It is amazing that the little town of Dolhinov continues to draw so much interest 65 years after the Jewish presence there largely ceased. The Dolhinov memorial meeting in Tel Aviv recently had about 170 people present—far more than those attending similar gatherings for much larger towns. There is a memorial book, a video, a film, and possibly a television program and a book coming out on Dolhinov.
I have a lot of information to convey but want to keep this first edition short so I will try to be brief. And I also invite you to send me your information to include here.
First, let me give special thanks to Leon Rubin who has done more to preserve the memory of Dolhinov than anyone else, including creating the memorial project, leading trips, and arranging for maintaining the cemetery there; Eilat Gordin Levitan for creating the website; and Harold Rhode for giving me help and encouragement.

I. Here are some Dolhinov resources you may not know about:
--Website: http://eilatgordinlevitan.com/dolhinov/dolhinov.html
--Memorial book, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/dolginovo/dolginovo.html
--Bill Yoffee on his visit to Dolhinov <http://www.jewishgen.org/Litvak/HeritageLithuania.htm>
--My article on the Dolhinov memorial meeting (attached)
--"Kisilev's List" a remarkable documentary about live in Dolhinov focusing on the survivors' march to escape the Nazis and the Red Army role, made by a Russian Jewish film director who met the daughter of the Soviet soldiers who led the escape. Well worth seeing. For copies, write Leon Rubin
--"Return to Dolhinov" is a video on the 2002 trip of survivors and descendants which gives a clear sense of how the town looks today (and many of the buildings are the same as they were a century ago). For copies, write Leon Rubin.
--The Rubin DNA project. Harold Rhode is organizing testing of a number of Dolhinov Rubins to see their relationship. The results so far—which probably holds for most Dolhinov people—is one of distant origins in eastern Anatolia, a fairly typical European Jewish profile, and an implication that all Dolhinov Rubins are indeed related. Other Dolhinov families could undertake such projects. For more information, write Harold Rhode.
--The British-based ( now starting in the U.S) "Who Do You Think You Are?" show, a wonderful program about genealogy, may do one on someone with Dolhinov ancestors ( Farberman family).
--I am planning to go to Dolhinov in October and to record all inscriptions in the graveyard, about 400 tombstones.

2. My book idea
I am seriously considering writing a book on Dolhinov having three aspects: the life and people of the town, the Shoah there (with emphasis on the escape march), and the amazing story of the varied and talented people descended from the town's Jews.
While Dolhinov society was strong, integrated, and traditional, people there were very poor and had little opportunity of education. What is truly remarkable is that literally hundreds of descendants in far-flung places in the world became successful and creative people. How can one explain this explosion of talent once given opportunities?
I may ask for your help, advice, and information so stay tuned.

3. Ideas: Let us know if you are interested in these projects or have ideas of your own to suggest:
Translate memorial book into English $5,000
http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/dolginovo/dolginovo.html

A forest in Israel named after Dolhinov $50,000-100,000

4. Sources on Dolhinov
The central problem for tracing genealogy in Dolhinov is the gap between most family memories (1890 or so) and the 1850 census which is available at JewishGen.
(I have in Excel the list of 1170 Jews in Dolhinov in 1850 which I am happy to send to you). There is also, of course, the Yad va-shem listings which deal with those killed in the 1942-1943 period.
There are thus two issues:
--How can we get back to 1850 and
--How do we go back further than that?
The second question is easier to answer.
--The 1834 census is available in Vilna but you have to go there or pay someone to do the research for you (though a lot of the material can be reconstructed from the 1850 revision).
--There are hints of an earlier census being preserved from 1819, about which I will have information by the end of the year.
Yet what about the post-1850 gap? There has been an important breakthrough on this. I have discovered a number of records in Minsk which, to my knowledge, very few people have used. (For a list see attachment: Minsk archives). I will keep you informed of my progress in trying to use them.
But let me give you an example. I knew my great-grandfather was Haim Shimon Rubin but not anything about him. In these additional archives we discovered:
Conscript lists of Jews of Vileisky uyezd of Grodno Gubernia
1888: #12 Chaim-Simon son of Yankel Rubin – 21 years old – petty bourgeois of Dolginovo society. Not married. His father: Yankel son of Zalman Rubin – 50 years old. His mother: Chaya daughter of Itzko – 50 years old.
It is added with a pencil: his conscription is delayed on the basis of Law Article 16/1 – for 1 year. October 26, 1888.
So I knew his age and the fact that his father was Yankel and grandfather was Zalman, as well as the approximate date of his marriage. Using this fact and the age I was able to move back into the 1850 Revision and reconstruct my genealogy back a total of 12 generations. I also got a sense of the lives of Yankel, another two sons, and other material.
(An interesting note, assuming Yankel's mother Chaya bat Itzko came from Dolhinov—and she might well have come from another place of course—there is only one person who fits that description. Her name is Chaya Grosbein. By an amazing coincidence, though also families systematically intermarried and knew each other, Yankel's mother had the precise same name as the woman who married his grandson and became my grandmother, Chaya Grosbein!)
These additional files will solve many mysteries for those who use them.

