BERSHAD
Bershad is situated on the bend of a small tributary to the Southern Bug River and is accessible only along a handful of winding roads that half-heartedly link it to neighboring regional centers.
Even the roads to nearby Trostyanets and Chechelnyk are indirect, forcing drivers to go out of their way, past Olhopil, for instance, to reach Chechelnyk. Bershad has always been a bit out of the way. On our first visit there in 2002, Efim Vygodner, the head of the Jewish community, met us on the cobblestone street and took us on a tour of the Jewish quarter, Yerusalimka: “This was all Jewish,” he boasted, “completely Jewish.” “This was a Jewish house. This was a Jewish house,” he pointed at each of the seemingly abandoned white brick houses, and assigned them an ethnic identification. In the geography of the shtetl, every street and every house has its own ethnic identity. This ethnic demarcation of public space was an important marker, serving as a reminder of the boundaries between communities, and was repeated wherever we went. Jews and non-Jews alike seemed acutely aware of the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish house. These differences were not just reflected in imagined ethnicities of past owners, but were also visible in architectural style.36 Some of the Jews still living in these houses had inherited them from their parents or grandparents. They live there with a sense of permanence rare among contemporary Jews elsewhere around the world, who have made mobility one of the defining features of Jewish life in the twentieth century. But many of the Jewish houses in Bershad's Yerusa- limka have not had Jewish owners for decades; entire Christian families have grown up in these houses, where mezuzahs mark the doorposts. There was no reason to believe that the erstwhile Jewish owners would ever return. There was a time before the Revolution, when the street itself had a Jewish name—the Jewish Street or the Synagogue Street—and the ethnic composition of the houses was explicit. But after the Revolution, the streets in the market were rebaptized as Proletarian Street and October Street, and the Jewish identity of the square was hidden beneath a veil of internationalism. Only the Jewish residents remember: they insist that even though the communists had confiscated the houses from the Jews, they remained indelibly Jewish houses. As one resident of a neighboring shtetl told us, as we strolled through her town, “This is a Jewish house, this is a Jewish house, this was a polyclinic of ours, this is a Jewish house. These were all Jewish houses. And behind that street are also Jewish houses. But now non-Jews live here.” Much of the Jewish population had left the town since the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the architecture as the primary marker of the town's Jewish identity. Now even that was being lost. What had once been a Jewish shtetl was becoming a Ukrainian town.In search of those Jewish houses in Bershad, we looked past the overgrown weeds that crawled along the collapsing fences. We slowly drove through the narrow cobblestone streets of Yerusalimka, bumping along what were supposed to be symbols of Soviet progress—Proletarian Street, People's Street, October Street—and made our way toward the center of the quarter, toward the synagogue of Bershad. “Look at the roof of our synagogue,” mulled Efim as the peeling layers of roofing came into view. We would return to Bershad many times over the next decade and watch as the roof further deteriorated each year. In 2010, though, the sound of hammering echoed throughout Yerusalimka and a new roof was finally being installed with the help of money raised from abroad.
Even in its heyday, the synagogue was hardly spectacular: its whitewashed pis⅛ walls of earth, chalk, lime, and gravel blended into the surroundings: no steeple or turret alerted visitors from afar to the pride of the community. Like most synagogues of the region, the exterior architecture reflected the community's modesty.
