Jewish Heritage and the New Belarusian National Identity Project (East European Politics and...

East European Politics and Societies and CulturesVolume XX Number X

Month 201X 1 –28© 2015 Sage Publications

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Jewish Heritage and the New Belarusian National Identity ProjectMagdalena WaligórskaUniversity of Bremen

Focusing on three contemporary grassroots initiatives of preserving Jewish heritage and commemorating Jews in Belarus, namely, the Jewish Museum in Minsk, ada Raǐchonak’s private museum of regional heritage in Hermanovichi, and the initiative of erecting the monument of eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Hlybokae, the present article dis-cusses how local efforts to commemorate Jews and preserve Jewish heritage tap into the culture of political dissent, Belarus’s international relations, and the larger project of redefining the Belarusian national identity. Looking at the way these memorial inter-ventions frame Jewish legacy into a Belarusian national narrative, the article concen-trates in particular on the institution of the public historian and the small, informal social networks used to operate under a repressive regime. Incorporating the multicul-tural legacy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the canon of Belarusian national heritage and recognizing the contribution of ethnic minorities to the cultural landscape of Belarus, new memory projects devoted to Jewish history in Belarus mark a caesura in the country’s engagement with its ethnic Others and are also highly political. While the effort of filling in the gaps in national historiography and celebrat-ing the cultural diversity of the grand Duchy of Lithuania overlaps in significant ways with the agenda of the anti-Lukashenka opposition, Jewish heritage in Belarus also resonates with the state authorities, who seek to instrumentalize it for their own vision of national unity.

Keywords: Jewish heritage in Belarus; public historians; Holocaust commemora-tion; grassroots memorial initiatives; politics of memory

Mourning past neglect, we cherish islands of security in seas of change.David Lowenthal

Despite the fact that it is impossible to overlook vestiges of Jewish heritage throughout Belarus, the Jewish past is rarely being acknowledged in public

spaces of the country.1 Once home to a vibrant Jewish community and the site of war-time atrocities that claimed a death toll of a quarter of its inhabitants, today Belarus struggles to factor its history of multiethnicity and violence into a new vision of the national identity.

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2 east european Politics and Societies and Cultures

The present article concentrates on contemporary grassroots and official initia-tives of preserving Jewish heritage and commemorating Jews in Belarus, discussing how memory of Jews taps into the culture of political dissent, Belarus’s international relations, and the larger project of redefining the Belarusian national identity. Looking at the way three projects negotiate their visibility in public spaces, namely, a private museum of regional heritage in Hermanovichi, the multiethnic “walk of fame” in Hlybokae, and the Museum of Jewish History and Culture in Minsk, I focus in particular on the institution of the public historian and the small informal social networks used to operate under a repressive regime. Presenting projects launched by the local Jewish communities, but also those of non-Jewish activists or foreign foun-dations, as well as initiatives supported by the state like the Trostenets memorial complex, the article addresses the different agendas that accompany attempts to keep the memory of Jews alive in Belarus and inquires into how Jewish life and death in Belarus is being integrated into the conflicting national narratives created by official historiography and the oppositional circles.

Introduction: The Jewish Belarus

Jewish history of the lands that comprise today’s Belarus goes back as far as the fourteenth century.2 The territory, which in the course of the centuries comprised a number of different political bodies, including the grand Duchy of Lithuania, the tsarist Russian empire, interwar Poland, and the Soviet Union, was home to a sig-nificant Jewish population that at the turn of the twentieth century exceeded seven hundred thousand and even formed a majority in principal Belarusian towns. In 1897, every second resident of Minsk and Vitsebsk was Jewish, while only every third citi-zen of Pinsk was non-Jewish.3 Massive migration waves caused by economic hard-ship and anti-Semitic violence in the Russian empire were soon to change that status quo. In the early twentieth century, the Jewish population steadily decreased in num-bers, with just under four hundred thousand Jews, or 6.7 percent of the country’s population, living in Soviet Belarus by the eve of the Second World War.4

The twentieth century brought major turbulences both to the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of the Belarusian lands. The german occupation of Western Belarus (1915–1917) triggered the 1918 independence proclamation of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BNR), which, however, lacked most of the attributes of a state, such as proper borders, an army, or a constitution.5 Following its demise in January 1919, the 1921 Treaty of Riga sanctioned the annexation of Western Belarus into the new Polish state, while a “proto-state,” the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic, was created. This initially embraced a narrow strip of land around Minsk and then subse-quently incorporated the areas of Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Mahilew, and Homel.6 The Second World War meant further shifts of borders as well as unprecedented carnage. More than two million Belarusian citizens lost their lives, and the Jewish population



Waligórska / Jewish Heritage 3

was decimated by 80 percent.7 The end of the war offered little respite for the local Jews: with the beginning of the cold war, ongoing emigration, and the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Stalinist “black years” (1948–1953), the Jewish community in Belarus shrank further and was faced with constant discrimination.8 In the wake of the closedown of Jewish newspapers, schools, and cultural institutions, and the repressions following the alleged “Jewish doctors’ conspiracy” of 1953, Jewish com-munal life was severely limited and the memory of the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust systematically eradicated.9 although the memory of Jewish suffering dur-ing the war remained present in the local Jewish communities and Soviet-Yiddish press, like the Sovietish Heimland, which often featured articles on the Holocaust, these narratives reached a limited audience and were at best secondary to the main-stream narrative of the victorious and heroic great Patriotic War.10

Out of seven hundred synagogues in Belarus, only a couple of dozen survived the war intact—the authorities allowing just three of them to be used for prayer.11 Many Jewish cemeteries were destroyed, with tombstones being used to pave roads. Collective farms were located on the sites of mass graves. Holocaust commemora-tion on the part of survivors was permitted only on a limited scale.12 Many of the plaques and monuments on the sites of anti-Jewish atrocities bore “politically cor-rect” inscriptions about “Soviet citizens” and “victims of fascism.”13 even today, some local authorities oppose placing the word “Jew” on Holocaust memorials.14 The massive emigration wave of the 1970s dealt a further blow to the local Jewish community, which now saw itself fully marginalized, with Jewish heritage and Jewish death erased both from the landscape and official collective memory.15

In 1989, the Jewish community of Belarus counted just over one hundred thou-sand members.16 When the iron curtain fell, anti-Semitism in Belarus continued at levels estimated to be higher than those in other former USSR republics.17 emigration further weakened the local Jewish community, now estimated at only around thirty to fifty thousand, but the past two decades have also seen a growing interest in Jewish heritage in Belarus.18 The Marc Chagall art Center in Vitsebsk (1992), The Jewish History and Culture Museum of Belarus (1998), and a german-Belarusian educa-tional centre “The Minsk History Workshop” (2003) are among the most prominent institutions that—with considerable help from foreign foundations—have emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union.19 However, in recent years, small, local state muse-ums also set up new Jewish-theme exhibitions, prompted by the interest of foreign Jewish tourists.20

In the eyes of local observers, the situation of Jews in Belarus has changed sub-stantially in the course of the past two decades. according to Jakov Basin, historian and member of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, although Belarus today lists fewer acts of anti-Jewish violence than Ukraine or Russia, Jewish heritage and the contribution of Jews to Belarusian national culture does not receive enough attention in the public discourse.21 There are currently only two state schools, in Minsk and Homel, that offer a special curriculum for Jewish pupils, who can




attend specially profiled Jewish classes, and a Chabad Lubavitch religious school in Pinsk, while other cultural initiatives related to Jewish culture in Belarus struggle to find financial support.22 even though the authorities have undertaken some steps to counteract anti-Semitism, prosecuting neo-Nazis and closing down an anti-Semitic publishing house, there is no state support for Jewish culture and education, and the burning question of the restitution of Jewish real estate has not yet been addressed. While many synagogues still host sport clubs and cinemas, others have been demol-ished without consultation with the local community.

against this landscape of frequently frustrated attempts on the part of the local Jewish community and foreign NgOs to rebuild a Jewish cultural life and commemo-rate the Jewish history of Belarus, there have also been some grassroots initiatives of local Belarusian public historians, among them both trained historians and other local activists who address historical issues in the public space. and although, for lack of space, I will limit myself to discussing just three of them, it should be noted there are more such projects.23 They deserve attention because they take place also beyond the metropolitan centres, involve non-Jews too, and connect the revival of Jewish heri-tage with the wider project of renegotiating a Belarusian national identity.