5. Interesting Dolhinov descendants (if you know of more let us know):
Geraldo Rivera - Mother Lilian Friedman
Tim Nordwind - won a grammy award for his band's dance number last year,
OKGO
Orin Krivel - Toronto Railroad Museum
Kevin Krivel, artist, see http://www.baltanakts.lv/
Jonathan Guss - Toronto Medical Association
Meryl Getline - First female commercial pilot - Wrote a book called the World at my Feet.

6. The Washington "Mystery"
One thing that interests me is how so many Dolhinovers ended up in the Washington DC area. Logically, it seems that some must have gone there (virtually by accident?), done well, and others followed. I think that my great-grandfather's brother, Leib Rubin, went first (after trying Boston and New York) and that my grandparents went there because of him. (On the ship manifest it says my grandfather is going there to join him).
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Clearly one factor was the formation of a largely Dolhinover synagogue, Ohev Shalom, which is famous because its cantor's son became the singer, Al Jolson. Thus, the world's first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, has a Dolhinov connection, though I don't know the origin of the Jolson family.
As you can see below in the synagogue's official history, the archives are available in Washington DC. It would be great if we could find a Yiddish-speaker to research the synagogue's documents regarding Dolhinov people.

In 1886, during the administration of Grover Cleveland, a group of devout Russian immigrant Jews who had fled the tyrannical rule of Czar Alexander III founded Ohev Sholom Congregation. Among the founders of Ohev Sholom were Moses Sterman, Nathan Rudderman and Herman Sachs. The first services were held on the second floor over Myer Fisher's clothing store in the 1100 block of 7th Street N.W. As Ohev Sholom grew and required more space it moved to 616 Louisiana Avenue N.W. and later to 607 H Street N.W. On September 9, 1906, Ohev Sholom moved to 500 I Street N.W. where it remained for the next fifty years.
The nucleus of Talmud Torah was a group of twenty-eight families in Southwest Washington who conducted daily minyans together. They first met in Isaac Levy's clothing store, Levy's Busy Corner, on 4 1/2 Street S.W. They used a sefer torah that Morris Garfinkle had contributed to the minyan. The group later met in various members' homes on 4 1/2 Street, M Street, F Street and School Street. Their last meeting place was in Samuel Kessler's home before they moved to a permanent synagogue at 467 E Street S.W. Chazan Moshe Yoelson led the services of Talmud Torah from about 1892 through the 1920's. The shul and life in Southwest Washington form the backdrop for Chazan Yoelson's son, Al Jolson, considered by many the greatest entertainer of his time.

For the synagogue archives, see http://www.ostns.org/pdfs/ArchivesInventory.pdf

NOTE: IF YOU FAMILY NAMES INCLUDE GROSBEIN, HEFETZ, RUBIN OR RUDERMAN (AND WE HAVEN'T ALREADY DISCUSSED THIS) I CAN PROBABLY TELL YOU SOME NEW INFORMATION ON THESE FAMILIES.

I'll stop here since all this is a lot to absorb. I look forward to hearing from you and to getting additional emails of people interested in receiving this newsletter and future editions.

Write me if you want to send information on your Dolhinov ancestors to be included here.

Barry Rubin

Article on memorial meeting

REMEMBERING WHAT THE WORLD HAS FORGOTTEN

By Barry Rubin

            Why is this shtetl unlike all other shtetls? Once a year, the children of Dolginov and their descendants gather to remember the reason.

            It is the anniversary of the destruction of the town’s last ghetto. There were 3000 Jews living in Dolginov when World War Two began, they were 80 percent of the population.  On June 5, 1942, those still left were massacred by the Nazis and their helpers, who included Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians. On June 6, there weren’t any Jews left alive in Dolginov at all.

Then how is it that the long, low-ceilinged hall in Tel Aviv’s Vilna House is full to capacity, with about 150 people, the survivors and descendants of the Dolginov Jews in the town on June 5? Why has this particular shtetl been kept alive with a special kind of communal spirit? “There are more people here,” said Ariel Rubin, one of the survivors, “then at the Vilna memorial meetings,” even though Vilna had many times more Jewish residents.

