Shimon Huberband” and in Yiddish “Destruction of Jewish communities at the occupied territories. Summer 1941”.
b) Ring. I/433, description: duplicate, handwritten, notebooks, ink, Yiddish, 152x192, 36 sheets, 59 pages. Edition based on handwritten duplicates, 72 sheets, 131 pages.
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After 2 March, 1942, Warsaw, ghetto. Testimony by Israel Kempner or Yehuda Pińczowski, delegates of the Vilna Betar organisation, concerning the situation of the Jews under the Soviet occupation and anti-Jewish persecutions in the first months after the outbreak of the German– Russian war
[1] Information gathered in an interview with a 22-year-old young man who returned from Vilna. He has lived in Vilna since the beginning of 1940; until the Soviet–German war, he had lived in a Betar boarding house, supported by the JDC (during the Lithuanian times), and worked in the warehouse for food (during the Soviet times).
Jews as a distinct national group did not exist in Russia. Although there were two Yiddish universities in the Soviet Union, one in Kiev and one in Minsk, fewer and fewer students enroled there each year. Also Jewish education saw a marked decline. This is evidenced by the following figures: while in 1934, 150,000 Jewish children attended schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction in the Soviet Union, in 1940, their number dropped to 15,000. Young Jews in Russia assimilated, Jewish Communists stopped using Yiddishand spoke mostly [2] Russian. In schools, Jewish children were taught general subjects as well as the Jewish language and grammar. The history of the Jews was not taught in those schools because the Yevsektsiya444 argued that the
