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The Jewish Community of Kremenets

Kremenets

Кременець; in Polish: Krzemieniec

A town in Volyn Oblas, Ukraine.

Under Lithuania until 1569; in Poland until 1793; under Russia (after the partition of Poland) until 1918, and in independent Poland until 1939, between the two world wars.

Jews are first mentioned there in 1438, when they were granted a charter by the Lithuanian grand duke. They were expelled in 1495 along with all other Jews in Lithuania, returning in 1503. The number of Jews in the town rose from 240 (10.6% of the total population) in 1552 to 500 in 1578 and 845 (15% of the total) in 1629. The community developed and prospered during the 16th and 17th centuries, up to 1648. It was a center of arenda activity and the related trade.

Among the rabbis of that period were Mordecai B. Abraham Jaffe and Samson B. Bezalel, brother of Judah Loew B. Bezalel of Prague. The community participated in the work of the councils of the lands. Outstanding among the scholars of the yeshivah at the beginning of the 17th century was Joseph B. Moses of Kremenets. In the Chmielnicki Massacres (1648-1649) and the Russian and Swedish Wars soon after, many Jews were savagely murdered and many others fled. Subsequently the community was unable to regain its former importance.

In 1765 only 649 Jews lived there. The Jews were prohibited from rebuilding the houses burned down in the frequent fires that broke out in the town. At the beginning of Russian rule, Kremenets was an impoverished community of petty traders and craftsmen.

Kremenets was within the range of 50 versts from the Russian border, which was prohibited to Jews, but the authorities did not apply this prohibition to the town. The number of Jews increased from 3,791 in 1847 to 6,539 (37% of the total population) in 1897. At the end of the 19th century they played an important role in the economy of the town, in particular the paper industry, and the Jewish carpenters and cobblers of Kremenets exported their goods to other towns in Poland and Russia. There was an active cultural life in the community with the Haskalah and Chasidism competing for influence. The Haskalah writer Isaac Baer Levinsohn lived there, as did the Chasid R. Mordecai, father-in-law of Nahum Twersky of Chernobyl. In 1918-1920 Kremenets suffered from the attacks of marauding bands in the Ukraine.

In 1921, 6,619 Jews lived there. In modern Poland the Jews faced both the need for reorganization of their markets, as they were cut off from Russia, and the anti-Jewish policies of polish society and state. Cultural life continued, influenced mostly by Zionism. Two periodicals in Yiddish, which appeared at the beginning of the 1930s, merged in 1933 into one weekly newspaper, "Kremenitser Lebn".

After the outbreak of World War II (September 1, 1939) the Soviet authorities took over the town on September 22, 1939. In the spring of 1940 the refugees from western Poland were obliged to register with the authorities and to declare whether they wished to take up Soviet citizenship or return to their former homes, now under German occupation. For family reasons, many refugees declared that they preferred to return; that summer they were exiled to the Soviet interior. All Jewish communal life was forbidden, and Zionist leaders moved to other cities to keep their past activities from the knowledge of the authorities. By 1941 the Jewish population had increased to over 15,000, including over 4,000 refugees.

A few days after the German-Soviet war broke out (June 22, 1941) the Germans reached the area. Hundreds of young Jews managed to flee to the Soviet Union. A pogrom broke out early in July 1941, when Ukrainians, aided by Germans, killed 800 men, women, and children. In August 1941 the gestapo ordered all Jews with academic status to report for registration. All those who did so were murdered, and thus the Jewish community's leadership was destroyed. That month the Germans set fire to the main synagogue and exacted a fine of 11 kg. of gold from the community. They also imposed a Judenrat, headed by Benjamin Katz, but he was murdered for his refusal to collaborate with the Nazis.

Eventually the Judenrat was comprised of a number of people whose influence was detrimental. At the end of January 1942 a ghetto was imposed and on March 1st was closed off from the rest of the city. The inmates endured great hardship and there was a serious shortage of water. On Aug. 10, 1942, the Germans initiated a two-week long Aktion to annihilate the inmates, and at last set the ghetto ablaze to drive out those in hiding. Fifteen hundred able-bodied persons were dispatched to slave labor in Bialokrynica, where they later met their death. The vast majority of the ghetto inhabitants rounded up in the Aktion were taken in groups and murdered over trenches dug near the railway station, near a former army camp. The local Zionist leader Benjamin Landsberg committed suicide at this time. Only 14 of the Kremenets community survived the Holocaust.