Jewish History and Culture Museum of Belarus in Minsk

In 1998, Inna gerasimova, at that time employee of the american Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and a PhD candidate completing what was to become one of the first post-war doctoral dissertations in the field of Jewish Studies in Belarus, started her campaign for a Jewish museum in Minsk. after the Joint Committee purchased a new Jewish community building, she was allotted a single room and just one month to prepare an exhibition that would convince the founding body to sustain the museum indeterminately. The first exhibition received a positive feedback and encouraged Inna to start her quest for permanent exhibits. She started travelling extensively across Belarus and beyond, looking for objects, photos, and personal documents related to Jewish life. The objects that she collected over the years are equally fascinating as the stories of how they found their way to the museum: an old matzah-machine, retrieved from a house marked for demolition, as well as a Torah scroll extracted from the attic of a cottage where it served as insulating material, in exchange for which Inna pro-vided the owner of the house with substitute insulating material.

The Jewish Museum in Minsk has in time become the central reference point for many Belarusian Jews and non-Jews who donated Jewish objects they had in their possession or which they found under sometimes adventurous circumstances. In 2010, for example, construction workers in Brest unearthed a Hebrew-language mes-sage in a bottle hidden by a Jewish resistance group.24 Since, thanks to her travels, Inna gerasimova had become well known in Belarus, the valuable find could make its way to the Minsk museum. In more than ten years, she also gathered an impressive archive of Jewish family documents and photos. By 2012, when she retired, she had




prepared around forty exhibitions, many of them with a local outreach, such as “Synagogues of Belarus,” or “Monuments of the Holocaust,” which mapped Jewish heritage and existing commemoration projects across the country. For Inna, opening the museum was a last-minute rescue mission to save from destruction the last ves-tiges of Jewish material culture scattered across Belarus. Inna retired in 2012 and emigrated to germany, but she is still working on a number of monographs related to the archival material she gathered for the museum and declares herself ready to move back to Minsk if given the chance to realize her ultimate dream: a full-fledged state-funded museum of Jewish history and culture.

Museum of Belarusian Heritage in Hermanovichi

In the mid-1990s, ada Raǐchonak together with her son Mikhas’ initiated plein air painting workshops that gave rise to a unique museum project in the north Belarusian town of Hermanovichi.25 ada Raǐchonak, former teacher and museum curator, started inviting artists to her native village to promote Belarusian art, and also the Belarusian language. In 2002, she opened a museum to house her growing collection of paint-ings, craftwork, memorabilia, memoirs, underground publications, and the personal

Figure 1Inna Gerasimova with fragments of the bottle message, Minsk 2010




documents of different local artists. She also founded an oppositional newspaper Bats’kaǔshchyna [Fatherland], which reports local cultural and political events. ada’s museum, which because of the lack of official support is located in her private house, presents a truly multiethnic medley of narratives and images. It features a gallery dedicated to the heroine of the Polish 1830–1831 anti-Russian uprising, emilia Plater, but also a number of paintings devoted to Jewish themes. The Holocaust is a particu-larly central issue in ada’s work, as she herself is a Vitsebsk ghetto survivor. The story of how local Christians saved her life during the german occupation inspires her not only to try to preserve Belarus’s multiethnic heritage but also to remember those whose history was marginalized or framed within the dominant Soviet narra-tive. One of her plein air workshops was entirely devoted to the Holocaust, and the resulting exhibition travelled across Belarus. In consequence of her political engage-ment, ada lost her job, and in the early 2000s, she was arrested and fined.

Walk of Fame in Hlybokae

In September 2012, Belarus celebrated the annual Day of Literary Production and Printing, which that year took place in the town of Hlybokae in the north of Belarus.

Figure 2Ada Raǐchonak’s museum in Hermanovichi, 2013

Source: Klementyna Chrzanowska.




This official state festival, organized in a different town every year, brings with it both prestige for the organizing municipality, as it hosts the highest-ranking state officials and diplomatic envoys, and special funding from the Ministry of Culture. The 2012 festival in Hlybokae reverberated not only locally but also internation-ally.26 On the initiative of the local executive committee (Ispolkom), the statue of Lenin was removed from the central square of the town and replaced with an interethnic “walk of fame,” containing busts of eight illustrious citizens of Hlybokae, including Iazep Korsak (1590–1643), local governor and founder of two churches in Hlybokae and a Basilian monastery in Beraz’vechcha, Vaclau Lastoǔski (1883–1938), historian and prime minister of the Belarusian People’s Republic murdered by the Bolsheviks, as well as the father of modern Hebrew, eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922).

Before the Second World War, nearly 60 percent of the town’s twelve thousand inhabitants were Jews.27 In 1941, the Nazis created a ghetto in Hlybokae, and in 1942, the nearby Barok just outside of the town became the site of mass shootings.28 Today, there is a Jewish cemetery and a modest monument to the victims of the local ghetto to remind the inhabitants of the centuries of Jewish presence in the town. Henadz’ Plavinski, a retired engineer, thought that that was too little. In 2008 he started a campaign to erect a monument to eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born in nearby Luzhki and lived and studied in a private school in Hlybokae between 1872 and 1874.29 going from door to door, he gathered signatures for a petition to the local authorities, published articles about the life of Ben-Yehuda in the local oppositional press, and distributed flyers documenting Ben-Yehuda’s childhood and youth in Belarus. Four years later, and rather unexpectedly for Henadz’, the local authorities decided to realize his idea within the “Walk of Fame.” Henadz’ was never formally acknowledged for his involvement, but he is grateful to the authorities for their unorthodox decision and considers it nothing short of a miracle that the monument supplanted Lenin himself.

Jews in the New Belarusian National Narrative

The grassroots projects devoted to Jewish heritage in Minsk, Hermanovichi, and Hlybokae are interesting in that they reveal a wider interface between the new inter-est in Jewish past and the highly politicized Belarusian national identity project. Public historians championing the importance of Jewish history in Belarus today frame it as an integral part of the Belarusian past, and define Belarusianness itself via the federalist, multiethnic, and multireligious heritage of the great Duchy of Lithuania. The project of preserving Jewish heritage in Belarus and that of a national reawakening promoted by the anti-Lukashenka opposition intersect in different ways. One of them is the effort to shed light on the chapters of Belarusian history that have been particularly neglected or obfuscated by the official historiography.30




and although the anti-Lukashenka opposition circles might follow their own agenda of instrumental and selective rewriting of national history, which at times also involves whitewashing the nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis, or even Nazis themselves,31 some anti-regime activists assign a certain importance to “redis-covering” Jewish history as a way to highlight the plight of minority cultures oppressed under Communism—a historical experience that Jewish cultural activists shared with Belarusian national revivalists. By stressing the multiethnic heritage of Belarus, opposition activists also reference the grand Duchy of Lithuania as the legitimate predecessor and a model for independent Belarus. and last but not least,

Figure 3The statue of Lenin in Hlybokae, 2010




the similar subaltern position of Yiddish and Belarusian after the end of the Soviet korenizatsiia project allows some activists to refer to a certain sense of solidarity and interconnectedness of both revivals: that of the Belarusian language and of Jewish (language(s) and) culture.32 Hence, the project of constructing a nationalist discourse alternative to that of the regime, and the project of revisiting the Jewish heritage of Belarus often take place via the medium of the language understood by many as a political statement in itself: Belarusian.

