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Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk by Elissa Bemporad - 2013














Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk


Elissa Bemporad - 2013 

Elisa Bemporad helped me understand the political, religious and cultural challenges faced by Jews living in Minsk, now capital of Belarus, adjusting to the replacement of Czarist rule with that of the Bolsheviks. She focuses on the between the World Wars period.  She begins with an overview of Minsk just before World War One begins.


Minsk was in 1914 a heavily Jewish city, part of the imperial Russian Empire located in area of Russia, called the Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to live.

Jews occupied professional positions, were sucessful in trade and commerce.  Bemporad uses Minsk to explain what happens to the Jewish population of 
Russia when the Communists took over the government.  This was an frequently very violent period.  Young Jewish intellectuals were often in support of the  ideology of the Communists while older people feared a change.

Bemporad shows us how people kept their traditional beliefs while at least giving lipservice to anti-religious tenants of communism.  In order to get ahead, stay out of trouble you had to at least pretend to give up some of the old ways.
There is a very interesting chapter on the continuance of the custom of circumsicion.  The Kosher butcher was still an important figure.  Jews 
continued participated in labor bunds. She also talks about role of Yiddish in Minsk.  

As this period began, gender roles were clearly definded by Jewish tradition.  In theory, contrary to tradition, under Communism men and women were equal.  Bemporad devotes a chapter to “Housewives, Mothers, and Workers Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution” that helped me understand these changes.  Educational and career oportunities for women expanded and cross faith marriages became more common.

The book is very well documented and an extensive bibliography is included.


Bemporad lets us see that being Jewish in Minsk was not just a matter of having a certain set of religious beliefs.  There were many who self-identified as Jewish who attended no services.  There was no contradiction to being a Jewish atheist in Minsk. Most spoke at least Yiddish and Russian.


Hanging over all histories of European Jews between wars is the Holocaust.  We see the impact on the community when Hitler and Stalin signed a treaty.  Eighty thousand Jews were murdered by Germans,nearly destroying all Minsk Jews.


Bemporad also treats The persistence of Anti-Semiticism after WW Two.


This book was published by The Indiana University Press.
They have lots of serious  books on Eastern European and Russian Jewish Culture.  

Their  website is below


Author Bio

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Associate Professor of East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. The Russian edition was recently published with ROSSPEN, in the History of Stalinism Series. Her new book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, will be published with Oxford University Press in 2019. Elissa is the co-editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors and Perpetrators (Indiana University Press in 2018), a collection of studies on the multifaceted roles played by women in different genocidal contexts during the twentieth century. She has recently been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Elissa's projects in progress include research for a biography of Ester Frumkin, the most prominent Jewish female political activist and public figure in late Imperial Russia and in the early Soviet Union...from The Stanford  Center for Jewish Studies.

I would happily read more works by Bamporad and greatly enjoyed this work.

Mel u

















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