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Testimony
by
Uri Finkel
Translation by Sonia Kovitz
Uri Finkel wrote this account of events
under the German occupation in Rakov (Minsk District) immediately after
the war. Finkel was born in Rakov in 1896, son of the last rabbi of
Rakov, R’ Hirsh-Shlomo Finkel, who was murdered by the Nazis. Finkel
survived the war years in the Soviet Union. Returning to Rakov in 1945,
he found among his father’s belongings a precious historical record [pinkes]
in Hebrew, The Rakov Jewish Congregation from 1810 to 1913, to
which he appended his own account written in Yiddish. Finkel
safeguarded both documents throughout his life. After his death in
Minsk in 1957, these documents were transferred to the Israel State
Archives. [Translator’s note]
( ): parentheses are those of the
author
[ ]: brackets indicate notes added by
the translator
{ }: undecipherable
____
I found this record [The Rakov
Jewish Congregation from 1810 to 1913] among the sheymes
[pages of sacred writings] scattered in the attic of my father’s home.
It was all that remained of the cultural objects of value once possessed
by our Jewish community.
On Yom Kippur of 1941 the fascist
murderers drove the entire Jewish population of Rakov to the
marketplace. They made them bring all the books, Jewish, Hebrew,
religious and worldly, along with the sefer-toyres, and burned
them. For an entire day the Jewish cultural treasures of the shtetl
burned. The Jews had to stand over the bonfire, dance, jump, and sing;
those who could not do this were shot on the spot.
The fire and smoke from
the burning were visible far from the shtetl. In one day no fewer than
16,000 books burned and a couple hundred sefer-toyres, among them
neviim [writings of the prophets] and megilles [scrolls].
Our Jewish library that had existed from the early 1900s, covering
several centuries, possessed more than 30,000 volumes of Judaica (in
Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, German), and 10,000 Russian and Polish
books. Our young people had
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