This was not the Main Synagogue, Di hoykhe shil, which was situated on the market square and had been turned into a communist club before the war. It was actually only a shilekhl (a little synagogue); it had once been the tailors' shilekhl, but since the war, it has been the only synagogue in town and one of the few in Vinnytsya Province. The plaster was peeling, the building's foundations were crumbling, the roof was leaking, and dampness pervaded every nook and cranny. The floor of weathered wooden planks felt spongy as our feet sank into the rot; in places, the earthen floor was visible beneath. Wooden benches faced the ark on the eastern side, where the Torah scrolls would be kept. Efim explained, however, that he keeps the scrolls in his home rather than the synagogue. There are a total of six Torah scrolls in Bershad, all of which are stored in private houses for safekeeping, he continued. The synagogue uses two scrolls: a small one that everybody agrees is kosher, and a larger one that a rabbi who once visited from Israel told them was not kosher. In the center of the synagogue is the bime, the elevated platform from which services are conducted. A string of small Israeli flags was suspended between two pillars in the back. Metal pails scattered across the benches collected water that was dripping from the roof. The walls were whitewashed with few decorations other than some posters of Hasidic rebbes taped to the plaster. Rabbinical objections to displaying human images in a place of prayer were apparently forgotten or ignored. A six-pointed star, a mogen dovid, with the inscription “How Goodly are Your Tents, O Jacob,” the first line of the Ma Tovu prayer recited by Jews upon entering a synagogue and derived from Numbers 24:5, was painted on the ceiling.Today the synagogue serves the tiny Jewish community of Bershad as a social hall, administrative center, and place of prayer. The Bershad shilekhl was one of only four synagogues in the entire province to remain open throughout the Soviet period; the others were in much larger cities, maintained in part as “showpieces,” to counter accusations that the Soviet government discriminated against its Jews.
The Bershad synagogue, though, was no showpiece. It is precisely its modesty in an out-of-the- way shtetl that allowed it to remain open, beyond the sight of Bolshevik bureaucrats in the capital.Window slits were visible above the back wall where the women's section was located. Efim resisted our requests to go up to the women's section, warning us that it wasn't safe—the stairs were rotted and the floor above wasn't sound. He explained that there used to be a separate door and stairs to access the women's section from outside. After some persuasion, though, he ventured up with us. The attic room had become a storehouse of old sacred books, a geniza: boxes of frayed leather-bound books were piled atop each other, with holy texts overflowing from boxes and scattered around the floor—Talmud folios, Hebrew legal codes, prayer books. The storehouse in the women's section was an attempt to preserve this heritage and protect the folios. But time and neglect had foiled the plan. Torn pages were scattered across the floor, praising God's glory from beneath the dust. When we picked them up, the paper crumbled in our hands. Efim explained that books from all of the synagogues in Bershad had at some point been brought here for preservation. By now, though, there was little that could be preserved. In the corner, he pointed out a rusting matsukah, a machine for producing matzo.
The town of Bershad first appears in historical sources in the midfifteenth century as a fortress town. It subsequently came under noble ownership and by the seventeenth century had attracted a Jewish population. Like many other towns of the region, the Jewish community was devastated in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1648, a group of nomadic Cossack horsemen under the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitsky rebelled against the Polish government ruling the region and attacked the Jewish communities, whom they viewed as agents of the hated Polish nobility. Ukrainians today credit Khmelnitsky with taking the first step in establishing Ukrainian political independence; his statue stands in Kiev's central square and his picture adorns the five-hryvna bank note.
But in Jewish historical memory, the rebellion came to be known as gzeyres takh vetat, the evil decree of 1648-1649, and is remembered for the tens of thousands of Jews who were killed. The violence of the rebellion was followed quickly by war, which ultimately brought the town under the control of the Turkish Sultan Mehmet IV in 1676. It was returned to Polish sovereignty twenty-three years later. In 1776, a total of 267 Jews were counted within the city, and another 249 lived in the surrounding countryside.37In the eighteenth century, Bershad emerged as a Hasidic center under the leadership of Rebbe Raphael, a student of Pinhas of Korets and one of the new charismatic leaders who were beginning to challenge the official rabbinical establishment of the region. Although Raphael did not leave any significant writings, his teachings circulated through stories told by his followers; several of his sayings were published posthumously. Raphael is best known for two things: honesty and smoking. Two stories, or perhaps two versions of the same story, relate how a police officer caught him smoking contraband tobacco. When he confessed that the tobacco had been smuggled, the officer commended him for his truthfulness and let him go without punishment. The freethinker, Abraham ber Gotlober, who spent time among the Hasidim of Bershad in the mid-nineteenth century and who personally claimed to have dined at Raphael's table and learned from his sermons, wrote of the Bershad rebbe: “‘It is forbidden for a man to be proud' and ‘woe to a man who speaks a lie,' etc. These were his teachings and these he brought in his words to all his relations all the days of his life.”38 Gotlober is also one of the sources of a story about Raphael's unusual death. According to Gotlober, the rebbe was called as a witness against a Jew he knew was guilty. Unable to present false testimony and unwilling to condemn a fellow man, Raphael is said to have died on the spot. While this story is likely apocryphal, it tells a truth about how the Jewish community of Bershad sought to present itself to the world and of the ideals that the followers of Raphael were exhorted to value.
