The Felshtin Society

 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Greetings!! It’s been very busy at the Felshtin Society over the last few months. What follows are some of the things that we have been working on and some of what we’ve accomplished. Please read and let us know what you think.
WHO WILL LIGHT A CANDLE?
This title was designated as the name for our effort to shine light on the centennial memorial of the pogrom in Felshtin and all that it means to us and all of our brothers and sisters whose families came from all the other towns that suffered a similar fate. In an effort to involve as many people as possible, we’ve been reaching out to synagogues and other Jewish organizations to meet our goal of having 200,000 candles lit next Spring – one for each of the pogrom victims in in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. So far we have met with the following successes:
• Temple Israel (New York, NY) - Rabbi David Gelfand was the first to agree to hold a special memorial service to honor victims of the pogroms. He did this at the suggestion of my friend, Bob Marks. We thank Bob for his effort to lead the way in this endeavor.
• Central Synagogue (New York, NY) – a congregation with more than 2,300 households has agreed to devote a Shabbat service to giving a sermon on the pogroms and then holding a large candle-lighting. Allison Zivin was key to this effort.
• JCC (Upper West Side, NY) – proposed filling their windows on Amsterdam Avenue with 200 candles and having their Rabbi preside over a blessing for the pogrom victims. Thanks AZ
• Shorefront Y (Brighton Beach, NY) – will hold a candlelight vigil on the Coney Island Boardwalk by the ocean, will incorporate lessons about these pogroms into their intergenerational programming and will reach out to JCCs in Ukraine to ask them to participate. We are also talking to them about other ways the Felshtin Society may partner with them in the future on a variety of programs designed to sustain the memory of these events.

Felshtiners such as Beverly Gersfeld, Robyn Doyle, Barbara Fischkin, Dave Cherson, Flo Lotrowski and others have been helping us by reaching out to their own congregations and contacts. The following have agreed to participate:

• Temple Beth Shalom—Cambridge, MA
• Central Synaogogue-Beth Emeth—Rockville Centre, NY
• Temple Emanuel—Long Beach, NY
• Temple Israel of New York, New York, NY
• Midway Jewish Center—Syosset, NY
• Meer Apartments Senior Living—West Bloomfield, MI
• Westchester Jewish Council—White Plains, NY

We would like to expand this effort beyond the New York City area so please reach out to your congregations. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or need supporting documents.

CONFERENCE UPDATE
Plans are moving along for our April 14, 2019, centennial conference.. The Center for Jewish History has agreed to let us use their conference space for free – this is huge but, as always, we still need money to help fund our impressive list of speakers and presenters. Many thanks to Ruth Levine for her help in obtaining this space.

We are pleased to announce that we have confirmed the following presenters:

• Diane Covert, a photographer from Boston, will share her photography exhibit of the first ever photos taken of a genocide which are from our region of Ukraine.
• Dr. Yael Danieli - a noted trauma psychologist and advisor to the United Nations—has agreed to speak on the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
• Avraham Groll, CEO of Jewish Genealogy, will talk about family trees and genealogical research. His expertise in this area is profound and his leadership at JewishGen has made a difference to many. Their website www.jewishgen.org contains an enormous amount of information and deserves our support.
• Voicescapes has almost finished creating dialogue taken from our Yizkor book and will reenact it.

We are still finalizing other speakers and presenters and it promises to be a very informative and interesting day!
Discounted tickets for $90 each (instead of $125) are now on sale at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/felshtin-societys-conference-memorializing-e-european-pogroms-1917-19-tickets-46767712487?aff=eac2
All tickets include a kosher, buffet lunch.

PRESS COVERAGE

We’ve started to get some press:
Alan was interviewed by Nash Holos, a Ukrainian radio station based in Vancouver about the Felshtin Society. Here is the link:
https://www.nashholos.com/nash-holos-vancouver-2018-0317/
We wrote an article about our candlelighting for the Journal of Reform Judaism and are hoping this publicity will help spread the word about our efforts and get other Rabbis onboard. Here is the link: https://goo.gl/gjNn49

ANYONE TRAVELING TO UKRAINE?

We are also working with Anna Royzner – a Jewish tour guide and teacher in Khelminitsky – who is speaking on Ukrainian pogroms at the JewishGen conference in Warsaw – she loved our ideas and is spreading our initiative across the Ukraine by reaching out to rabbis there about hosting memorial observances and getting Jewish newspapers to publicize our events. If anyone is planning on going to Ukraine or Warsaw, please let us know and we’ll happily connect you with Anna.

