TULCHYN
About 70 kilometers northwest of Bershad, past Trostyanets, is Tulchyn. The city itself is due west of Teplyk, but is accessible from Teplyk only by traveling north past Haysyn and Bratslav.
In 1726, Tulchyn was purchased by the Polish nobleman Stanislaw Potocki. When Potocki died six years later, he left the property in the hands of his heirs, who would come to amass enormous holdings in the region, and kept Tulchyn as a major trading center. Felix Potocki, who ruled the town in the late eighteenth century, oversaw its expansion and development as the largest Jewish center in the region. It was Felix, as well, who built the 1780 Palladian palace that still greets visitors to Tulchyn today. The building mimics the classical temple architecture of ancient Greece, with its symmetrical design and Ionic columns supporting a colonial balcony that stretches across the length of the immense palace. Behind the palace is a large park leading to the Selnets River, a tributary of the Southern Bug that flows along the northern edge of the town. The vast parks surrounding the palace—long held privately by the noble family who guarded their usage—became a symbol of progress during the Soviet era, when the government expropriated the palace and the park and opened them up for public access. Lacking the funds to build entertainment palaces and clubs, the best the local government could do to provide leisure facilities for its citizens was to tear down the park gates. Directly across from the palace to the south is the Cathedral of Christ's Nativity, constructed in the 1780s as a Catholic church on the spot of what was once a Dominican monastery. The Potockis would at one time have enjoyed the forests, land, and river surrounding their vast palace, and attended the church to the palace's south.For most of the Jews in the town, though, the Potocki palace was of lesser interest than the court of Rebbe Borukh, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, who in 1781 moved from Miedzyboz to Tulchyn, where his father, the Baal Shem Tov's son-in-law, was born.
Borukh followed the example of the Potockis and established an opulent court for himself in Tulchyn, earning the nickname the Prince of Tulchyn. His followers spoke his name with reverence, his critics with derision. Borukh hoped to establish himself as the heir to the Baal Shem Tov, but his quarrelsome nature and extravagant lifestyle failed to appeal to the broad public. Legends of Borukh of Tulchyn are rife with arguments and battles— between Borukh and his nephew, Nahman of Bratslav, and between Borukh and Shneur Zalman of Liady. Nahman would become a leader of Breslov Hasidism and Shneur Zalman of Habad Lubavitch Hasidism, both vast movements still highly influential today. Borukh, though, is largely forgotten, not even famous in Tulchyn. According to Hasidic legend, the Baal Shem Tov stopped appearing to Borukh in his dreams and instead interrupted the sleep of Nahman of Bratslav, thereby anointing the younger tsadik as his heir and bypassing the arrogant grandson.By the early nineteenth century, the leadership of the Tulchyn Ha- sidim had passed to the students of the Seer of Lublin, who trumpeted the mystical and supernatural abilities of the tsadik to intervene with the Divine and annul Divine decrees. But with the growing popularity of the Breslov school of Hasidism in the region, followers of Natan Sternhartz soon set up camp in Tulchyn, becoming the dominant Hasidic court in the town by the middle of the century, only to be surpassed by the Talne Hasidim toward the end of the century. There was also a small group of Hasidic opponents, led by Akiva Sholem Chajes, at least until Chajes himself renounced his opposition and joined the followers of the redoubtable David of Talne.
The 1,300 Jews who resided in Tulchyn in the early nineteenth century failed to make a positive impression on Tulchyns most famous son, Colonel Pavel Pestel. After taking part in the Napoleonic wars of 1812, Pestel became commander of the Vyatka Infantry Regiment, quartered in Tulchyn.