The Bershad Hasidim, sometimes called the Breshter or Bershidir, prided themselves on their honesty and humility. Even the great Raphael himself is commonly commended for being a simple man of the people. He is said to have shopped in the marketplace and carried his own vegetables home, to have dressed in modest clothes, and to have sat in the back of the synagogue or stood behind the door during prayer. Raphael is said to have encouraged small-scale manufacturing and manual labor, which can be performed for the sake of God, and was likely instrumental in transforming Bershad into a local center for the manufacture of prayer shawls (talliths, or taleysim in Yiddish) and garment fringes (tsitsith). Because of their skills in tallith making, residents of Bershad were known as Bershad Taleysniks. Podolians from neighboring towns prided themselves on their Bershad-made prayer shawls.
When the freethinker Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski, who was raised in Dubova, near Uman, visited Bershad in 1887, his impressions were dim: “A dark spirit hovers over the entire city and all the heads are bowed and bent.” Berdyczewski looked back at the golden age of the city. “A long time ago the chief trade in our city was religious goods, they made talliths and tsitsiths and the majority traded in this plentifully,” but now,
in this entire large city, there are many poor folk and only a trifle few wealthy... even living conditions are very difficult because of the crowded conditions: twenty people live in a single house as a result of which no air gets into them... the majority of youth live in darkness because the Talmud Torah [Jewish public school] has deteriorated and Enlightenment has not made any inroads. In this entire city you won't find a single person with any concept of our books or our nation. In general, this city is isolated and has no connection to the rest of Israel.39
By the early twentieth century, the town was showing signs of growth, with the establishment of an independent bank, as well as a distillery, a brewery, a sugar refinery, a mill, an iron foundry, a printing house, a haberdashery, and timber and produce stores. A market and bazaar also fueled commerce in the town. During the violence and pogroms that accompanied the Civil War of 1918-1919, several Jews, inspired by Zionist self-defense ideology, organized a defense brigade, several members of which gave their lives defending the town during a pogrom on March 14, 1919. When the Bolsheviks moved into the city in April, the violence and rioting intensified, leaving thirty-one Jews dead. The city repeatedly switched hands during the spring and summer of 1919, and in August of that year, twenty-two Jews were killed in a pogrom as Soviet and Ukrainian forces clashed. Throughout the remainder of the year, Jews were forced to pay tribute to the Ukrainian conquerors until Bolshevik forces took the city in April 1920. During the two years of civil war, approximately 150 Jews were killed in pogroms and fighting. By comparison, the next few years brought peace, if not prosperity, to the small town.
The census of 1924 showed 9,371 residents in the city, of whom 6,979 were Jewish and 1,657 were Ukrainian, with most of the remainder identifying as Polish. The Jewish workers of Bershad seemed disinterested and distant from the revolutionary turmoil and excitement engulfing the region. Their hearts were more set on emigration, whether to Palestine for the many Zionists in the town, or to America. A correspondent who visited the town in 1925 was struck by the absence of Jews in the local revolutionary movement and commented that “all cultural and political work in the unions is done by Russians.”40 The Jewish Sections of the Communist Party tried to spread their message of communism, but Bershad proved to be infertile ground for revolutionary activism.