Inna gerasimova, ada Raǐchonak, and Henadz’ Plavinski all make it clear that dealing with Jewish heritage for them means reclaiming a part of their national

Figure 4The monument of Ben-Yehuda in Hlybokae, 2013




history. For Henadz’, a Catholic with Polish roots, it was the lack of any signs of the past Jewish life in Hlybokae that animated him to become active: “There were two thirds of Jews in Hlybokae; where is there a monument for them in the town? There are their graves, but where is a trace of their culture?”33 ada Raǐchonak, whose father was Jewish but who was raised Orthodox, sees the concept of Belarusianness as heterogeneous: she pleads for a national identity that does not seek to claim its own national heroes, that Belarusians share with other countries, and she celebrates the cultural overlaps: “They are all ours,” says ada, guiding visitors through her museum “Mickiewicz, Ben-Yehuda, emilia Plater . . . emilia Plater is a Polish heroine, but she is also ours. . . . adam Mickiewicz was a Pole, but he was also ours, Belarusian. He was actually half-Jewish. . . . Here cultures intertwined very closely.”34 The difficulty in defining the ethnicity of people like adam Mickiewicz, whose birthplace lies in today’s Belarus, who considered Lithuania (Litva) his homeland and wrote in Polish, in ada’s view requires the recognition of hybridity, simultaneity, and polyvalence as the defining features of the Belarusian identity.35

ada understands her work as pursuit of the “true history” of her nation. However, in her opinion the exploration of the blank spots in Belarusian historiography can only take place within the political opposition:

Figure 5Henadz’ Plavinski with a flyer about Ben-Yehuda, 2013




We want the history of our nation, we want the truth. Just that. and who did more for our history than the opposition? They [the authorities] silence our history; our history is a horrible lie. and that’s why I’m writing in my newspaper about deportations, for example. Who can speak about it? Only the opposition. We can only write about it in oppositional newspapers and periodicals. We have censorship here.36

although the concept of a “true history” has to be taken for what it is—a rhetorical figure that usually legitimates one instrumental use of history over another—the fact is that the desire to fill in the lacunas in the official historiography can be a strong motivation for public historians dealing with the Jewish past.37 and since it is unoffi-cial newspapers and periodicals that often offer a forum for issues that are otherwise underemphasized in the public discourse, activists involved in rediscovering Belarus’s Jewish history and members of the political opposition often use the same media. and thus oppositional periodicals like Bats’kaǔshchyna, or the religious freedom bulletin Za Svabodnae Veravyznanne (For Free Denomination) address the problems of the Jewish community, such as difficulties with the restitution of synagogues, or anti-Semitism, alongside the challenges facing other religious and ethnic minorities.38

a good example of how the agenda of Jewish heritage revivalists and that of the anti-Lukashenka opposition coincide is the biographical dictionary of prominent Belarusians One of Us, published in 2009 by The Belarus Free Theatre Publishing House, associated with the internationally renowned underground theatre company of the same name. Out of twenty-six entries, ten are biographies of Jews, including Isaac asimov, Marc Chagall, Kirk Douglas, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, and eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The cover of the book features a number of traditional Belarusian straw dolls, one of which is clearly distinguishable as Jewish, wearing a black caftan, a hat, and peyes. In the introduction, the editors state their intention is to establish a national pantheon and thus address “one aspect of the . . . problem of Belarusian self-identification.” By listing famous artists, writers, politicians, and sci-entists who came from Belarus, they hope to foster national pride and also articulate a political message. “a country that has given the world so many geniuses,” they urge, “can and indeed should transform into a civilized, modern and sensible state.”39 The multiethnic heritage is thus interpreted as a legacy of modernization and enlight-enment that should inspire a political change in Belarus. although the reception of the book in Belarus was limited to a few reviews in oppositional periodicals, the high profile of the Belarus Free Theatre both in Belarus and abroad made their message resonate: for example, the dictionary was distributed among participants of interna-tional workshops for NgO activists and journalists in 2010.40

Including Jews into the Belarusian pantheon marks an effort at constructing an inclusive national identity that gives the previously forgotten others a prominent place. This project of a pluralist national identity is both subversive and rooted in an older political tradition. On one hand, it implies a critique of the Soviet marginaliza-tion of Belarus’s ethnic minorities by re-embracing them as constituent parts of the Belarusian nation—even if the concepts of nationality and the nation are here at




times anachronistic. On the other hand, however, the federalist vision of Belarus as amalgamate of many different ethnic groups is a political idea with a long pedigree.

In The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder observes that the federalist traditions that lay at the foundations of the grand Duchy of Lithuania still to a con-siderable extent shape the political imagination of Belarusians:

Since the nineteenth century, Belarusian national activists have seen themselves as the inheritors of the territorial center, the language and the traditions of the grand Duchy of Lithuania. as we have seen, the traditions of the grand Duchy were altered beyond recognition by Lithuanian and Polish national movements, as well as Russian imperial and Soviet states. They have changed least perhaps in the lands we now call Belarus.41

and indeed, the budding Belarusian nationalist movement embraced the ideals of interethnic solidarity and equal standing of all languages spoken in Belarus.42 These principles inspired the BNR exiled government, which even established a Ministry for National Minorities (in 1921) and called upon Belarusians and Jews as “two dominant nations on the Belarusian territory”43 to co-construct the Belarusian People’s Republic but, more importantly, also the BSSR, which implemented quadri-lingualism and guaranteed equal status of the Belarusian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish languages in the constitution.44 The ideals of korenizatsiia—the Soviet poli-cies of supporting the revival of ethnic minorities oppressed under the tsars—not only brought about unprecedented opportunities of social mobility for Belarusian Jews, a proliferation of Yiddish schools and the rise of Jewish studies under the aegis of Institute for Belarusian Culture [Inbelkult], but also helped consolidate the Belarusian nationalist movement.45 and although the Soviet nationalities policies had ended by the 1930s, giving way to Sovietization and the repression of ethnic minorities, the ideas of multilingualism and ethnic pluralism came to shape the Belarusian nationalist project.46

It is interesting in this context that although the BNR activists who collaborated with the Nazis did harbour anti-Semitic prejudice, modern anti-Semitism never played the same role for Belarusian nationalism as it did in neighbouring Poland and Ukraine.47 In fact, the Jews were hardly a topic of interest for the Belarusian intelli-gentsia of the turn of the twentieth century and never played the role of evil counter-figures to the “good” Christian citizen, as was the case in nineteenth-century Poland.48 and although interwar Belarus was certainly not free of anti-Semitic violence and during the Second World War even the partisan units, celebrated as national heroes, committed acts of violence against Jews,49 the religiously motivated Judeophobia in Belarus, as Claire Le Foll puts it, was “untouched by the innovations of antisemitism in the modern age.”50

Historians have tried to explain this particularity of the Belarusian case, on one hand, with the fact that the massive destruction and loss of intellectual elite during the Soviet purges and the Second World War prevented Belarusians from developing




modern ethnic nationalism, with all of its side-effects like xenophobia.51 On the other hand, however, some scholars have spoken of the particular “traditional tolerance of the Belarusians in relation to national and religious minorities.”52 Natallia Savitskaya, for example, argues that Belarusians, as inhabitants of a transit country with con-stantly shifting political boundaries, developed a particular assimilatory potential and language tolerance, which was indispensable for social mobility.53 Victor Shadurski, in turn, points to the fact that with an average of one armed conflict every ten years over the last eight centuries, Belarusians were bound to cultivate the strat-egy of constantly adapting themselves to changing authorities.54 These particular historical conditions seemed to have, on one hand, weakened Belarusian nationalist movement, and on the other—so the tentative claim—preserved the idea of Belarusian heritage as co-created by several ethnic groups, and articulated in more than one language.