While abroad, he imbibed Republican ideas and, when he returned intoxicated with Revolution, wrote a proposal for the establishment of a liberal constitutional government in Russia. The “Southern Society” he established advocated the overthrow of the monarchy and the installation of a new government modeled on Pestel's constitutional proposal. He had no place for the Jews in the liberal utopia he hoped to establish, though. He recommended the Jews be expelled to Central Asia. After the failed December 1825 rebellion, Pestel was arrested in Tulchyn and later hanged in St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. The fact that the most radical ideas of the French Revolution could be heard even in “faraway” Tulchyn provides clear evidence that the shtetl was never an isolated island of tradition.Tulchyn continued to expand throughout the nineteenth century as a trade and manufacturing center, particularly of sugar, beer, soap, and leather. Its status as a leading trading post, however, was threatened when the new railroad passing through southwestern Russia bypassed Tulchyn. The anti-Jewish vandalism that took place in the city in late May 1882 further led to the town's decline, damaging the market where the Jewish stores and houses were concentrated. In 1896, the city had about 22,000 residents, 18,000 of whom were Jews. A report from the time noted that the “economic condition of the shtetl is not bad” and “on a par with, even better, than many other shtetls of Podolia."47 The town's economy was buoyed by the tobacco factory, brewery, soap factory, and leather factory. By the early twentieth century, the Jewish community was supporting a synagogue as well as eighteen prayer houses and a hospital. Boys received traditional educations in one of the city's seventy heders, and girls had since 1867 benefited from the opportunity to study in a modern private school. Tulchyn was not bypassed by the flowering of cultural activity that followed the 1905 Russian Revolution: a library was established in the town, as well as a private Jewish boys' school, another Talmud Torah, and rival Zionist and Bundist youth movements.
Before the First World War, there were some two hundred stores in Tulchyn, almost all owned by Jews. Jews also worked in town as professionals: doctors, dentists, midwives, apothecaries, teachers, and insurance salesmen. There were 262 Jews left in Tulchyn when we first visited in 2002, only a handful of whom spoke Yiddish.48Sharhorod
Sharhorod is located 70 kilometers west of Tulchyn, past Shpykiv, at the confluence of the Murashka and Kolbasna rivers. When we visited in 2002, we strolled up and down Lenin Street and Karl Marx Street, the former Yidishe Gas (Jewish Street), which brackets the main market square. Although the communist duo had been out of favor for more than a decade, nobody had yet bothered to rename the streets in this out-of-the-way hamlet. Abandoned houses still bore the marks of me- zuzahs on their doorposts, but inside only chickens made their homes. In one house, feathers gently floated around the empty room, circling with the wind that blew through the broken windows. Outside, a goat bleated, tied to a tree with rope. A lone chicken roamed through the empty square. In the early twenty-first century, the town still retained its nineteenth-century layout and residential area. The historic preservation of the town center has come at the price of modernization—many houses still have outhouses, and urban amenities are hard to come by, but it has made for a very scenic background, earning it a place in numerous recent films about the shtetl. Among the city's most noticeable highlights are the Orthodox monastery, the Catholic church, and the sixteenth-century fortress-style synagogue. The synagogue still stands in the southern portion of the town, even though it was converted into a juice factory after the war. The synagogue had undergone several renovations over the centuries, leading to numerous legends about its longevity. Many of these legends tell versions of how the synagogue was “discovered” rather than built.
In one variant recounted by Mordechai Cooper in his book about Sharhorod, some children were playing on a hill, digging into the ground when they hit upon the tip of a cornice, and “when they started to dig further, they found the synagogue just as it stands today, in every detail.’^9 Asya Barshteyn, an energetic woman who was born in the town in 1928, traveled with our team from her home in Vinnytsya back to Sharhorod in 2005 to show off the sites. She told us a similar story she heard from her mother, about how the synagogue survived calamity because it was buried underground. Cooper insists that its Torah scrolls were five or even six hundred years old. The souls of the dead were said to come to the synagogue from the cemetery at night—it was therefore always advisable to knock before entering in order to allow them to disperse. In its day, the synagogue was but one site of prayer, surrounded by several prayer houses used by the various Hasidic groups that vied for supremacy in the town.The town was established in the sixteenth century by the Polish crown as a bulwark against Turkish invaders and as a trading center on the crossroads of several trade routes through the region. The territory was granted to Jan Zamoyski in 1579 and given the rights of Magdeburg Law in 1588. The fortress-style synagogue was built the following year, and the Jews coexisted with Catholic and Orthodox Christians in the town. In the seventeenth century, the town emerged as one of the largest in Podolia, largely due to its location along the wine- and cattle-trading routes between Wallachia and Piast Poland. When the town was occupied by the Turks between 1672 and 1699, it was dubbed “Little Istanbul,” a name that allowed for an opportune pun on the names of Sharhorod and Tsargrad (a Russian name for Istanbul). By the time of its return to Polish hands, the town had developed a reputation as a center of mysticism, owing in part to the local influence of Sabbatianists, followers of the seventeenth-century false Messiah Shabetai Tsevi.