Societies of former residents of Kremenets function in Israel, the U.S. and Argentina.

Yitshak Ber Levinsohn (1788-1860), Hebrew author, Haskalah pioneer, born in Kremenets, Ukraine, to a wealthy family. He later moved to Radzivilov where he taught himself languages and acted as interpreter for Russian forces during Napoleon's 1812 campaign. Between 1813 and 1820 he lived in Brody, Tarnopol and Zolkiew where he met some of the outstanding figures of the Haskalah. From 1823 he was in Kremenets. In 1820 Levinsohn published two satires on the Hasidim and after that devoted himself to the dissemination of Haskalah. Influential Russian authorities, including government circles, supported him and protected him from persecution by the Hasidim. In 1852 the Russian government bought 2,000 copies of his book, Bet Yehuda, for distribution in Hebrew schools. His books extolled the virtues of Enlightenment and manual labor, especially agriculture. His contemporaries called him ' the Russian Mendelssohn'.

Isaac Stern (21 July 1920 - 22 Sept 2001), violin virtuoso, Born in Krzemieniec, Poland (now (Kremenets, Ukraine). He was brought to San Francisco as an infant. He is the first major violinist who was wholly trained in California, in the San Francisco Conservatory. His principal teacher was Naoum Blinder who was concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He made his debut with the San Francisco orchestra in 1931, when he was eleven. In 1937 he made his debut in New York and during World War II appeared before the Allied troops. In 1943 he gave his first recital in Carnegie Hall, New York, and in 1944 made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic. His career took off in 1948 at the Lucerne Festival. Since then he has played in Australia, Japan and South America and appears regularly with American and European orchestras. In 1956 he made a successful tour in the USSR and in 1979 visited China. This visit was documented in the film From Mao to Mozart Isaac Stern in China that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1981. In 1967 he played Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein at the famous Mount Scopus concert to celebrate the victory of the Six Day War. He was one of the founders of the Jerusalem Music Centre where he conducted master classes each year for promising violinists from all over the world, and acted as a driving force behind the American-Israel Cultural Foundation. He is known for his humanitarian activities all over the world for which he received the Albert Schweitzer Award For Music in 1975. Died in New York.

Noah Prylucki (also Prilutski) (1882-1941), Yiddish philologist, journalist, poet, and politician, born in Berdichev, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). He grew up in Kremenets before moving to Warsaw where in 1909 he began working as a lawyer.

His collection of sensual poems Farn Mizbeakh ("Before the Altar", 1908) was well received. Prylucki decide to focus on Yiddish philology and journalism. He made significant contributions as a pioneering researcher of the Yiddish language and played a crucial role in categorizing its various dialects across Eastern, Central, and Western regions. At the Czernowitz Language Conference in 1908, he fervently advocated for Yiddish to be recognized as the national language of the Jewish people, although his efforts did not succeed.

In 1905, Prylucki and his father, Zevi Prylucki, founded the Warsaw Yiddish daily newspaper Der Moment, which remained active until the German occupation of Warsaw in 1939. Engaged in politics since 1916, he became an advocate for impoverished Jews and middle-class artisans. He established the Folkspartei, a political party that championed Jewish autonomous rights in Poland, and was elected as its representative in the Polish Sejm in 1918.

In addition to his political activities, Prylucki published philological studies, influenced the modernization of Yiddish orthography, and played a role in the establishment of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He served as the editor of YIVO's publication, Yidish far Ale (1838-1939), and contributed numerous articles and reviews to YIVO Bleter.