The Language of Memory

The tradition of multilingualism and the linguistic diversity of Belarusian cultural and intellectual life before the Second World War today inspires both the activists dedicated to preserving Jewish heritage in Belarus as well as the anti-Lukashenka oppositionists, who resent the dominance of Russian in the public domain. although the grassroots projects commemorating Jewish past devote a certain amount of attention to the Jewish languages, it is notable that the context of Jewish memory projects is also one where the revival of the Belarusian language is high on the agenda.

While Belarusian and Russian are official languages of Belarus, because of inten-sive Soviet Russification campaigns and current language politics, only 23.4 percent of Belarusians speak Belarusian fluently, and less than 4 percent use it constantly in their daily life.55 Moreover, less than 15 percent of books printed in Belarus are in Belarusian,56 and the UNeSCO atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists it as a “vulnerable” language.57 The difficulty of Belarusian to establish itself as an offi-cial language has a certain history. The predecessor of contemporary Belarusian, Chancellery Ruthenian, had been the administrative language of the great Duchy of Lithuania until 1696.58 after the subsequent period of Polonization, the local Belarusian dialects diminished in importance and the Russification campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth century further weakened their status. Belarusian wit-nessed a brief revival in the nineteenth century, but it did not officially become the language of instruction until 1916, under the german occupation. Despite a nominal parity of Belarusian and Russian in Soviet times, Russian remained the language of the ruling elite and education, while Belarusian suffered the stigma of being an uncultured, rural dialect. even though, paradoxically perhaps, it also enjoyed the status of the language of the literary elite. The latest attempts at reinstating Belarusian




as the sole official language, in 1989, ended however six years later with the re-introduction of Russian as the other and de facto principal official language, and the abandonment of large-scale schemes to revive Belarusian.59 Today, speaking Belarusian, especially in the urban context, is often understood as a political state-ment and is often associated with oppositional leanings.60

For ada Raǐchonak, Henadz’ Plavinski, and Inna gerasimova, speaking Belarusian is a conscious choice that has political implications. ada always gives her museum visitors guided tours in Belarusian. “I lead every tour in a way to make everyone feel a little Belarusian,” she says.61 Many young people who come to participate in her plein air painting workshops—where Belarusian is the language of instruction—leave Hermanovichi with the resolve to speak Belarusian.

Moreover, including Ben-Yehuda in the Hlybokae pantheon was read by many in the first place as a tribute to a language-revivalist. When the governor of Vitsebsk opened the “walk of fame,” delivering his speech entirely in Belarusian, he sent a clear message about how much the new memorial was part of a national project. During a conference in Luzhki devoted to the work of Ben-Yehuda that was orga-nized by ada Raǐchonak in 2013, author Pavel Kastiukievich went so far as to state that the situation of today’s Belarusian is comparable with the state of Hebrew in the late nineteenth century. In the same vein, the Bats’kaǔshchyna journalist Zmitser Lupach wrote that “eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his biography could serve us all as an example.”62 Clearly, part of the new local fascination with Ben-Yehuda has to do with the inspirational potential that his project of reviving Hebrew has for those campaigning for a rebirth of Belarusian today.

Jewish Past and the Intra-Belarusian “Truth-Telling”

apart from the material, tangible results of their work, public historians like ada, Inna, and Henadz’ have also to be acknowledged for creating local spaces of learn-ing, articulating empathy with the other, and what anthropologist erica Lehrer called “difficult truth-telling.”63 Inna gerasimova, who toured Belarus in search of infor-mation about local synagogues and Holocaust memorials, reports that this outreach initiative of the museum offered a way for the local people to incorporate the history of Jews into a narrative about their communities. She recounts that many locals were grateful that “finally, someone is interested in our Jews.”

But apart from encountering voices of empathy, Henadz’, ada, and Inna also occasionally hear stories of betrayal and anti-Jewish violence that both local Jews and non-Jews still have in their memory. The presence of the public histo-rian thus often serves as a trigger for critical “truth-telling.” When Henadz’ was collecting signatures under his petitions, he visited the Jewish families of Hlybokae first. In one of the households, he was refused a signature by a man who told him the story of how local Belarusians reported his family members to the




germans—a traumatic experience that made him deeply distrustful toward any Belarusian initiative of commemorating Jews.65 ada, who because of her Jewish descent repeatedly experienced anti-Semitism at firsthand, also reports that her presence at times works as a catalyst for other people to narrate their traumatic family stories reporting violence and persecution of Jews during the war. One of them concerned a group of Jewish insurgents from the ghetto in Hlybokae who, in 1942, managed to escape to the partisans operating in the nearby forest. During archival work, ada came across a letter by a commissar of one of the local parti-san units, disclosing that a commander of the neighbouring unit executed a group of Jewish ghetto survivors. ada recounts:

and I didn’t believe in what the letter said. . . . and I was thinking: how could it be possible that partisans killed them? and then, later, I understood that it was the truth. During the next elections, I was going from door to door with the son of [that com-mander], assisting people to vote at home. . . . and I told him: “I cannot thank my grandfather enough for today” . . . and he answered: “and my father killed a whole Jewish unit and he doesn’t regret it.” and then I understood that that man was telling the truth.66

Coming across both narratives of suffering and unremorseful confessions of those who identify with the perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence, activists dealing with Jewish history are in a particular position as catalysts of—often painful—memory. Trying to document, commemorate, but also mourn the victims, they provide a space where true stories can be narrated and heard. given the taboo that surrounded Jewish history in Soviet Belarus and that still surrounds the issue of Belarusian complicity in anti-Jewish violence, the significance of this space of “truth-telling,” be it very limited, cannot be overestimated.

The Politics of Jewish Memory

Because of their agenda and modus operandi, grassroots projects devoted to Jewish heritage in Belarus sometimes fall into the wider orbit of oppositional activi-ties. Public historians like ada and Henadz’ rely on small informal networks, unof-ficial press, and the support of Western NgOs and foundations to realize their projects. They also adopt some of the protest strategies used by the anti-Lukashenka opposition. When gathering signatures under his petitions, for example, Henadz’ would put his name as the first on the list to protect other, younger signatories from a possible backlash.67 Similarly, ada, who is also active in the oppositional Belarusian Popular Front [BNF], states that “if it’s dangerous, then I go . . . we don’t send our youth; if they hang the banner of BNF, they won’t find a job anywhere.”68 It is not only the methods but also the contents that connect activists like ada and Henadz’ to the agenda of opposition movements. Creating a new national historiography is an




important objective, both to those who want to give more space to the history of Belarusian minorities as well as to those who oppose the dominant historical narra-tives. at the same time, because of the way Jewish history can be framed within the mainstream historical narratives, such as the story of anti-Nazi resistance, it can also resonate with the official authorities. as the festival in Hlybokae indicates, the idea of commemorating Jewish past as part of Belarus’s multiethnic heritage also appeals to state actors, who might see the benefit of supporting such initiatives in order to present Belarus as a tolerant country that respects its religious minorities.

Inna gerasimova believes, therefore, that it is important to use the dominant offi-cial historical narratives as a vehicle to make Jewish history present in the national historiography. Some of the most important exhibitions she organized were dedi-cated to Jews in the Belarusian partisan units between 1941 and 1944 and the Jewish resistance to Nazi occupiers.69 She also edited a volume of archival materials “We Stood Shoulder to Shoulder,” which lists more than seven thousand Jews who fought in Belarusian partisan units.70 It is notable that while the volume addresses a chapter forgotten in the official Soviet historiography, its title clearly refers to a Soviet rheto-ric, framing the difficult history of Belarusian–Jewish relations into a familiar, main-stream language. The project that Inna feels personally most proud of is “The Man and His Fate,” prepared for the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto in 2008 and devoted to former members of anti-fascist resistance groups.71 The project entailed archival research on Jewish anti-fascist fighters killed during the war. It was followed by the posthumous decoration of twenty-one persons with the military combatant’s medal. The Belarusian Ministry of Defence and the largest Belarusian daily and mouthpiece of the regime, Sovietskaya Belarusiya, supported the initiative and made the final ceremony of awarding the military distinctions to surviving relatives possible. “The Man and His Fate” thus both commemorated the forgotten Jewish victims and honoured them as Belarusian war heroes.