The answer is one of the many remarkable stories of the Shoah, in this case the heroism—or perhaps it should just be called human decency—of the Soviet Red Army and in particular of three individual soldiers.

Dolginov is a small town once in Lithuania, later in Poland (until 1793), Russia (until 1918), Poland again (until 1945), the USSR (until 1991), and then Belarus. North of Minsk, there was absolutely nothing to distinguish the place, except a grinding poverty which could compete with the more ragged precincts of the contemporary Third World. On the eve of World War Two, it was walking distance from the Polish-Soviet border. There were five synagogues; a couple of market places for the small Jewish merchants and peasants selling their produce; a Zionist-run school; and a Bund-directed loan society. No intelligentsia, nor famous rabbis. Even in 1939 there was hardly a telephone or an automobile.

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet army marched in, as part of Moscow’s partition deal with the Nazis. And on June 28, 1941, the Germans arrived. The Jews were forced into a tiny ghetto, overcrowded in a small part of the town. There were a number of murders by the regular German troops. As one survivor recalled, they beat and killed people during the day, especially in March and April 1942, but at a certain hour they regarded themselves off duty and stopped.

Then on May 21, SS troops, including Lithuanians and Latvians helped to some extent by the Polish police, wiped out the ghetto. By the end of the day, only around 250 to 300 Jews were left alive, some who had been outside the town when the killing began, or fled at the last minute, or hid in concealed underground chambers they had prepared in advance.

Somehow it seems even more horrible that not a single Dolhinov Jew was deported to a concentration camp; most weren’t even taken out of town and shot. They were gunned down inside and in front of their own homes. The SS left and the survivors were free to enter the town and see the bodies of their families, or in a few blessed cases to find them emerging from tunnels.

But what could they do next? Into the forest they went, begging food from peasants, who sometimes helped but were badly frightened, and ultimately to go to the Soviet partisans fighting there. But what could the Soviet fighters do, saddled with around 250 Jews few of them of military use and having to forage for food themselves?

Perhaps they would have chased them away to their ultimate deaths. Yet the commander of the Partisan unit, “Revenge,” was Timchuk. He had been sent by Moscow as part of the Soviet occupation army to run the confiscated estates and, in this capacity, had dealt with the Jewish livestock merchants and artisans of Dolginov. Timchuk decided to ask Moscow what to do. Headquarters sent some paratroopers for the mission and Timchuk asked for a young officer to lead an escort party to take the Jews across the front lines to safety. This meant a two-month journey, traveling only at night, of more than 750 miles through German-infested territory leading a column of 300 people clearly unfit physically for such a march. Two men turned down the mission, the third, Lieutenant Gregory Kisilev, accepted.

To tell the story briefly, Kisilev and a young woman partisan scout named Anna who also volunteered were sent along with two professional soldiers and a group of partisans.  For 30 nights, they walked, skirting the Nazi-held cities, usually avoiding German patrols. There were several German attacks A few people were left behind because they simply could not continue. When Berthe, a two-year-old girl cried continually, and everyone feared the sound would give them away to the Germans, her parents decided she must be drowned to save the group. But they simply couldn’t do it. Kisilev then took the girl and carried her himself.

Finally, they came to the front line. A few people were killed trying to cross over but in the end 218 of the original 300 arrived safely. They said goodbye to Kisilev and none of them ever saw him again. He survived the war, married the scout, and had a nice career working in international trade for the Soviet government. His daughter explained, long after his death, that he only mentioned the experience once, to say that he wondered what happened to all those people he saved.

Sometimes, it seems too much emphasis is put on those who survived—about 200 people related to me died; perhaps a dozen escaped. My great aunt, Haya Doba Rubin, her husband Aharon Perlmutter, and their sons, Haim, 12, and Jacob, 10; my great uncle, Samuel Grosbein, his wife, Rivka Markman, and their children, Leah Rivka, 18, and Lev, 23,; my great aunt, Rahel Grosbein, her husband, Yirimayahu Dimenshtein and their son Moshe, 21. All murdered on the same day and practically within sight of each other.

At any rate, though, there is much more that can be told about these events and what happened to the Dolginov refugees immediately afterward. One young man returned to the town, tried to reclaim his family home, and was murdered. Virtually every single survivor made his way to Israel, though it took some of my cousins ten years.

But I am telling you about this not primarily to recount another story of the Shoah but to explain something very profound about Israel. It has been rightly said that for a long time after its founding, Israelis did not want to talk about these events, partly for ideological factors (the focus on the new Jew and on the building up of the land; partly for psychological reasons (it was just too painful).