When WW II erupted, Prylucki sought refuge in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania. After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, he became a lecturer in Yiddish Language and Culture at the University of Vilna delivering lectures on Yiddish philology until 1941. Following the German attack on the Soviet Union and occupation of Vilnius, Prylucki was arrested and forced to compose a list of incunabula housed in Vilna’s Strashun library. Subsequently, he was tortured to death by the Germans.

Tsevi (Cwi) (Zeev) Prylucki (Hirsh-Sholem Prilutski) (1862-1942), journalist, newspaper editor and Zionist, born in Kremenets (Krzemieniec, in Polish), Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) into a wealthy family of merchants. He studied at studied at the universities of Kiev and Berlin, Germany. As one of the leaders of Hibbat Zion movement, during the 1880s and 1890s he was engaged in Zionist activities advocating for Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. In 1898 he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, and in 1905 settled in Warsaw, Poland. The same year he founded Der Veg (“The Way”), the first daily newspaper in Yiddish. All those years he continued to publish in various periodicals in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian. In 1910, along with his son Noach Prylucki ,he founded and then served as editor-in-chief of the popular Yiddish daily Der Moment. Part of his memoirs about the Jewish journalistic scene in Poland during the early decades of 20th century survived in Ringelblum Archive from Warsaw Ghetto. Prylucki himself died in Warsaw Ghetto.

Ukraine

Україна / Ukrayina

A country in eastern Europe, until 1991 part of the Soviet Union.

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 50,000 out of 42,000,000 (0.1%). Main Jewish organizations:

Єврейська Конфедерація України - Jewish Confederation of Ukraine
Phone: 044 584 49 53
Email: jcu.org.ua@gmail.com
Website: http://jcu.org.ua/en

Ваад (Ассоциация еврейских организаций и общин) Украины (VAAD – Asssociation of Jewish Organizations & Communities of Ukraine)
Voloska St, 8/5
Kyiv, Kyivs’ka
Ukraine 04070
Phone/Fax: 38 (044) 248-36-70, 38 (044) 425-97-57/-58/-59/-60
Email: vaadua.office@gmail.com
Website: http://www.vaadua.org/

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The Jewish Community of Kremenets

Kremenets

Кременець; in Polish: Krzemieniec

A town in Volyn Oblas, Ukraine.

Under Lithuania until 1569; in Poland until 1793; under Russia (after the partition of Poland) until 1918, and in independent Poland until 1939, between the two world wars.

Jews are first mentioned there in 1438, when they were granted a charter by the Lithuanian grand duke. They were expelled in 1495 along with all other Jews in Lithuania, returning in 1503. The number of Jews in the town rose from 240 (10.6% of the total population) in 1552 to 500 in 1578 and 845 (15% of the total) in 1629. The community developed and prospered during the 16th and 17th centuries, up to 1648. It was a center of arenda activity and the related trade.

Among the rabbis of that period were Mordecai B. Abraham Jaffe and Samson B. Bezalel, brother of Judah Loew B. Bezalel of Prague. The community participated in the work of the councils of the lands. Outstanding among the scholars of the yeshivah at the beginning of the 17th century was Joseph B. Moses of Kremenets. In the Chmielnicki Massacres (1648-1649) and the Russian and Swedish Wars soon after, many Jews were savagely murdered and many others fled. Subsequently the community was unable to regain its former importance.

In 1765 only 649 Jews lived there. The Jews were prohibited from rebuilding the houses burned down in the frequent fires that broke out in the town. At the beginning of Russian rule, Kremenets was an impoverished community of petty traders and craftsmen.

Kremenets was within the range of 50 versts from the Russian border, which was prohibited to Jews, but the authorities did not apply this prohibition to the town. The number of Jews increased from 3,791 in 1847 to 6,539 (37% of the total population) in 1897. At the end of the 19th century they played an important role in the economy of the town, in particular the paper industry, and the Jewish carpenters and cobblers of Kremenets exported their goods to other towns in Poland and Russia. There was an active cultural life in the community with the Haskalah and Chasidism competing for influence. The Haskalah writer Isaac Baer Levinsohn lived there, as did the Chasid R. Mordecai, father-in-law of Nahum Twersky of Chernobyl. In 1918-1920 Kremenets suffered from the attacks of marauding bands in the Ukraine.