The famous German rabbi Jacob Emden spread reports of orgies, wife-swapping, and black magic taking place in Sharhorod under Sabbatian influence. Among the miracle-working rabbis who resided there during this period were Naftole Herts son of Aaron Kohen, and Avrom son of Meir, both of whom are buried in the old Jewish cemetery. Dovid Tzevi, the fatherin-law of Natan Sternhartz, served as rabbi and head of the yeshiva in Sharhorod, thereby tying Sharhorod to the Breslov Hasidim. Sternhartz himself got married in Sharhorod in 1793 and lived in his father-in-law's home there for two years. Ya'akov Yosef of Polonne, the author of the seminal Hasidic text Toldot Ya'akov Yosef, served as Sharhorod's rabbi for four years before being driven out by the community. Legend has it that upon his exit from the town, under police escort, he turned back and cursed the residents who had expelled him. Later in the nineteenth century, the town became a center of Sadagora Hasidism—the opulent and ostentatious leader of the Ruzhin dynasty, Israel Friedman, even visited the city himself in 1825, thirteen years before his arrest for the murder of two Jewish informants, a charge that was never substantiated. The Jewish community, as well as the Christian community, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth century; there were 283 Jewish houses there in 1799. A survey of that year noted that “Jews carry out trade in goods brought from Berdichev and other locations” and counted among Jewish artisans fifteen tailors, eight cobblers, and ten bakers, as well as furriers, glaziers, silversmiths, a coppersmith, and a watchmaker. A salt storehouse, three distilleries, a copper smelting works, and a tannery were also run by Jews.50Relations between Jews and Christians in the town remained generally cordial throughout the nineteenth century. Sharhorod was spared violence during the wave of pogroms that swept the region in 1881-1882. The closest the town seems to have come to experiencing a pogrom was in April 1885, when a group of drunken peasant military recruits began harassing Jews on the street. According to one newspaper report,
A crowd of Jews gathered to defend themselves and then a genuine fight broke out. All the stalls and stores were closed in an instant, and the women took cover in cellars. A rumor that they are beating the kikes quickly spread through the entire city. The local peasants instantaneously ran into the bazaar, and were already prepared to make a run for the stalls, but word that a boy had been killed quickly cooled the crowd of burghers and peasants, who feared responsibility for the murder, and quickly dispersed to their homes?1
After the May Laws forbade Jews from residing in villages, Jewish refugees from surrounding villages began to settle in Sharhorod. Many who came to reside there temporarily during the High Holidays were not permitted to return to their village homes. The town was then engulfed with endemic poverty and homelessness as the new refugees sought work and shelter. In response, in the 1890s, the Jewish community engaged in several communal building projects, including a renovation of the synagogue, the construction of a new bath, the establishment of a private school, and the building of other facilities. Many Sharhorod Jews, however, believed their only future lay in America and sought to
emigrate. By the turn of the century, the Jewish community numbered five thousand people. The marketplace was full of Jewish stalls, including twenty-seven grocers, eight flour merchants, three butchers, and two fishmongers. There were also eleven Jewish haberdasheries, eight tanners, seven smiths, a watchmaker, a book and paper store, and several other stores, including one that manufactured goods from hemp.52 The generally peaceful relations that had reigned in the town between Christians and Jews were briefly broken when Ukrainian soldiers carried out a pogrom in the town on September 3, 1919. The number of dead was estimated at about one hundred. The Soviet government took control of the town in spring 1920.53
At the end of our visit in 2002, we went to the old Jewish cemetery. It was overgrown with weeds; even fully mature trees had grown over time amidst the underbrush. Only a handful of gravestones remained, jutting out of the earth at slanted angles sporadically throughout the field. Most of the stones had been carried off long ago to pave streets or repair broken walls. I decided to wander off on my own to see if any old stones could still be found protruding from the ground. In an isolated corner of the graveyard, I found a few inches of stone, surrounded by earth and foliage. I squatted down to see if I could make out any of the epitaph, but the inscription was concealed behind layers of thorny weeds. Lost in my thoughts, I felt a shadow creep over the tomb and heard heavy breathing behind me. I glanced up and saw, standing over me, a somber-looking man in black, brandishing an enormous scythe—the image of Death Himself. In a moment of terror, I saw in the rusting blade the blood of all those Jewish martyrs who had been murdered by Cossacks, Haidamaks, pogromists, Stalin's agents, and Hitler's henchmen, on the outskirts of Ukrainian villages just like this one. The peasant from the neighboring field, aware only that he had inadvertently startled me, smiled, revealing a mouthful of gold and silver teeth, and gently lowered the tarnished blade to help clear the brush away from the stone. I thanked him with a dollar bill as the name of the deceased came into view.