It is very difficult to imagine modern Belarus without Jewish heritage, just as it is to imagine Israel without Belarusian heritage. It’s no joke – before the start of World War II, about 1 million residents of Belarus (which was a full 15% of the population at the time!) were Jews. Finding a Belarusian town or shtetl without a synagogue at the end of the 19th century was impossible. But the upheavals of the 20th century almost completely destroyed the remarkable culture of Belarusian Jews at its root. Data on when the first Jews appeared on the territory of Belarus vary. The official history of Jews in these lands begins during the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, when they were allowed to settle on Polish and Lithuanian lands, and a large number of Jewish migrants from Germany (the German principalities), where they were oppressed, moved eastward to the relatively tolerant and religiously permissive Polish-Lithuanian state. It is known that Jews began to migrate en masse to the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as early as the 13th century. The authorities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were known for their tolerance, so after several centuries, one of the largest Jewish diasporas in the world lived on the territory of modern Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania, and Minsk became one of the centers of the global Zionist movement (that is, the movement for the return of all Jews to Israel). After the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Jewish shtetls found themselves within the Russian Empire, and the Pale of Settlement was created, restricting the movement of Jews from their traditional settlements (in the territories of modern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania), and Jews remained in these shtetls until the very collapse of the Empire. The situation began to change at the end of the 19th century. That was when the first pogroms began within the Pale of Settlement. The horrors of revolutions and World War I only worsened the situation of the Jewish population. Only the Provisional Government after the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the decree banning the movement of Jews across the country. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the USSR had a very ambivalent policy: there was propaganda of cosmopolitanism and equality. Jews held power and leading positions in culture. But this was accompanied by a struggle against their identity as Jews and the erasure of boundaries – everyone was supposed to be Soviet citizens. The authorities sought to make Yiddish part of the Soviet world, while Hebrew and everything related to Judaism (art, schools, religious associations) was harshly repressed. For example, at Belarusian State University there was a Yiddish faculty, but studying the Torah there was forbidden. Read Marx – he was Jewish too. Incredibly but true, from the mid-19th century until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the capital of Belarus, Minsk, was predominantly a Jewish city – Jews made up 52% of the city’s population, the largest community in the city. Moreover, until 1936, alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish, Yiddish was an official language of the BSSR. Today, almost nothing reminds us of the pre-war and especially pre-revolutionary Jewish heritage; the number of Jews has decreased from more than half the city’s population to a statistical margin of error, and old Jewish schools and synagogues have been closed or repurposed for civilian use. However, if desired, traces of Jewish presence can still be found. Before the revolution, Minsk had 83 synagogues – more than the number of Orthodox and Catholic churches combined. After World War II, Jewish culture in Belarus was destroyed. The surviving Jews, under pressure from the authorities’ anti-Semitic policies, actively assimilated. Mass aliyah (repatriation) began in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, according to the latest census, there are about 12,000 Jews in Belarus.

Jermaine