Factoring Jews into what is the central historical narrative in Belarusian collective memory—that of heroic resistance during the german occupation—presents an opportunity for the mainstream historical account to also include in it the Belarusian others. given that the current regime prefers to commemorate “glorious achieve-ments rather than . . . suffering,” partisan anti-Nazi resistance remains in the focus of Belarusian memory politics and the narratives of official history textbooks.72 Their heroic fight also dominates the memorial landscape: there are more than one thou-sand six hundred monuments commemorating Belarusian partisans in the Vitsebsk region (also known as “partizanskiǐ kraǐ”) alone.73 giving attention to Jewish resis-tance acknowledges the Jewish fighters as part of Belarusian history and frames the partisan war as a shared Belarusian–Jewish historical experience.74

The current initiative to create a memorial site in Trostenets and Blagovshchina, just outside of Minsk, exemplifies such an attempt of the Belarusian authorities to give Holocaust victims a prominent space in the national memorial landscape, but at the same time it is also a project that frames Jewish history within a dominant




Soviet-time national narrative of heroic resistance against fascism.75 In June 2014, President Lukashenka, accompanied by the President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, deposited a capsule with a message for future generations at the foundation stone of the memorial at Maly Trostenets, a former Nazi concentration camp and site of mass killings. although President Lukashenka occasionally appeared at commemoration events related to the Holocaust before,76 the Trostenets celebration, extensively covered by the Belarusian media and staged with certain pomp and with participation of foreign delegations and diplomats, marked an impor-tant milestone in how the Holocaust has been gaining visibility in the public space and the Belarusian political discourse.77

The laying down of the foundational stone at Trostenets was carefully orches-trated, with a VIP tribune for invited guests: veterans, pioneers, representatives of pro-Lukashenka political association Belaya Rus’, foreign diplomats, and interna-tional delegations. Lukashenka also did not miss the opportunity to frame this event into his own agenda. In a short speech at the memorial stone, he said,

It seemed that the genocide that happened here would stay in memory of mankind for ever and people would resist the virus of the brown plague. Unfortunately, this is not the case and today fascism raises its head again and some political powers try to white-wash fascism . . . some foreign politicians argue that all this is about freedom of speech and support of democracy. We don’t accept such democracy. I am sure that the coun-tries that reject the lessons of history and allow racial or nationalist intolerance and the idea of a superiority of one nation over others, are doomed to repeat the tragedy, on their land this time, and in their own houses.78

Spoken at the time when clashes in Ukraine were escalating, framing the intention of the Trostenets memorial in anti-fascist rhetoric had a political resonance beyond the immediate context of Holocaust commemoration. But the implications of the project for Belarus’s foreign relations were wider than that. The memorial at Trostenets, which constituted the fourth biggest site of Nazi atrocities in europe, was eventually authorised only because of the external pressure from germany and german NgOs operating in Belarus, in particular the IBB Minsk (Internationales Bildungs-und Begegnungswerk). after a fundraising campaign in six german cities from which local Jews were deported to the Minsk ghetto (Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, and Cologne), germany offered to support the construction of the memorial with an amount of 1 million euros, with President gauck expressing his personal support for the initiative.

During the press conference that accompanied the ceremony, Peter Junge-Wentrup, director of IBB Dortmund, which coordinates the fundraising project in germany, expressed the hope that Holocaust-related memory work will lead to “more political contact between Belarus and germany.”79 Likewise, the head of the Minsk municipal administration, Sergeǐ Chilman, recently stated that “[the Trostenets monument] has a great meaning for Belarus’ cooperation with germany and austria




and the development of friendly relations between our states.”80 For Lukashenka, therefore, this project might be a possibility not only to legitimize himself as being benevolent toward the Jewish minority, and preventing the opposition from claiming issue-ownership over problems of anti-Semitism, but also to join in what is very clearly seen in Belarus as a European project of Holocaust commemoration. During the conference that accompanied the Trostenets event, Viktor Balakirev, director of IBB Minsk, spoke of two patterns of memory dominant in Belarus and Western europe: the memory of victory and that of victims, respectively.81 Incorporating the Holocaust into the official Belarusian historical narrative, and presenting Trostenets within the european constellation of the darkest annihilation sites of the Holocaust, namely, auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, is also a gesture of adopting the “Western” paradigm of memory and placing Belarus on the map of european Holocaust tourism.

Notwithstanding, at the same time the Trostenets project is also very clearly framed within the traditional Soviet-time narrative of the Second World War as a heroic victory. The memorial will consist of two parts: the site of the former concen-tration camp, Maly Trostenets, where also Soviet POWs, resistance fighters, and ethnic Belarusian civilians died, and the mass killing site in Blagovshchina, where the graves of more than one hundred fifty thousand Jews from the Minsk ghetto are

Figure 6President Lukashenka at the commemorative ceremony in Trostenets, 2014




located. It is planned to be opened on the very symbolic day of the 9th of May 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet victory in the great Patriotic War.

Significantly, both parts of the memorial are also to be realized by two different teams of architects. The architect whose project was authorized to be built in Blagovshchina forest is Leonid Levin, who gained celebrity as the author of the cen-tral Belarusian memorial of the Second World War—Khatyn. The village of Khatyn, where in 1943 the Schutzmannschaft Bataillon 118 and the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger carried out a massacre of civilians in reprisal for partisan activities, is the central symbolic site of Nazi atrocities in Belarus and has a central position in the national Belarusian narrative of victimhood. The memorial’s website frames Nazi violence against civilians in places like Khatyn as nothing less than “genocide of the Belarusian people.”82 Some historians also argue that the very placement of the memorial in the village of Khatyn, whose name can be easily confused with Katyn, played a role for the Soviet propaganda, which continued to blame the 1940 mass killings of Polish officers by the NKVD in Katyn on the germans.83

Leonid Levin, who passed away in early 2014 and did not live to see the laying of the foundational stone for the Trostenets memorial, framed the project as a milestone in the mapping of Belarusian lieux de memoire. In an autobiographical documentary from 2012, he made an open call for including Trostenets, next to Khatyn, Yama and Kurapaty, as the most important sites of national memory, pleading to expand the Belarusian memoryscape to include not only places of Jewish suffering but also the biggest site of Stalinist atrocities, Kurapaty, which is still ignored in the official com-memoration and has become a space of alternative remembrance by the opposition.84 This reconciliatory vision of recognizing both the sites of Nazi and Soviet violence against Jews as well as non-Jews as equally important for the national memory endows the Trostenets project with an additional layer of political significance.

While the memory of the Holocaust becomes more and more visible in the public space and is instrumentalized politically, the local Jewish community responds with ambivalence. On one hand, public commemoration projects like the Trostenets memo-rial are endorsed by communal Jewish structures. galina Levina, daughter of Leonid Levin and the chief architect who is going to realize the Blagovshchina complex, is also Head of the Jewish Community in Belarus. “This is part of our history, of european history,” she said during the Trostenets ceremony in 2014, stressing that the project is important not only to the Jewish community but to the Belarusian society at large. also Rabbi grigor abramovich, who on the occasion spoke kaddish for the victims at the Blagovshchina forest, expressed careful optimism, speaking of a suc-cessful policy of “small steps” that allowed Jewish activists like Levin to win the support of the authorities.

