JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

elorussia
(13.6% of the total population), forming the majority in the
principal cities of the region. There were 47,561 Jews in Minsk
(52.3% of the total population); 34,420 in Vitebsk (52.4%);
32,369 in *Daugavpils (46.6%); 21,539 in Mogilev (50%); 21,065
in Pinsk (74.2%); 20,759 in *Bobruisk (60.5%); and 20,385 in
*Gomel (54.8%). The Jews in the cities and townships of Belorussia
had associations with the village and rural economy in
a variety of ways. Both the wealthy and poorer Jews engaged
in the development and trade of forest industries, and established
small- or medium-sized timber enterprises. They also
developed leather and allied industries on a similar scale. Another
Belorussian Jewish occupation was peddling combined
with the buying up of village produce, such as flax, hemp, and
bristles, which the Jewish peddler sold to Jewish merchants
who exported these commodities to the West. Because of the
prevailing conditions of poverty, large numbers of Jews emigrated
from Belorussia to the Ukraine or southern Russia, and,
from the 1880s, to the United States.
In the cultural sphere, the Jews of Belorussia were influenced
by the centers in Vilna, Volhynia, and Podolia. In general
the *Mitnaggedim trend predominated in the north and
west of the region. Most of the celebrated Lithuanian yeshivot
were in Belorussia, those of *Volozhin and *Mir, among
others. Ḥasidism penetrated Belorussia from the south. Two
of the fathers of Ḥasidism, *Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk and
*Shneur Zalman of Lyady, were active there. Belorussia was
the cradle of *Ḥabad Ḥasidism. In southern Belorussia the influence
of the ḥasidic rabbis of the *Karlin and *Stolin dynasties
was strong. By the mid-19th century Haskalah penetrated
the larger towns from Vilna. The pogroms in Russia from
1881 to 1883 did not spread to Belorussia. The Ḥovevei Zion
found adherents mainly in the larger and average-size communities.
Toward the end of the 19th century Zionism and the
Bund movement began to spread among Belorussian Jewry.
Zionism found its main adherents among middle-class professionals
and white-collar workers or working men from the
ranks of traditional Judaism. It was in Belorussia that Labor
Zionism originated, its centers being Minsk, Bobruisk, Gomel,
and Vitebsk. The second convention of Russian Zionists was
held in Minsk in 1902. The Bund won converts mainly among
Jewish artisans and workers, but also among radicals of the
intelligentsia. During the revolution of 1905 the Bund headed
the revolutionary movement in Belorussia. Self-defense organizations
to protect the Jews during the wave of pogroms in
this period were established by the Bund and Labor Zionists
in every town in the region. The first move toward organized
Jewish self-defense was made to combat a gang of rioters in
Gomel in the fall of 1903. As a result, only a few communities
in Belorussia experienced harm.
The revolution precipitated far-reaching changes in the
internal life of the Jews of Belorussia which contributed to the
breakup of traditional Jewish social and spiritual patterns and
loyalties. Zionism resulted in the development of modernized
ḥadarim and Hebrew schools. After the outbreak of World
War I a stream of refugees and émigrés from Poland and Lith-
uania passed through Belorussia, and were warmly received
by the Jews there. The 1917 February Revolution aroused great
expectations among the Jewish public, and Jewish political
parties emerged from underground. A number of Jewish
journals were issued in Minsk, including the Zionist Der Yid
and the Bundist Der Veker. In the Minsk district the Zionists
received 65,400 votes in the elections to the All-Russian Constituent
Assembly, with 16,270 votes cast for the Bund and the
Mensheviks. After the October Revolution and the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk, Belorussia became a battlefield between the Red
Army and the Polish army. The Jewish communities suffered
severely both from general wartime conditions and from attacks
by the Polish Army when Jews were killed indiscriminately
on the charge of spying and helping the Red forces. The
victims of these atrocities included 35 Jews in Pinsk in April
1919. Russian volunteers under the command of General Bulak-Balakhovich
terrorized the Jews in the small towns and
villages. After the Treaty of Riga in March 1921, Belorussia was
divided between the Soviet Union and Poland.
Under Soviet Rule (until 1941)
During the first years of Soviet rule, the Jews of Belorussia
found themselves in an exceptional situation. Among the
Belorussian people, mainly poor and uneducated peasants,
nationalist feelings were just beginning to crystallize. The
anti-Jewish tradition, which poisoned relations between the
Jews and non-Jews in Poland and the Ukraine, was little felt
among the peasant masses of Belorussia. On the other hand,
there were no cultural ties between the Belorussians and the
Jews. The Jewish poet Samuel Plavnik (1886–1941), writing
under the pseudonym Zmitrok *Byadulya, who was one of
the creators of Belorussian literature even before the October
Revolution was a rare phenomenon. The Jewish population
in Belorussia existed in conditions conducive to a flourishing
cultural and social life of its own. Relatively, the largest
concentration of Jews in the Soviet Union was that of the Belorussian
Republic, with a solidly based social structure and
culture, Yiddish being its main language. According to the
census of 1926, the 407,000 Jews in Belorussia formed 8.2%
of the republic’s total population. A considerable proportion
of the urban population was Jewish. There were 53,686 Jews
(40.8%) in Minsk; 37,745 (43.7%) in Gomel; 37,013 (37.5%) in
Vitebsk; and 21,558 (42%) in Bobruisk. The Belorussian government,
in its policy of reducing the predominance of the
Russian language in towns, which was to no small extent a language
used by the Jews, encouraged the use of Yiddish among
the Jewish population. For some time the slogan “Workers of
the World Unite!” was also inscribed in Yiddish, in addition
to Belorussian, Russian, and Polish, on the emblem of the Belorussian
Republic.
With the consolidation of the Soviet regime in Belorussia,
the old economic structure of the Jewish population was
overturned. The abolition of private trade and restrictions
on small artisans created a large class of citizens “deprived
of rights” (“Lishentsi”). Attempts to integrate these elements
304 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3