My Dad's History

I recently investigated my roots via relatives who either had been looking into the subject or were older and knew things.

My quest was to find out what my father and his parents were doing during the Russian Revolution, roughly 1918-1925. I had some bites of information but not much. So here's what I have now.

Tiable, my father's sister, and Morris, my dad, were living in Murafa, Russia in 1918. That's now in the Ukraine. I believe they were born there.

Marachva which is the name I grew up hearing was the Yiddish or Polish pronunciation of Murafa. It's in the region of Podolia. My cousin Sheldon, Tiable's son, visited in the 1990s travelling via Romania.

My grandfather, my dad's father, was Yisroel Yitzak. I have what might be my father's Russian passport. It has Russian [Cyrillic], French and an unknown language in it. Morris was identified as Moishe Abrahamovitch Chore on this passport in the French section. Of course the Chore was probably Shore. My father's embarkation card stamped St. John, New Brunswick February 20, 1927 said Moishe Shor. His ship was the Marloch.

Yisroel might have been Abraham since the Abrahamovitch on my dad's passport I think indicates son of Abraham.

Yisroel/Abraham had red hair and was a chicken merchant as reported my cousin Helen Rosen, Tiable's daughter in law. 

His first wife died in 1921. I believe in a flu epidemic. My grandfather remarried and had a third child with his new wife.

My grandfather had a brother, Uncle Ben Shor, who came to New York and was successful and an important person in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. I remember his son Irving Shor from my childhood. Irving and his wife Minna had two children Arnold and Rita, both now deceased. Rita, passed away in 2010 with two survivors in New Jersey. You can see her obituary by googling Rita Binenstock Shor.

Tiable came to Canada in 1924 and married my Uncle Lou in 1925. Morris married my mum, Goldie, in 1931. Tiable was born in 1907 and Morris in 1909. Tiable was 17 when she came but had first gone to live in Riga before coming to Canada. Sheldon told me Tiable once met the mother of David Barrett a former premier of B.C. at a senior's event in Vancouver. The women had known each other in Riga [now in Latvia].

The following two excerpts about Podolia describes the situation around Murafa from 1918-25. These answer my question about what was going on at the time.

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1. During the civil war in Russia (1918–21) Podolia was among the regions which suffered most severely. Pogroms began with the retreat of the Ukrainian army through Podolia before the advancing Red Army, fomented by Ukrainian army units, bands of peasants who rebelled against the Soviet regime, and units of the White Army commanded by A.I. Denikin . Massacres took place in Proskurov and Felshtin (Gvardeyskoye) in February 1919. Up to the end of 1921, 162 pogroms occurred in 52 localities of Podolia, 125 by the Ukrainians, 28 by the White Army, and nine by the Poles. The total number of victims has been estimated at about 3,700. The most sinister pogroms (after Proskurov and Felshtin) took place in Trostyanets (with 342 dead), Bratslav (where pogroms occurred 11 times), and Litin . The small Jewish settlements in the villages were destroyed and completely abandoned. Refugees from the villages and the townlets streamed into the larger towns of the region and Odessa . Many crossed the borders into Bessarabia and Poland. Typhus and famine also devastated the Jewish population. In many settlements (Orinin, Chmielnik, Kamenets-Podolski, etc.), Jewish self-defense units were organized against the pogroms. They withstood the rioters but could not resist the regular army units. Many Jewish youths joined the ranks of the Red Army, within whose framework Jewish units were occasionally formed. These were specially sent on punitive expeditions against rebellious villages.

Under Communist rule Jewish communal life ceased and the position of the Jews of Podolia was the same as that of the rest of Russian Jewry. In the 1920s Jews in Podolia organized cells of He-Ḥalutz and other secret Zionist youth movements. In 1925 a petition for the right to study Hebrew, signed by thousands of Jewish children in Podolian towns and townlets, was presented to the authorities. The Jewish population in 1926 numbered 347,481 in the seven regions which comprised the former province of Podolia (and some smaller areas).

2.Those few Jews who participated in the struggle for control of the Ukraine in the period 1917-1922 were mostly on the side of the Bolsheviks, though a small number threw in with the Ukrainian nationalists.  In July, 1917, the provisional Ukrainian government declared its independence from Russia and granted autonomy to all  minorities within its boundaries.  The initial reaction of the Ukrainian Jewish communities was positive; however, the Kerensky regime, then in power in Moscow, and the Bolshevik regime which followed it both opposed Ukrainian independence.  The seizure of power in Moscow by the Bolsheviks led to anarchy throughout the former Czarist empire, including the Ukraine, and Russia shortly thereafter invaded the Ukraine to put down the independence attempt.

The majority of the Jews took no position in the dispute between the Ukrainian nationalists and the Russian Bolsheviks, rightly having come to the conclusion that none of the combatting factions offered them anything better than the miserable life they already knew under the Czars.  There were numerous pogroms in this period as  well, resulting in many deaths and further impoverishment of the Jews. Before 1919, the pogroms primarily occurred in the cities, one particularly ugly such pogrom occurring in the city of Proskurov (Khmelnitsky).  After 1919, they were more prevalent in the villages.  Again, the Jews were unfairly accused, this time of being pro-Bolshevik and anti-Ukrainian. Jewish self-defence organizations were established in many cities, towns and villages, as once again the "ruling" authorities were either unwilling or unable to prevent attacks by the various factions on the Jewish population.

The defeat of the Ukrainian nationalists by the Bolsheviks was followed by numerous terrible pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine; these actions were most often led by Ukrainian soldiers supported by Ukrainian civilians, and were "justified" as retaliation against the Jews for their support of communism.

Of the three periods in which pogroms occurred in Ukraine, the worst period was from 1917-1921.  In Podolia alone, 213 pogroms are recorded, the vast majority of them having been committed by supporters of one or another of the various Ukrainian nationalist movements that were operating at the time in the region.