Others, however, also point to the unresolved issues surrounding the Trostenets memorial that are problematic for the local Jews. a round table discussion which took place under the banner of the oppositional BNF in Minsk in april 2014 and included, among others, the renowned Belarusian Holocaust historian and human




rights activist emanuil Yoffe raised the point that the area of Maly Trostenets camp was used after the war as a rubbish dump, and the piles of refuse resting on human remains were merely covered up with greenery for the 2014 celebrations. a further controversy is also related to the fact that the Trostenets area is also a resting place of victims of pre-war Stalinist purges, yet their mass graves do not form part of the planned memorial complex.85 For the Head of the Historical association “Trostenets,” evgenii Tsumarov, the new memorial project merely contributes to pushing these victims into oblivion and does not do justice to the still “unfulfilled moral duty” to remember victims of both the fascist and the communist regimes.86

although, as the case of Trostenets suggests, the question of Holocaust commemo-ration might become a forum for a wider debate on memory politics in Belarus, accord-ing to Inna gerasimova, Head of the Jewish Community until 2012, local Jews, based on their own traumatic experience of Stalinism, are wary of involving themselves in political debates.87 To be sure, a number of Jewish organizations, such as the Union of Belarusian Public associations and Communities, the Holocaust Fund or the american Jewish Joint Distribution Committee devote an important part of their work to Holocaust commemoration, and the two flagship projects endorsed by the Jewish Community: the Jewish Museum in Minsk and the Trostenets memorial, clearly indi-cate that the local Jewish activists on their own part campaign for a prominent space for Jewish heritage within the national memorial landscape. But although the idea of pre-serving Jewish heritage and educating the Belarusian public about the Jewish history may be high on the agenda of Jewish organizations, there is no unified position within the Jewish community as to how these aims should be achieved. Weakened by emigra-tion, struggling to find adequate funding, and negotiating their community interests in uneasy political conditions, Jewish activists, perhaps even more than other cultural activists in Belarus, are forced into an uneasy balancing act between pursuing their interests within the available sanctioned framework and risking a more dissenting voice, exploring a common agenda with oppositionally minded cultural activists.

Conclusion

Jewish heritage has a political significance in today’s Belarus—both for the pro-Western opposition as well as the Lukashenka regime. Framing the Jewish past as part of the national historical narrative, activists, public historians, and authorities instrumentalize Belarus’s history of multiculturalism to advance their competing visions of what constitutes the Belarusian national identity. and although that does not necessarily translate into any measurable improvements for today’s local Jewish communities, it does mean that the Jewish past is of national importance – probably more than ever before.

For some activists of the anti-Lukashenka opposition, Jewish heritage consti-tutes part of the cultural landscape of the great Duchy of Lithuania, which they




celebrate as the predecessor of the Belarusian state. The multiculturalism of this ethnically heterogeneous and multilingual state constitutes a counterpoint to the Soviet homogenizing policies that followed on the heels of korenizatsiia and serves as a model for the future Belarusian state which, in the eyes of the democratic opposition, should emphasize its ties with europe and act as a bridge between the West and the east.88 Jews, as an important minority in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and as a group with particularly intensive transnational networks in the region, are thus protagonists of the success story of this once powerful eastern european state. Their history in Belarus, their contribution to the develop-ment of urban centres and trade, and their role as middlemen between different social and ethnic groups, makes them into symbolic representatives of the mythical great Duchy of Lithuania. On the other hand, the fact that Jews were a minority persecuted by the Soviet regime and marginalized by its official historiography makes the rediscovery of Jewish heritage also relevant for the wider project of exposing crimes of the Soviet regime—which became particularly visible in the debates around the Trostenets memorial complex.

But despite the common agenda of Jewish heritage revivalists and some members of the political opposition, the state authorities are likewise interested in including Jews into their national narrative. The emphasis on Jews as victims of fascism allows them to frame their history within the dominant Soviet-era account of heroic anti-fascist resistance in Belarus—the narrative which still defines the Belarusian memo-rial landscape. But including Jews as Belarusian citizens, or even—like in Hlybokae—as members of the national pantheon, also permits the authorities to invoke the idea of (ethnic) equality, celebrated by the Lukashenka government as a “Belarusian value” par excellence.89 But if Lukashenka adopted the ideals of collec-tivism and social equality from Soviet ideologues, the inclusive approach to national heritage that subsumes the achievements of ethnic minorities does not here equal nostalgia for the Soviet Union. The incorporation of illustrious ethnic Jews (or Poles) into a Belarusian pantheon is rather a way to boost national pride. If Lukashenka’s Belarus celebrates the idea of Slavic unity, celebrating the Soviet victory over Nazi germany as the core narrative of national memory, it is at the same time committed to the idea of national independence.90

Finally, the interest in Jewish history in Belarus should be viewed against the background of a wider european trend. We have seen that several Belarusian projects devoted to Jewish memory, like the Minsk History Workshop, or the Trostenets memorial, draw inspiration from similar german initiatives and follow certain german templates of Holocaust commemoration.91 But also the developments within the region resonate among the Jewish heritage revivalists in Belarus. The Jewish heritage revival in Poland and Lithuania, coupled with a boom of Jewish tourism—which Belarus also currently aspires to develop—both indicates a grassroots need to engage with the history of Jews within the former Soviet bloc and points to measure-able benefits of commodifying Jewish heritage. But while the Polish case, in




particular, has enjoyed some scholarly attention, other eastern european countries remain underresearched in this respect.92

The connection between the early revivalist activities in late-communist Poland and the circles of democratic opposition also offers an interesting prism to look at the Belarusian case. Some of the grassroots activists who in the 1980s organized networks of self-education about Jewish culture, like the Jewish Flying University, or cultural festivals that later expanded into regular, large-scale international events, like the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, were active in the Solidarity circles and think of their involvement in Jewish heritage revival as “amateur overthrowing of Communism.”93 Synergies and overlaps of interests between pro-democracy protest movements and the Jewish heritage revival are therefore not a new phenomenon. On the other hand, benevolence toward Jewish culture can by no means be ascribed to any political camps as a whole, and instrumentalizing Jewish heritage or Holocaust memory, as we have seen, can be motivated by expedient political inter-est. and the transnational projects of Holocaust commemoration—like the one in Trostenets—enable the Belarusian authorities to interact with Western european countries on an apolitical basis. given the sanctions of the Council of the european Union, including a travel ban for many Belarusian officials and the general diffi-culty for Belarusians to travel into the eU, Holocaust commemoration and educa-tion projects, developed in particular in cooperation with germany, can provide an important opening to the West.

Jewish heritage in Belarus is both valuable and vulnerable. giving it more visibil-ity can make Belarusians aware of the multiethnic heritage of their country, but instrumentalizing it to boost national pride runs the risk of being self-serving. It remains to be seen whether the small grassroots initiatives and state attempts at remembering Jews in Belarus can inspire Belarusians to acknowledge in their narra-tives not only the harmonious coexistence of Jews and non-Jews but also the dark chapters of Jewish–Belarusian relations that challenge the national mythology of heroic resistance to fascism.

Acknowledgment

The author wishes to thank Claire Le Foll and alena Barysevich, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on an early version of this article.

Author’s Note

Note on transliteration: all geographical names are given in the Belarusian form, proper names are transliterated either in the Belarusian form or according to the spelling the protagonists of this article use in their publications.




Notes

1. I use the term heritage here to denote not only material and immaterial vestiges of Jewish culture but also the instrumentalization of Jewish history in the public realm, following David Lowenthal, who defined “heritage” as “a celebration of [the past], . . . a profession of faith in a past tailored to the present-day purposes.” See The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), x.

2. Barbara Stępniewska-Holzer, Żydzi na Białorusi: Studium z dziejów strefy osiedlenia w pierwszej połowie XIX w. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2013).

