’End of the Road’: 1999 Belarus expedition documentary by Saulius Beržinis (Vilnius)

WELCOME to the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA) at: *** In 1998, the wonderful Lithuanian film maker, historian and intrepid fighter for historic truth and rights of his country’s minorities, Saulius Berzinis, founder of the non-profit Kopa Studios in Vilnius, was able to accompany me for some weeks in western Belarus to meet up with (reinterview) dear friends from among the Yiddish mohicans in their towns with whom I’d met and previously audtiotaped in the early and mid 90s. Thanks to the Dora Teitelbium Foundation, then in Coral Gables, Florida, and its director David Weintraub, these research trips were able to benefit from a professional videographer for the first time (well, almost the first time; the Minsk based film director Yuri Gorulov had done a day with us beforehand, voluntarily, but support didn’t materialize ). The 1998 result was dozens of hours. Hopefully, the high-res originals will find their way online. * Then, a year later, in 1999, Saulius succeeded to obtain support for a return trip that summer to some of the same folks. The result was this film, “End of the Road“ enabled by an EU grant thanks to the help of Lithuanian parliamentarian Emanuelis Zingeris. The material represents a small extract of what was filmed. Hopefully, Kopa will find a way to put all the materials online. * In some cases the people in The End of the Road were subjects of articles I’d published in the 1990s in both the Yiddish and English Forward, and the Algemeiner Journal in New York: * (1) in Glubok (Hlybokaye), Yankl Pelkin, a shoemaker who set up his workshop at home. * (2) in Radashkóvits (Radashkovichy), the very religious tailor Avrom-Yankev Pelkin, living in a classic shtetl kháte with his animals in the garden. Berchifand of * (3) in Mir, the secularist and pro-Soviet (but anti-Stalnist) veteran of the Jewish parisans in the forests, Líbe Krenítshne. In the 1990s she was brought to London to testify in a war crimes trial. In 1999 she was brutally murdered, deep in her 80s, in a still unsolved case.... Krinitzky of ; * (4) in Rádin (Radun), Meirke Stoler, a blacksmith, veteran of the partisans who was among the few to escape the mass shooting of the town’s Jews by hitting his guard over the heard and running to the forest to co-found a partisan group. Himself secular he remembered fondly the Chofetz-Chaim and the fabled Radin yeshiva. Stoler of * (5) At a homestead near Líde (Lida), hosted by its owner Tamara Borodatsh (now in Israel) we sent for the famous Yiddish writer Hirsh Reles of Minsk to come out to the country and reminisce surrounded by nature, far from his little apartment in Minsk (where we’d interviewed him extensively in previous years). Hirsh * (6) In Smólevitsh (Smaliavičy), the extraordinary couple: Yankev Frayman (Freiman) who was over 100, a veteran of the Russian Revolution of 1917 who remained staunchly socialist and atheist, and his much younger wife, Peshke Levitan (late 80s) who was deeply religious and prayed daily at her grandmother’s grave. Levitain and Shleyme * (7) In Ivyánets, Yóysef Kantarovitsh, himself originally of Vólme (Volma) who sings a prewar Ashkenazic version of Hatikvah. * ( 8 ) In Kábik (Zadvinye), across the river from Polotsk, with our local friend Dina Katkov-Itkina (who came one summer as a student at the Vilnius Yiddish Summmer Program), we visit the home that was once the Secret Synagogue of Kabik whose founder’s children, Lezyer Perlin (who still lived there) and his sister Merke, remembered so much. The very high fence to prevent people from looking in still stood (though it constantly shook precariously in the wind). The prayerbooks were often re-bound in covers of Lenin and Stalin tomes (they are now partof our informal mini-museum in Vilnius. secret Prayer House in * * * It was a privilege to be involved in work to win these remarkable (and very impoversihed) survivors support, even if they were not techncially “Holocaust survivors“ (surviving by fleeing eastward to the USSR, losing all relatives left at home). I was honored and touched that my 1999 article ( to help the Holocausts Last ) was cited in the case over disbursement of the Swiss banks affair by Judge Judah Gribetz, whom I met years later in Brooklyn thanks to my friend Herbert Block. But all that is for another day. . .