Streshin - the shtetl of the Levins

Thu 26 May

Before we started this trip none of us had even heard of Streshin. Bella, our guide and a director of the Belarus Jewish Heritage Research Group, had heard of the village, and knew vaguely where it was, but had never been there and knew no details. It is, literally, not on some maps. And yet this turned out to be, for me at least, the most moving visit of the whole trip.

Streshin is a small village on a hill on a bend in the Dniepr, a major river that goes south to Kiev and comes out into the Black Sea at Odessa. We ended our tour there because the research had told us that this was where our Great-grandmother Mikhlya Levin - and all her brothers and sisters - had been born. Mikhlya was born in 1858, her brother Leib in 1861, and in 1867 their father Berko obtained permission to move his family to the town of Gomel, some 80km away to the south, down the Dniepr.

On the way to the village we stopped to pay our respects - once again - at two mass graves, just outside the town of Zhlobin. One of them was for 400 Jews from the village of Streshin, shot on the spot and buried in a pit, during the Nazi occupation in 1942. So our visit started on an unavoidably sombre note.

The mass grave 20km from Streshin

Once in Streshin we met the mayor, and had a chat, and tea and sandwiches. It soon became clear that we were the first people ever to visit the village in search of its - and our own - Jewish heritage.

 Tea with the mayor

The population now numbers no more than a couple of hundred at the most, and was probably no more than a thousand or so at its highest, between the World Wars. There is a little park in front of the town hall, which had been the market-place in the old days, when Streshin was the local agricultural centre.

We tried to imagine Mikhlya and Leib, and all the little Levins, playing in the main street, the market square, and the castle ruins. I swear I half-saw a swish of little skirts disappearing round a corner, and heard a mother's voice calling the children back for dinner, in Yiddish of course . . .

 150 years ago our great-grandmother may have lived in this street

The mayor had arranged a meeting for us with the village's oldest inhabitant, 92 year-old Maria. We asked a stream of questions, which Bella conveyed to her in Belarussian, and Maria came out with a host of recollections of life in the 1920s and 30s that contained many surprises for the mayor and even for her own son. There had been a Jewish majority in the population, and Maria told us that relations between Jews and non-Jews were good on the whole, to the extent that many non-Jews spoke Yiddish rather than Russian in conversation with Jews.

Maria remembers

She recalled the day the Nazis rounded up all the Jews and marched them off; Maria, then around 20 years old, tried to give a friend some food for the journey, but the Nazis would not allow any contact. No-one knew where they were being taken. We, of course, had just seen where they ended up.

The most poignant moment for us was when we asked if she remembered the surnames of any of the Jewish people in the village. Were there any Levins, for instance? "Ach, Goldring, Rivkin, Levin - there were lots of them . . . ".

Berko Levin had taken his family to Gomel, but he had a brother who had at least three sons, who may well have stayed in the village and carried the name on through the generations. Were any of the Levins Maria knew in the 1920s and 30s relatives of ours? Were any of them amongst those marched off by the Germans that fateful day in 1942? Were any of them buried in the pit we had stood beside a few hours earlier?

Bella made a couple of quick phone calls as we walked back to the car, and told us that according to Russian state archives in Moscow, over 200 Jews had been killed in the village, in addition to those buried in the mass grave in Zhlobin.

Now, as a direct consequence of our visit, the Jewish Heritage Research Group will send researchers to Streshin, and will try to interview and record anyone with memories of that period who is willing to speak with them. They hope to set up a commemorative plaque to honour the dead in a suitable place in the village, and also to mark the site of the former Jewish cemetery, now slipping under the waters of the Dniepr.

In this way they hope to rescue for future generations at least some small part of the heritage of a shtetl that had been a quiet centre of Jewish life for two centuries or more, only to be wiped out, like so many others, in the blink of an eye.

See photos: Zhlobin - Streshin

Destination Gomel

Tue 24 May

Gomel - myth or reality?

We had long thought that our Iliatovitch/Gitovitch family came from Gomel. Parents and grandparents spoke of it - though not very often - and the town took on something of a mythical character for us. So this journey was originally planned as a visit to Gomel. We even hoped to fly straight there, maybe via the Belarus capital Minsk. Fortunately we didn't manage to sort out a route, as the research has led us to a succession of other places across the west and south of the country.