3. Considering Belarus’s today’s territory back in 1897, it was inhabited by 6.5 million people, of whom 73 percent later identified themselves as Belarusians, 13.8 percent as Jews, 4.7 percent as Ukrainians, 4.3 percent as Russians, and 2.5 percent as Poles. Victor Shadurski, “Rekonstruktionen der belarussischen geschichte: Zur Überwindung von Stereotypen,” in Ein weisser Fleck in Europa . . . Die Imagination der Belarus als Kontaktzone zwischen Ost und West, ed. Thomas M. Bohn and Victor Shadurski (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 80–81.

4. The number refers to a 1939 census. Mordechai altshuler, Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Maccabi Press, 1993), 11. See also Leonid Smilovitsky, “a Demographic Profile of the Jews in Belorussia from the Pre-war Time to the Post-war Time,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 117–29.

5. Per anders Rudling, “The Battle over Belarus: The Rise and Fall of the Belarusian National Movement, 1906-1931” (PhD dissertation at the University of alberta, 2010), 140. See also Dorota Michaluk, Białoruska Republika Ludowa 1918-1920: U podstaw białoruskiej państwowości (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2010), and Per anders Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

6. Rudling, “The Battle over Belarus,” 1; David Marples, “Die Sozialistische Sowjetrepublik Weißrußland (1917-1945),” in Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrußlands, ed. Dietrich Beyrau and Rainer Lindner (göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 135–52; andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last Dictatorship in Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 90–117.

7. an estimated 2.3 to 2.4 million Belarusians were killed during the Second Wold War, including 500,000–550,000 Jews. It is estimated that at least 800,000 Jews (including victims deported from other countries) were killed in occupied Belarus by the Nazis. Per anders Rudling, “The Invisible genocide: The Holocaust in Belarus,” in Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 60–61. On Holocaust in Belarus, see also Zvi gitelman, “The Holocaust,” in The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: The Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1988), 175–224, Barbara epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); andreas Hollender et al., Existiert das Ghetto noch? Weissrußland: Jüdisches Überleben gegen nationalsozialistische Herrschaft (Berlin: assoziation a, 2003); Zvi gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Leonid Smilovitsky, Katastrofa evreev v Belarussii 1941-1944 gg (Tel aviv, Israel: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2000); Inna gerasimova and V. Selemenev, Vyzhit’-Podvig: Vospominaniia i dokumenty o minskom getto (Minsk: NaRB, 2008); Wassili grossman, Ilja ehrenburg, and arno Lustiger, eds., Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994), 227–400.

8. Zvi gitelman, The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 225–66; Leonid Smilovitsky, Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final Decade of the Stalin Regime, 1944-53 (Budapest: Central european University Press, 2014); Leonid Smilovitsky, “Die Partizipation der Juden am Leben der Belorussischen Sozialistischen Sowjetrepublik (BSSR) im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt, 1944-1954,” in Hollender et al., Existiert das Ghetto noch?, 277–94; elizaveta Slepovitch, “Jüdischer alltag in Weißrussland vom Spätstalinismus bis zur Perestroika: eine geschichte von Freude, Trauer und Hoffnung,” in Bunte




Flecken in Weißrussland: Erinnerungsorte zwischen polnisch-litauischer Union und russisch-sowjeti-schem Imperium, ed. Thomas M. Bohn, Rayk einax, and Julian Mühlbauer (Wiesbaden: Harassovitz, 2013), 105–17; Lionel Kochan, The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

9. Smilovitsky, “Die Partizipation der Juden,” 287; Rudling, “The Invisible genocide”; Zvi Y. gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research; Jewish Museum), 225–66. On early Stalinist anti-Jewish purges, see elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

10. Rudling, “The Invisible genocide,” 65; Per Rudling “‘For a Heroic Belarus!’: The great Patriotic War as Identity Marker in the Lukashenka and Soviet Belarusian Discourses,” Nationalities Affairs 32 (2008): 43–62; David Marples, “Our Glorious Past”: Lukashenka`s Belarus and the Great Patriotic War (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2014), 92–101; Felix ackermann, “Wem gehört der große Sieg? Die Öffentliche aushandlung der erinnerung an den Zweiten Weltkrieg in Belarus,” Zeitgeschichte Online, July 2014, http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/geschichtskultur/wem-gehoert-der-grosse-sieg (accessed 4 September 2014).

11. at the same time, the sixteenth-century Holodnaia Synagogue in Minsk, which survived the war, was demolished in 1965. See Smilovitsky, “Die Partizipation der Juden,” 291.

12. The Yama memorial in Minsk, erected by Holocaust survivors already in 1946, was one of the first Holocaust commemoration sites in the USSR and, for a long time, the only site bearing a Yiddish inscrip-tion. Inna gerasimova documented other early Holocaust monuments across Belarus for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Minsk. See her “K voprosu o klassifikatsii pamyatnikov Holokosta na primere Belarusi” paper presented at the conference “Uroki Holokosta i sovremennaya Rossiya,” 16–18 November 2008, Kaliningrad. also Zvi gitelman lists some Belarusian Holocaust memorials in A Century of Ambivalence, 189, 205.

13. ekaterina Keding, “Konkurrenz der erinnerungen: Partisanenwiderstand und Holocaust in der belarussischen gedenkkultur,” in Ein weisser Fleck in Europa, 168–69.

14. as late as 2005, there were still examples of new Holocaust memorials in Belarus that did not contain the word Jew. Often, while the correct inscription would be allowed in Hebrew or in english, the Belarusian version would be “censored.” Inna gerasimova, interview with the author, 18 June 2014.

15. Thomas e. Sawyer, The Jewish Minority in the Soviet Union (Boulder: Westview Press, 1979), 217; Jerome M. gilison, “Soviet-Jewish emigration, 1971-80: an Overview,” in Soviet Jewry in the Decisive Decade 1971-1980, ed. Robert O. Freedman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), 3.

16. Robert J. Brym, The Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk: Identity, Antisemitism, Emigration (London: Macmillan, 1994), 3.

17. Ibid., 29.18. The official census of 1999 reported 27,810 Jews living in Belarus, the communal estimates are,

however, around 50,000. See alexander Friedman “Jews in Belarus,” in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora, ed. avrum ehrlich (Santa Barbara, Ca: aBC-CLIO, 2008), 946.

19. Other Jewish cultural institutions in Belarus include JCC emunah in Minsk, Israeli Cultural Center (operating at the Israeli embassy in Minsk), Jewish Student Organization “Beit Hillel” or the Jewish Revival Charitable Mission. See http://www.jewishbelarus.org.

20. e.g., local museums in Mir, Maladzechna, Mstsiclaǔ, and Smilavichy included a segment on Jewish history in their permanent exhibitions. Inna gerasimova, interview 2014.

21. Jakov Basin, “Judenfrage in heutigem Weißrussland,” unpublished manuscript, 2009, 3.22. gerasimova, interview, 2014.23. See in particular the project of compiling a Belarusian-Yiddish Dictionary, coordinated by

aleksandr astraukh: Idysh-belaruski sloǔnik (Mensk: Medysont, 2008) or the documentary on Yiddish in Belarus directed by Yurii Khashchevatski, V poiskakh idisha (Studia atlanty, 2008). Noteworthy also are the publications devoted to Jewish history in Belarus by the Arche magazine.

24. The message was authored by Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamarof, one of Dror leaders from the Bialystok ghetto, and addressed to the activists of the movement in Israel. Other copies of this message had already been known. Havi Dreifuss, personal communication 17 May 2015.


http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/geschichtskultur/wem-gehoert-der-grosse-sieg

http://www.jewishbelarus.org



25. In 2008, Uladzimir Kolas directed a documentary about ada Raĭchonak’s work: Ada’s Gallery (Film Studio everest), DVD.

