Minsk Ghetto Survivors

Since 1995, our congregation has maintained a friendship with a group of survivors of the Minsk Ghetto of the Holocaust. These elderly Jews, numbering about 22 people (in January of 2025), still live in and around Minsk, Belarus. We speak with the ghetto survivors about 4 times a year, by telephone, and provide financial assistance for urgent needs, Jewish holiday celebrations, and trips to memorial sites. The survivors live on a fixed monthly pension and have trouble paying for housing, food and medicine.

Michael Treister, one of the survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, wrote a book, Gleams of Memory (ПРОБЛЕСКИ ПАМЯТИ), about life in the ghetto and after the war. To read Gleams of Memory in English and/or in Russian, click here.

The ghetto survivors published a book of short memoirs in 2014 about the Minsk and Belarusian ghettos, called Memory and Time (ПАМЯТЬ И ВРЕМЯ). To read Memory and Time, in Russian, click here. Some of the stories in Memory and Time have been translated into English: 

To read “Victim of Two Tyrants,” an interview of Nelly Gerbovitskaya, in English, click here.
To read “I Walked the Road of Death” by Naum Heifetz, in English, click here.
To read “The First Days of The Great War” by Lev Stelman, in English, click here.

The following stories, found in Memory and Time, were translated into English in a book called We Remember Lest the World Forget:

“Everyone Looked After the Orphan” by Roman Gurevich,
“How We Left to Become Partisans” by Yakov Kravchinsky,
“From the Ghetto to the Naliboki Forest” by Pavel Rubinchik,
“I Live and I Remember” by Savely Kaplinsky.

To read the stories listed above and more in We Remember Lest the World Forget, in English, click here.

If you would like to contribute to this program with other Hakafa members, please contact Judy Solway or Julia Volpe.