The following day, 10 August, a public meeting was organized in Lenin Square at which Rymkevich, the chairman of the town council, and a partisan hero Savva Nikolaichik made speeches.
From Rymkevich’s speech we derived the same pleasure as we used to from reading Soviet newspapers. It was an antidote to any possible nostalgia for socialism, although there was among our number Leib Rafalsky from Tel Aviv who no longer loves Stalin but still loves Lenin and Karl Marx. Then Savva spoke. I remember him from Czarna Puszcza. He was the head of a brigade further to the west but our people were in contact with him. He is a very good man. He later fought at the front and lost an arm, but at that time he had both arms. More to the point, he had a good head on his shoulders.
Then I spoke, Ruvim Lakhish, a citizen of Israel, and thanked the town council and local people for having preserved half the Jewish cemetery and having built a very fine sports stadium on the other half. When the speeches were over, we laid flowers at the monument to the Heroic Liberators of Belorussia and the Town of Emsk from the German Fascist Usurpers.
There was then an amateur concert in the square in which a group of schoolchildren performed Belorussian folk songs and dances, and the musicians from the Minsk Philharmonia performed arias from the operas of Verdi. Some actors read poetry by Pushkin and Lermontov, and the war poets Konstantin Simonov and Mikhail Isakovsky. A folk music troupe from the House of Culture performed folk songs, also very well.
One of our members, Noel Shatz, sang “Lomir ale ineynem” and “Tum balalaika,” and everybody joined in.
In the local restaurant, which is called Waves, tables were set and everybody was very touched because there are no potatoes growing in Israel or Canada as delicious as those which grow in Belorussia.
The next day was the main event, the erecting of the memorial. There was an unveiling. The names of those who died was read out loud, more than 500 people. That was also a major task, compiling that list, making sure nobody had been forgotten
I said a few words and a local woman, Elizaveta Kutikova, spoke. Throughout the war she sheltered Raya Ravikovich and her little daughter Vera and saved both their lives. Vera is a grandmother now herself. They met like family. Raya died last year in Israel. Everybody cried of course. In the Yad Vashem Museum to the memory of the slain in Jerusalem, trees have been planted in honor of righteous people who saved Jews. Each one has a tree, but in Yad Vashem there is no tree in honor of Elizaveta. Raya, of course, is to blame for that. She did send Elizaveta money, but she was not given the honor she deserved. How that happened I do not know, but here was one more righteous person. Of course, when we get home we will put that right and invite Elizaveta over, and plant the tree, welcome her as she deserves and show her everything. Everybody who saved Jews during the war is respected as a righteous person, but she had been forgotten.
Rymkevich this time sent a deputy in his stead, a pretty woman, and she, too, spoke. At the end our Rabbi Chaim Zusmanovich came forward. He is the son of Berl Zusmanovich who also escaped from the ghetto but did not live to see this day, having died in 1985. Chaim was born in Israel in 1952. First he gave a speech and then he read the Kaddish.
There was one more event, a service at the Catholic Church, but I did not attend it. That is one place I would not go.
How can I describe the feeling of sorrow and gratitude. Six million people were killed—what a tragedy. The European Jewry who spoke Yiddish no longer exist. Our children speak Hebrew, other Jews speak English or Russian or all sorts of different languages. Of the 5,000 Jews who lived in Emsk before the war, only one Jewish woman remains. I will not speak on her behalf, she will tell her own story.
Our gratitude is to fate, or God, or I don’t know how best to put it, that we 44 are still alive and have had many children and grandchildren. I calculate that the posterity of those who survived Emsk, who came out from the ghetto, is more than 400 souls. There is one other person to whom we are all gratefuclass="underline" Daniel Stein. Our thanks to him for leading us forth, like Moses.
August 1992
S
PEECH BY
R
AV
C
HAIM
Z
USMANOVICH
Do you know that today is the day of deepest mourning for Jews, the ninth of Av? Our day of grief has inexplicably fallen on the ninth of Av. This is the day we broke out of the ghetto and a day when hundreds of our relatives and friends died here. It is a day of fasting and on this day we eat and drink nothing and do not put on leather footwear. The fasting begins on the evening of the eighth of Av, a few minutes before the setting of the sun, and ends after the appearance of stars in the sky in the evening of the ninth.
Originally the fast of the ninth of Av was associated with the “sin of the scouts,” when Moses had brought the Jews to the borders of the Promised Land. They were afraid to enter it immediately and asked Moses to send scouts so that they could come back and describe what kind of country lay before them. Although this request in itself revealed a doubting by the people of the Word of God, Moses nevertheless agreed to send people to reconnoiter. The scouts who returned 40 days later reported that “the cities are walled, and very great” and populated with giants against whom the Jews were “as grasshoppers.” Two of the scouts said that the Promised Land was beautiful, but they were not believed. All night from the eighth to the ninth of Av the Jews wept, saying that God had brought them to this land to destroy them and that they would rather die in the wilderness. Then God was angered and said that this time the Jews’ tears had been wasted, but now they would have many causes for lamentation on this night. Such would be their punishment for the sin of unbelief.
The first punishment was that the generation which came out of Egypt was not destined to enter the Holy Land. For forty years they wandered in the wilderness, one year for every day spent by the scouts, and they died in the wilderness as they had asked to in their moment of cowardice. Only their children were able to enter the Promised Land.
The second punishment, for the Jews having been frightened of the people inhabiting Canaan and refusing to go into Israel at the time ordained by God, was that now they faced years of terrible wars for that land although, if they had obeyed the Lord, they would miraculously have been granted it without effort.
Even after entering the Promised Land the Jews continued to sin. They still did not believe in the One Being. They needed images and idols, material things.
The prophet Jeremiah, a witness of the destruction of the First Temple, said that people had made even the Temple itself into an object of worship. People thought it was the Temple that protected them and not God, and that the Temple would redeem any crime they might commit. It was for this reason that the Temple was destroyed as God removed that temptation.
God expects faith from the Jews, and until the Jews repent of their sin of unbelief, this punishment will be with them, and they will have ever new cause for lamentation on this day.
Here is a list of the sorrowful events which have occurred over the centuries on the ninth of Av:
On 9 Av in 2449 from the Creation of the World (1313 BCE) the Almighty passed judgment that the generation coming out of Egypt was doomed to wander in the wilderness for 40 years and to die without seeing the land of Israel.
On 9 Av in 3338 from the Creation of the world (422 BCE) the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed and burned the First Temple built by Solomon in the 10th century BC.
On 9 Av in 3828 from the Creation of the World (68 BCE) the Roman warlord (subsequently Emperor) Titus Vespasian destroyed the Second Temple, built in the 4th century BC.