aim:
- to create a memorial with the names of the murdered Jews, placed at the killing site just outside the town, as had been done in other Lithuanian towns;
- to assist the local Birzai Ausra School to establish a Tolerance Centre and,
- to arrange an exhibit about the Jews, to be placed in the local Birzh museum.
Glenda and Abel immediately wrote to their contacts in Birzh and Dr Belling started to compile lists of names of the murdered Jews, contacting the Yad Vashem’s central database of Shoah victims’ names.
When visiting Birzh, Glenda and Abel met with Vidmantas Jukonis and his son Merunas, history teachers at the Ausra High School who cared for the Jewish and Karaite Cemetery. The school headmistress showed them the empty classroom that could be made available for the Birzh Tolerance Centre. She was happy to give the Jukonises a free hand with the teaching of tolerance as an ongoing subject, along with an annual art competition arranged by Glenda.
The Birzh Museum has three floors. There is a room for Catholic artefacts and one for Lutherans. In a corner is a cabinet with five Hebrew prayer books, a photograph of a synagogue, a Kiddush cup and a scrap of blood-stained Torah parchment. No other signs of the existence of a former vibrant Jewish community are present. Glenda and Abel met with the museum director to discuss creating an exhibit to represent the history of the Jews of Birzh. The director wanted a portable exhibition that could be shown in the outlying areas as well. He proudly told them that he felt a special interest in the proposed project as his grandmother had hidden a young Jewish girl during the war.
With the groundwork done, Belling arranged for Saul Issroff to publicise an appeal on Jewishgen’s Litvasig special interest website and for Eli Rabinowitz to post an appeal on his Birzh kehilalink. These released an outpouring from all over the world from interested people with roots in Birzh – family trees, photos, videos, history and a valuable testimony. One wrote that he lived a part of each day in Birzh and in trying to understand what happened there. He held the Lithuanians accountable for all the murders that happened that one day and had not yet heard one word about responsibility, nor about reparations.19 Rosalie, whose grandmother was born in Birzh, recalled that what happened in Lithuania was never discussed in the house – it was only later that she discovered that her Great Uncle Ruben, his wife and children were shot in August.20 Mina Tillinger21 wrote that her mother was the only survivor of her immediate family from Birzh – she survived because she was away at college, and also survived the Vilna ghetto and some camps. Another, in Israel, got the message via the Hebrew Order of David in Johannesburg. She was hungry for information – her father and his brother never mentioned one word about their past in Birzh or their family left behind.
Knowing that the Levitts would be visiting Cape Town, Bennie hosted a cocktail party for Cape Town Birzh descendants to publicise the project. Over 40 turned up and listened spellbound as Glenda and Abel gave a powerpoint presentation explaining their commemorative projects in Lithuania and their Birzh visit. The report of the party in the Cape Jewish Chroniclebrought more Birzher descendants to light. In Johannesburg, which once had an active Birzher landsleit society, they gave a similar presentation, also enthusiastically received. Since the cocktail party, a committee has been formed in Cape Town to take the project forward. Further details will become available towards the end of 2015 after the Levitts return from their next visit to Birzh.
There is another memorial of Birzh in Cape Town. The Sefer Torah which had been brought from there by Bennie’s grandfather has been repaired and – adorned with a beautifully embroidered cover made at the Astra Jewish Sheltered Employment Centre – donated by Bennie to the Highlands House seniors’ home. There it is in regular use, except for the High Holy Days services, when it is used by the Tikva Tova Congregation’s Egalitarian Synagogue.22
Today Lithuania is trying to whitewash its enthusiastic involvement in the Holocaust. This project will help to create the tolerance necessary to prevent such crimes taking place and restore the memory of the Jewish citizens to the youth growing up in Judenrein Birzh.
“What we all have in common is an obsession not to betray the dead we left behind, or who left us behind. They were killed once. They must not be killed again through forgetfulness.”
(Elie Wiesel)
- The authors would like to hear from you if your ancestors came from Birzh. If you have any photos, documents or artefacts from Birzh, please let us have them for possible use in the Birzh Museum or in the Tolerance Centre. If you have the names of any ancestors who were killed in Birzh, please let us have them so that we can add their names to the Memorial Board at the site of the mass graves. And if you would like to make a contribution to this project in honour of your ancestors, please give us your details. The project organisers can be contacted at michelle@abbeygroup.co.za or veronicabelling21@gmail.com asil
Bennie Rabinowitz, a Rhodes Scholar with a BA with distinction in Constitutional Law (UCT) and an MA in Jurisprudence (Oxford), is a retired attorney and property developer. He has received many awards for his philanthropy, as well as the prestigious UCT President of Convocation Medal.
Dr. Veronica Belling is the author of Bibliography of South African Jewry (1997), Yiddish Theatre in South Africa (2008), and the translator of Leibl Feldman’s The Jews of Johannesburg (2007) and Yakov Azriel Davidson: His Writings in the Yiddish Newspaper, Der Afrikaner, 1911-1913(2009).
Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history.
NOTES
- Now called Obeliai
- Kretzmar, T. Unpublished letter. (undated – September-October 1899), by kind permission of the late Dr J Kretzmar, Cape Town.
- Highest-ranking military officers, second only to the King.
- Rosin, Yosef, History of Birzh (Birzai), Lithuania, translated by Sarah and Mordehai Kopfste in Josef Rosin, ‘Birzh (Birzai) Lithuania’, in Preserving Our Litvak Heritage: a History of 31 Jewish Communities in Lithuania, Jewishgen, 2005.
- Two supervisors per fund were appointed – Ma’oth Eretz Yisrael and Ma’oth Yerushalayim. The money was sent first to Vilna, later it was sent to the Rabbi of Brisk to await the arrival of the meshulachim. Rosin, p5/26
- Hashomer Hatzair, Hechalutz, Bnei Akiva, Betar and Gordonia , Rosin, Yosef , p 16/26
- Rosin, p9/26
- Rosin, p11, 12/26
- Sarid, A, There was once a home… Memories of the Lithuanian Shtetls published in the Afrikaner Idishe Tsaytung – African Jewish newspaper, 1952-54 translated by Veronica Belling, Jewish Publications, Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, Cape Town, 2015, p66
- Lithuanian Holocaust Atlas, pp 130-1
- Belling, Veronica and Ginsburg, Natalie, ‘A Very Personal Journey’, Jewish Affairs, Pesach 2014, pp14-15
- Copy of Sonia Beder’s Testimony belonging to her cousin Grant Arthur Gochin sent to Saul Issroff, by e-mail, 25 April 2015. The signed testimony was related to L Koniuchowsky at the Landsberg Cultural Commission, Epsenhausen, 25/12/1946 and attested to by the Epsenhausen Jewish committee.13
- Belling, and Ginsburg, p15
- Young, James E, The texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning , Yale University Press, 1993, the information comes from the preface, pages ix-xiii
- Young, p5
- Snyder, Timothy, Lithuania neglects the memory of its murdered Jews, 29 July 2011, www.theguardian.com › Opinion › Second world war
- http://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/85805-150915-why-israel-fails-to-confront-lithuania-over-the-holocaust
- E-mail from Ingrida Vilkiene, 29/10/2014
- Ivan Sindell, by e-mail, 13/4/2015
- E-mail, 11/4/l 2015
- E-mail from Mina Tillinger, 11/4/2015
- ‘New Year and New Home for Sefer Torah’, Cape Jewish Chronicle, September 2015, p67