In 1921, 6,619 Jews lived there. In modern Poland the Jews faced both the need for reorganization of their markets, as they were cut off from Russia, and the anti-Jewish policies of polish society and state. Cultural life continued, influenced mostly by Zionism. Two periodicals in Yiddish, which appeared at the beginning of the 1930s, merged in 1933 into one weekly newspaper, "Kremenitser Lebn".

After the outbreak of World War II (September 1, 1939) the Soviet authorities took over the town on September 22, 1939. In the spring of 1940 the refugees from western Poland were obliged to register with the authorities and to declare whether they wished to take up Soviet citizenship or return to their former homes, now under German occupation. For family reasons, many refugees declared that they preferred to return; that summer they were exiled to the Soviet interior. All Jewish communal life was forbidden, and Zionist leaders moved to other cities to keep their past activities from the knowledge of the authorities. By 1941 the Jewish population had increased to over 15,000, including over 4,000 refugees.

A few days after the German-Soviet war broke out (June 22, 1941) the Germans reached the area. Hundreds of young Jews managed to flee to the Soviet Union. A pogrom broke out early in July 1941, when Ukrainians, aided by Germans, killed 800 men, women, and children. In August 1941 the gestapo ordered all Jews with academic status to report for registration. All those who did so were murdered, and thus the Jewish community's leadership was destroyed. That month the Germans set fire to the main synagogue and exacted a fine of 11 kg. of gold from the community. They also imposed a Judenrat, headed by Benjamin Katz, but he was murdered for his refusal to collaborate with the Nazis.

Eventually the Judenrat was comprised of a number of people whose influence was detrimental. At the end of January 1942 a ghetto was imposed and on March 1st was closed off from the rest of the city. The inmates endured great hardship and there was a serious shortage of water. On Aug. 10, 1942, the Germans initiated a two-week long Aktion to annihilate the inmates, and at last set the ghetto ablaze to drive out those in hiding. Fifteen hundred able-bodied persons were dispatched to slave labor in Bialokrynica, where they later met their death. The vast majority of the ghetto inhabitants rounded up in the Aktion were taken in groups and murdered over trenches dug near the railway station, near a former army camp. The local Zionist leader Benjamin Landsberg committed suicide at this time. Only 14 of the Kremenets community survived the Holocaust.

Societies of former residents of Kremenets function in Israel, the U.S. and Argentina.

Written by researchers of ANU Museum of the Jewish People
Yitshak Ber Levinsohn

Yitshak Ber Levinsohn (1788-1860), Hebrew author, Haskalah pioneer, born in Kremenets, Ukraine, to a wealthy family. He later moved to Radzivilov where he taught himself languages and acted as interpreter for Russian forces during Napoleon's 1812 campaign. Between 1813 and 1820 he lived in Brody, Tarnopol and Zolkiew where he met some of the outstanding figures of the Haskalah. From 1823 he was in Kremenets. In 1820 Levinsohn published two satires on the Hasidim and after that devoted himself to the dissemination of Haskalah. Influential Russian authorities, including government circles, supported him and protected him from persecution by the Hasidim. In 1852 the Russian government bought 2,000 copies of his book, Bet Yehuda, for distribution in Hebrew schools. His books extolled the virtues of Enlightenment and manual labor, especially agriculture. His contemporaries called him ' the Russian Mendelssohn'.

Isaac Stern

Isaac Stern (21 July 1920 - 22 Sept 2001), violin virtuoso, Born in Krzemieniec, Poland (now (Kremenets, Ukraine). He was brought to San Francisco as an infant. He is the first major violinist who was wholly trained in California, in the San Francisco Conservatory. His principal teacher was Naoum Blinder who was concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He made his debut with the San Francisco orchestra in 1931, when he was eleven. In 1937 he made his debut in New York and during World War II appeared before the Allied troops. In 1943 he gave his first recital in Carnegie Hall, New York, and in 1944 made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic. His career took off in 1948 at the Lucerne Festival. Since then he has played in Australia, Japan and South America and appears regularly with American and European orchestras. In 1956 he made a successful tour in the USSR and in 1979 visited China. This visit was documented in the film From Mao to Mozart Isaac Stern in China that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1981. In 1967 he played Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein at the famous Mount Scopus concert to celebrate the victory of the Six Day War. He was one of the founders of the Jerusalem Music Centre where he conducted master classes each year for promising violinists from all over the world, and acted as a driving force behind the American-Israel Cultural Foundation. He is known for his humanitarian activities all over the world for which he received the Albert Schweitzer Award For Music in 1975. Died in New York.