This era is long past.  If Kisilev was one example of how much difference one person could make, the same is true of Leon Rubin who founded the Dolginov Cemetery Project to build a memorial in the town to those who perished there and organized three visits by Israeli delegations. Similarly, one of the speakers was Ziva Lisitzki, a kibbutznik, whose mother had left Dolginov a few years before the war to the land of Israel, recounted the stories about Dolginov she had heard as a little girl. Yuval Rubin, who seemed to be about as typical an Israeli as one could find, told about his discoveries on his own family’s experiences, including a trip to Dolhinov with a group.

A Russian film was shown about the story made by a Soviet Jewish filmmaker named Yaakov Kolar who, by coincidence, had met Kisilev’s daughter in school in Moscow and heard her father’s story. It was a shock to see a rather jovial and very well-preserved man I had met before, describing on the screen how he had survived three years in the forest as a wild child, living on snakes and life fish he caught by hand. The little girl who had come so close to death because of her crying was shown with her children and grandchildren, now living a few minutes away from me.

Watching all this, my elderly aunt, who had seen the bodies of her parents and older brother, able only to snatch three photographs from their house before fleeing, dissolved into tears to be comforted by my teenage daughter. In Dolginov, some of my relatives had been in Hashomer Hatzair, the left-wing youth group, and in Israel had worked at the Histadrut, the trade union federation. Others had been in Betar, the right-wing youth group, and Menahem Begin had attended their weddings. That wasn’t so important after all.

These people sitting in the hall were the people who make up Israel, along with the Sephardic Jews who have their own stories of dispossession and flight. Almost 90 percent of the Jews of continental Europe were murdered; well over 90 percent of the Jews of the Middle East were turned into refugees.

And these are the people daily demonized around the world as monsters, told by well-paid academics, intellectuals, and journalists, that Israel had no right to exist or was some kind of mistake.

 The meeting ended with Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem.  When we sang the words, “As long as the heart of a Jew beats and his eye is turned to the east,” I thought of these people who had marched—unarmed, impoverished, pursued, close to friendless—750 miles eastward. They had rebuilt their lives and brought up their families, not wasting time on bitterness or seeking revenge but acting constructively.

When we sang the lines, “Our ancient hope is not lost, the hope of two thousand years,” I thought of what these people had hoped as they trudged through the forest, with horrors in their thoughts and trying to believe there was some hope at the end of the journey.

Professor Yehuda Bauer, the great historian who practically founded the field of Holocaust studies, once told me about a conversation he had with one of Israel’s founding leaders, a man frequently in government cabinets during the country’s early years. He explained to Bauer that he could simply not believe in his heart that six million Jews had been murdered in Europe, that somehow they were still out there and would some day arrive.

It is important to understand that Israel is not merely a product of the Shoah, a consolation prize handed to the Jews by a guilty world but rather the result of its people’s desires and labor. For what marvels we could have achieved, Bauer’s interlocutor continued, if we had the energy, strength, and either presence or support of those murdered millions?

Similarly, for the Dolginov Jews, stuck in the corner of the corner of a forgotten back alley of Europe, Zionism and the land of Israel was not something they dreamed up merely as a result of the Shoah. They thought of their lives as good before the war but knew where their future lay, and they had already sent about 50 of their children there.

Nahum Lenkin, one of those who escaped through the forest, later recalled how parents often “went without food so they could pay the tuition for their children” to go to the town’s Zionist school. “They made these sacrifices because the school provided young people their first preparation to one day go as pioneers to Eretz Israel, the land of the workers, and the renewed land.”

Or in the words of the song, “To be a free people in our land.”

Standing there in the hall of Vilna House--amidst photos of vanished places in Europe; next to those who had survived, rebuilt, and fought; alongside those who had such a varied set of lifestyles, religious views, and character—never had the words of “Hatikvah” seemed more meaningful, nor living up to that heritage more essential.   

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org. 

For example, my family always told me we lost no relatives in the Holocaust which I find to be common among American Jewish families--obviously not all. In fact, what I didn't know is that my grandfather's sister kept a prominent picture of our family in her home in Dolginov. When my grandfather died, she named her next child after him--a child murdered in the Holocaust. When another aunt came home to find her family murdered she picked up their copy of my family's picture but discarded it at the last minute because it was too much to carry withthe three she saved. I grew up with no relatives and never knew why. 

Minsk archives

1.

• Belorussian National archive
  a) Financial aid fond 1918-1920
  -Lists and delos of residents who suffered from pogroms and bandits attacks;
  - Lists of refugees;
  - Conscription lists to the red army.

b) Revolutionary tax fond 1919
- Lists of business owners,
- Lists of tax payers,
- Lists of tax exempt individuals,
- Lists of arrested individuals, who didn't pay taxes.