LIMMUD FSU

We are also trying to spread the word about the Felshtin centennial to individuals interested in this era. We distributed candles and flyers about our activities that were placed in welcome bags that were distributed to over 400 attendees at the Limmud FSU (www.limmudfsuus.org) conference that was held at Columbia University on May 6th. This conference was for Russian speaking Jews in the US to strengthen their Jewish identity. They hold other events around the world supporting these interests.
WEBSITE
Under the able leadership of Sarah Schneider, we are updating our website so that we can collect email addresses to make it easier to remind people to light candles and register for our conference.
FUNDRAISING
We’ve been applying for grants for the conference and to date have sent out about 30 letters of inquiry. This is a long, complicated process and has not borne fruit as yet. So, we need your financial support to cover our operating costs as we move forward.

We have a Crowdrise link to make it easy for people to donate online:
https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/felshtin-centennial-memorial2/alanbernstein6
However, they do take a small processing fee so we hope you will either cover that with your online donation or send donations directly to Sid at his new office:
Sidney Shaievitz
112 Broad St.
Bloomfield, NJ 07003
OTHER WAYS TO HELP
Reach out to your local Rabbi to host a remembrance observance. There are so many people who came from this part of the world in these years that we are certain this will be meaningful to many. Please keep us posted on the response from your efforts. Feedback is important to us.

If you have media contacts? We’d love more press so that we can educate as many people as possible about this chapter in history.
Buy your tickets and make a donation!
Buy tickets

MY DEAR CHILDREN
LeeAnn Dance, co-director/producer, of this recently released documentary on the pogroms, wrote the following for our newsletter, which we think provides interesting historical context on the pogroms:
Nearly 100 years ago, the Jews of Felshtin were decimated – one-third of them brutally killed in a pogrom. Unfortunately, they were not alone. Between the years 1917-1921 there were at least 1,000 pogroms. But those are only the ones for which there are records. There were likely many more.
Polly Zavadivker, director of Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware, says that before WWI, Jews were spread out in more than 100 cities, towns, and villages throughout the Pale of Settlement. After WWI and the ensuing Russian Civil War, Zavadivker says that number was reduced to 35-40.
“That tells you that certain towns that had Jewish populations before the war were completely emptied of their populations of Jews,” she says. “Turned into cemeteries.”
This past December, a panel of scholars at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies said the number of Jews killed during the Russian Civil War pogroms could be as high as 300,000, an increase of 50,000 over previous estimates.
It was the holocaust before the Holocaust. A small but growing group of pogrom scholars believes these massacres should be seen as a precursor to the greater tragedy that followed just 20 years later. And yet, many know little, if anything, about these massacres.
For nearly five years now, I have worked to change that. A few years prior, a dear friend brought me a letter written by his great grandmother. Her name was Feiga Shamis. She was a Jewish mother of 12 driven by this little known humanitarian tragedy to send two of her youngest children to an orphanage in South Africa. My friend thought this letter might be the basis for a future documentary. But when I first read the letter, I was perplexed. Feiga wrote about incident upon incident of violence in what is today Ukraine. Anti-Jewish violence in the aftermath of World War One? Why had I never heard about this?
Nearly two years later, my friend called to tell me his cousin, Judy Favish, was about to head to Ukraine to trace Feiga’s story and asked if I wanted to go along. It was the beginning of a journey that would open my eyes to a forgotten piece of history and result in what is the first-ever in-depth documentary about these massacres.
My Dear Children weaves between Judy’s journey, Feiga’s letter, and the little known history behind it. Judy’s journey took her to Ukraine, New York, and a little known archive in South Africa. What we all discovered was a story unknowingly shared by Jews around the world.
But uncovering that story was challenging. Much of the documentation about the Civil War pogroms was hidden in Soviet archives until the fall of the Iron Curtain, and scholars have only recently begun to study it. The scholars who endeavor to study this time period must be proficient in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, and French. And most importantly, the Holocaust just 20 years later overshadowed the earlier events, meaning the vast majority of scholars have focused on the Holocaust, not the one before it.
My Dear Children finally brings this history to light, helps Jews everywhere understand their connection to this history, and, we hope, honors the countless victims. Feiga’s story is a testament to the consequences of unchecked anti-Semitism. It is, unfortunately, a story that remains relevant today.
My Dear Children premiered on WPBT South Florida PBS this past January. It is just beginning to appear on the Jewish film festival circuit and it I s anticipated that American Public Television will distribute the film to the national network of public television stations beginning September 1. In the meantime, the filmmakers have launched a yearlong community screening campaign with the goal of getting the film into museums, universities, synagogues, and community centers nationwide. For more information about the film and to see the trailer, visit www.mydearchildrendoc.com.