Mikhlya Levin's family was from Streshin, a shtetl some 50km from Gomel. Dovid Iliatovitch was from Lida, in the north-west, and all their children were born there. At some point after 1891 they moved to Gomel, possibly after the death of Dovid, presumably so that Mikhlya could be nearer to her own family, including brother Leib (Leibisch).

We now know that 2 of Mikhlya and Leib's brothers, Itzka and Aron, both had children born in Gomel, between 1890 and 1907. Will we find any trace of them, or their descendants?

Where were they from?

Sun 22 May

Yesterday and today we have been in Lida, where my Grandmother Zlata (Sarah) was born in 1886, and Novogrudok, where her father Shlema-Dovid was born in 1858. His father, Leizer Iliatovitch, obtained permission from the authorities to move his family to Lida in 1863. Both towns had flourishing Jewish populations in the mid-19th century.

The records we have found show that Shmuil, the son of Shlema-Dovid and Mikhlya Levin, was born in Lida in 1881, and their last son known to us, Hirsch (Harry), was also born there, in 1891. In between came Zlata and Myer, though we have not found the records for them.

Granny was born in Lida, not Gomel

Shlema-Dovid must have died at some time between 1891 and 1906, as in that year Mikhlya re-married. Her new husband was Abram-Lieb Shushan, aged 60, and they married in Gomel; she was 48. Presumably he died within a few years of the wedding, as by 1911 we know she was living in London with her sons Myer and Harry.

Mikhlya's family, meanwhile, were from a small shtetl near Gomel called Streshin. Her father Berka got permission to move his family to Gomel in 1867, by which time he had 6 children, of whom Mikhlya was the third. At some point Mikhlya from Gomel met Shlema-Dovid from Lida, but there is no information about their marriage. As suggested above, it appears that all their children were born in Lida. We will be in Gomel on Tuesday and Wednesday, and hope to visit Streshin on Thursday.

Tomorrow (Monday) we go to Pinsk, to chase up my grandfather, Moshe Shraibman.

See photos: Lida - Novogrudok

Roots and routes

Sometime after 1900 Labisch Levin left his home in, or maybe near, Gomel, a town in the south east of what is now Belarus, and set off to build a new life in England. He may have thought he was heading for America, but London was where he landed and where he stayed. He, like many others, was hoping to escape the oppression and violence to which Jews were routinely subjected in the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western fringes of the Russian Empire to which Tsarist laws restricted them.

He was aged around 40, and brought with him his three children, and maybe his wife. Or maybe it was his second wife, Annie, that accompanied him, with her own child. Or maybe they came later. Not long afterwards, his niece Zlata, aged 18, came too, and stayed with the Levins for a while, maybe a few years. In their new country Labisch became Lewis, and Zlata became Sarah.

In 1905, in the aftermath of war and a crushed revolution, Moshe Shreibman, aged 20, from Pinsk, left his uniform and his family behind and made the same journey into the unknown. In London he became Morris. A few years later he met and married Sarah.

Within a couple of years, Lewis's sister Michla - Sarah's mother - arrived, together with two of her sons, Myer and Herschel. Another son, Eliezer, had died, or been killed; another, Shmuel, had married, and stayed in Gomel. Michla's husband David Ilitovitch had died sometime previously.

Between them, Lewis Levin and his sister Michla had nine children who survived into adulthood. These nine went on to have thirty of their own, and their children in turn have migrated to many different parts of the world. Many links have been stretched or broken. Now, a hundred years later, some of Lewis and Michla's great-grandchildren - and great-great ones too - are trying to find out who these mysterious people were, where they came from, how they lived, why they uprooted themselves, how they made new lives in strange places. And pondering the heritage they have left us.

Four of us - Ralph, Mark and myself from the UK, and Dan from the USA - are about to embark on a short research tour of some of the places in Belarus that we think might be significant in our families' histories.

View Belarus in a larger map

Between us we represent three of the four surviving children of Michla Levin and David Ilitovitch.

Coffee at the airport. What does the week ahead hold in store for us?

We hope to use this blog to pass on some of the stories we hear, and invite family members to contribute their own memories and tales. Maybe in this way we can get a little closer to those brave people who, a hundred years ago, took such a giant leap into the dark. And maybe get a little closer to each other, too.