Noah Prylucki

Noah Prylucki (also Prilutski) (1882-1941), Yiddish philologist, journalist, poet, and politician, born in Berdichev, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). He grew up in Kremenets before moving to Warsaw where in 1909 he began working as a lawyer.

His collection of sensual poems Farn Mizbeakh ("Before the Altar", 1908) was well received. Prylucki decide to focus on Yiddish philology and journalism. He made significant contributions as a pioneering researcher of the Yiddish language and played a crucial role in categorizing its various dialects across Eastern, Central, and Western regions. At the Czernowitz Language Conference in 1908, he fervently advocated for Yiddish to be recognized as the national language of the Jewish people, although his efforts did not succeed.

In 1905, Prylucki and his father, Zevi Prylucki, founded the Warsaw Yiddish daily newspaper Der Moment, which remained active until the German occupation of Warsaw in 1939. Engaged in politics since 1916, he became an advocate for impoverished Jews and middle-class artisans. He established the Folkspartei, a political party that championed Jewish autonomous rights in Poland, and was elected as its representative in the Polish Sejm in 1918.

In addition to his political activities, Prylucki published philological studies, influenced the modernization of Yiddish orthography, and played a role in the establishment of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He served as the editor of YIVO's publication, Yidish far Ale (1838-1939), and contributed numerous articles and reviews to YIVO Bleter.

When WW II erupted, Prylucki sought refuge in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania. After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, he became a lecturer in Yiddish Language and Culture at the University of Vilna delivering lectures on Yiddish philology until 1941. Following the German attack on the Soviet Union and occupation of Vilnius, Prylucki was arrested and forced to compose a list of incunabula housed in Vilna’s Strashun library. Subsequently, he was tortured to death by the Germans.

Tsevi Prylucki 

Tsevi (Cwi) (Zeev) Prylucki (Hirsh-Sholem Prilutski) (1862-1942), journalist, newspaper editor and Zionist, born in Kremenets (Krzemieniec, in Polish), Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) into a wealthy family of merchants. He studied at studied at the universities of Kiev and Berlin, Germany. As one of the leaders of Hibbat Zion movement, during the 1880s and 1890s he was engaged in Zionist activities advocating for Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. In 1898 he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, and in 1905 settled in Warsaw, Poland. The same year he founded Der Veg (“The Way”), the first daily newspaper in Yiddish. All those years he continued to publish in various periodicals in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian. In 1910, along with his son Noach Prylucki ,he founded and then served as editor-in-chief of the popular Yiddish daily Der Moment. Part of his memoirs about the Jewish journalistic scene in Poland during the early decades of 20th century survived in Ringelblum Archive from Warsaw Ghetto. Prylucki himself died in Warsaw Ghetto.

Ukraine

Ukraine

Україна / Ukrayina

A country in eastern Europe, until 1991 part of the Soviet Union.

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 50,000 out of 42,000,000 (0.1%). Main Jewish organizations:

Єврейська Конфедерація України - Jewish Confederation of Ukraine
Phone: 044 584 49 53
Email: jcu.org.ua@gmail.com
Website: http://jcu.org.ua/en

Ваад (Ассоциация еврейских организаций и общин) Украины (VAAD – Asssociation of Jewish Organizations & Communities of Ukraine)
Voloska St, 8/5
Kyiv, Kyivs’ka
Ukraine 04070
Phone/Fax: 38 (044) 248-36-70, 38 (044) 425-97-57/-58/-59/-60
Email: vaadua.office@gmail.com
Website: http://www.vaadua.org/