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In my day there were three rabbis in town. Why
three, you ask? Because the town had a variety of
Chasidim who could not come to an agreement
about having one rabbi for the entire community.
The rabbi of the Trisker Chasidim in town
was the rabbinical judge [dayan]. Rabbi Leybl
Melamed. The Rizhiner, Radziner, and others
had as their rabbi Pinchas Oselka, and the Kotsker
had Rabbi Leybish Landau. Before this period,
the town's rabbi was Leyb Finkelshteyn.
Rabbi Finkelshteyn's son, Dovid, wrote anonymously
in the journal HaTsefirah at an early age.
At home, of course, he was afraid to read a newspaper
or write for one. For these purposes, he used,
quietly, the Kotsker prayer room.
With regard to the Zionist movement, local
youth were not far behind other shtetls in Volhynia.
In the early 1920s, we organized the Keren
HaYesod in Luboml. The most important members
were myelf, Elke Eizenberg, Mendl
Eizenberg's daughter, Gedalia Grimatlicht, and
Leybish Gleizer. Elke was the treasurer.
In light of the fact that the times were uncertain
and robberies were a regular occurrence,
Elke's brother Srulik buried the money collected
for Keren HaYesod. Later he was killed and we
could not find the buried money.
Occasionally we were visited by party leaders
from Warsaw or other towns. One, I.
Meremin ski, participated in a public trial we held
of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment.
In the home of Shmuel Bershtat, a kind of club
was organized where Jewish youth gathered and
participated in heated and interesting debates
about Jewish problems that seemed at the time the
most important issues in the world.
AFTER WORLD WAR I
By Meyer Natanzon
93
A year or two after the war, a Tze'ire Tzion
party was organized in town. At the beginning, its
chairman was Asher Budman, founder of our
Tarbut school; Natanzon was vice-chairman and
Elke Eizenberg was secretary. Active members in
the organization were L. Gleizer and M.
Grimatlicht. The various Zionist parties took control
of the entire town. The Bund was very weak.
Among the locally active Bundists was Yeshaye
Sheyntop.
The Jewish Communists, though few, were
quite active in certain circles. The three brothers
from the Chiniuk family were all Communists.
During the time of the Polish-Bolshevik war, just
after World War I, when the Bolsheviks occupied
Luboml for a few weeks, the few Jewish Communists
in town played an important role.
After the Poles took back Luboml, they arrested
some of the Communists and sent them to
Kartez Bereze (an exile camp). The father of
Chiniuk and his son Chayim-Hersh died in that
Polish camp. Ben-Tsiyon came back a sick man.
He later escaped to Soviet Russia with his brother
Itzik.
A Ukrainian leader in town once said to
Hershl Chasid: "Let us go help the Russians
against the Poles." Hershl told me about it, and I
reminded him: "Have you forgotten what
Chmielnicki and his cohorts did to the Jews? We
will be the first victims." He listened to me. It so
happened that this time the Poles guarded us
from the Ukrainian pogroms.
Hershl Chasid was the leader of a drama
group in town. The group especially performed
plays by Jacob Gordin. The plays were presented
in Motl Yisroel Sonyes' brick building, in front of