26. Polish media reported the events in Hlybokae, interpreting them as a sign of deep transformation in Belarus’s memory politics. See “głęboka przemiana,” Kresy24: Wschodnia Gazeta Codzienna, 3 September 2012, http://kresy24.pl/14036/gleboka-przemiana/ (accessed 2 December, 2013).

27. alexander Friedman, “Die ghettoisierung der jüdischen Bevölkerung im ehemals polnischen Westweißrussland. Das Fallbeispiel der Stadt Hlybokae,” in KZ-Verbrechen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager und ihrer Erinnerung, ed. Wojtek Lenarczyk, andreas Mix, Johannes Schwartz, and Veronika Springmann (Berlin: Monopol Verlag, 2007), 18.

28. gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, 188–90; R. Kownator, “Die ermordung der Juden in glubokoje und in anderen Ortschaften,” in Das Schwarzbuch, 316–31; Friedman, “Die ghettoisierung der jüdischen Bevölkerung.”

29. Joseph gedaliah Klausner “eliezer Ben-Yehuda,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, vol. 3, ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 386–88.

30. History textbooks in post-1994 Belarus dedicate only minimal attention to the Holocaust, framing it as a foreign intervention and not part of the national narrative. Rudling, “The Invisible genocide,” 70–71; see also Marples, “Our Glorious Past.”

31. Ibid., 68–69.32. gerasimova, personal interview, 17 august 2013.33. Henadz’ Plavinski, personal interview, 12 august 2013.34. ada Raǐchonak, personal interview, 13 august 2013.35. It might be useful to consider the complexity of collective identities emerging in the Belarusian

lands also through the lens of postcolonial critique, especially since the Polish discourse on the so-called “Kresy,” or eastern borderlands of the former great Duchy of Lithuania, which has been ascribing Mickiewicz and Plater a highly symbolic role as Polish national heroes, has long been characterized by exclusivist, colonialist language and symbolic appropriation. See Bogusław Bakuła, “Kolonialne i post-kolonialne aspekty polskiego dyskursu kresoznawczego,” Teksty Drugie 6 (2006): 11–33. In this context, postcolonial concepts of hybrid identity emerging at the intersection of several cultures, like Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” appear as particularly relevant for the Belarusian case; see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). On the importance of Jewish culture and Judaism for Mickiewicz, see Maria Janion, Bohater, spisek, śmierć: Wykłady żydowskie (Warszawa: WaB, 2009).

36. ada Raǐchonak, personal interview, 13 august 2013.37. Postmodern critique dismantled the myth of history-writing as true and impartial, recognizing the

inevitable bias of every attempt as historiography. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 105–26.38. e.g., Za Svabodnae Veravyznanne, no. 21 (2008); Za Svabodnae Veravyznanne, no. 24 (2009);

Grazhdanskoe Dostoinstvo, no. 3 (2009).39. Nikolai Khalezin et al., One of Us / Adzin z nas (Minsk: Belarus Free Theatre Publishing House,

2009), 7.40. See Kniganosha, no. 2 (2010), 8.41. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 281.42. For example, Nasha Niva, the first legally published paper in the Belarusian language, and some

of the leaders of the Belarusian nationalist movement like Ianka Kupala stressed the brotherhood of Jews and Belarusians. Rudling, “The Battle over Belarus,” 90.

43. Claire Le Foll, “The ‘Belarusianisation’ of the Jewish Population during the Interwar Period: Discourses and achievements in Political and Cultural Spheres,” East European Jewish Affairs 38, no. 1 (2008): 68.

44. Ibid., 72.45. Claire Le Foll, “The Institute for Belarussian Culture: The Constitution of Belarussian and

Jewish Studies in the BSSR: Between Soviet and Non-Soviet Science (1922-1928),” Ab Imperio 4 (2012): 245–74; Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews; Rainer Lindner, Historiker und Herrschaft:


http://kresy24.pl/14036/gleboka-przemiana/



Nationsbildung und Geschichtspolitik in Weißrußland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999).

46. While the policies of Belarusization/Yiddishization/Polononization can be credited with creating an important impulse for Belarusian nationalism, some historians also point to their negative effects, such as reinforcing ethnic divisions and linking class to ethnicity. Rudling, “The Battle over Belarus,” 318. The work of the Inbekl’kult was also closely supervised by the Communist Party. Lindner, Historiker und Herrschaft, 198.

47. Rudling, “The Battle over Belarus,” 89.48. Claire Le Foll, “The Missing Pogroms of Belorussia, 1881-1882: Conditions and Motives of an

absence of Violence,” in Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, ed. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 169–70; Mikola Iwanou, “Die jüdische Welt in Weißrussland vom ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Holocaust,” in Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrußlands, ed. Dietrich Beyrau and Rainer Lindner (göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 394.

49. arkadi Zeltser, “ethnic Conflict and Modernization in the Interwar Period: The Case of Soviet Belorussia,” in Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, ed. Jonathan Dekel-Chen et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 174–83; Friedman, “Die ghettoisierung der jüdischen Bevölkerung”; Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews, 189–96; Leonid Smilovitsky, “antisemitism in the Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941-1944: The Case of Belorussia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20, no. 2 (2006): 207–34. elissa Bemporad also points out that old, traditional anti-Semitic prejudice fuelled some cases of blood libel in interwar BSSR. See “Confronting Blood: Jewish Responses to the Ritual Murder accusation in Interwar Poland and USSR” (paper presented at the 10th Congress of the european association of Jewish Studies, Paris, 23 July 2014).

50. Le Foll, “The Missing Pogroms of Belorussia,” 171.51. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 280.52. Friedman, “Jews in Belarus,” 951. See also Nelly Bekus, Struggle over Identity: The Official and

the Alternative “Belarussianness” (Budapest: CeU Press, 2010), 159.53. Natallia Savitskaya, “Weißrussisch: eine Verkehrsprache oder eine Sprache von Verkehrsschildern?”

in Ein weisser Fleck in Europa, 37.54. Shadurski, “Rekonstruktionen der belarussischen geschichte,”, 84.55. “Belaruskaya mova, mova elity i apazitsyi” http://budzma.org/news/belaruskaya-mova-mova-

elity-i-apazicyi.html (accessed 29 November 2013). In 1989, 66 percent of Belarusian citizens said Belarusian was their native tongue; in 2009, it was only 53 percent. according to a poll from 2009, less than 8 percent of Belarusians speak Belarusian on a regular basis. See Wilson, Belarus, 123–24.

56. Wilson, Belarus, 123.57. Christopher Moseley and alexandre Nicolas, eds., Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd

ed. (Paris: UNeSCO Publishing, 2010), http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas (accessed 28 November 2013).

58. The last book published in Ruthenian, which combined Old Church Slavonic elements with Polish, was published in 1722. Wilson, Belarus, 46.

59. Susanne golz, “Quo vadis, Weißrussisch? entwiklungslinien einer (Standard-)Sprache,” in Ein weisser Fleck in Europa, 39–47; Hermann Bieder, “Der Kampf um die Sprachen im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrußlands, ed. Dietrich Beyrau and Rainer Lindner (göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 451–71.

60. Savitskaya, “Weißrussisch,” 36.61. Raǐchonak, interview.62. Zmitser Lupach, “U Luzhkakh ushanavali pamyats adrazhentsa iǔrytu,” Bats’kaǔshchyna, no. 7

(2013): 7.63. erica Lehrer, “Can There Be a Reconciliatory Heritage?” International Journal of Heritage

Studies 16, nos. 4–5 (2010): 269–88. See also erica T. Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 140ff.


http://budzma.org/news/belaruskaya-mova-mova-elity-i-apazicyi.html

http://budzma.org/news/belaruskaya-mova-mova-elity-i-apazicyi.html

http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas



64. gerasimova, interview, 2013.65. Plavinski, interview.66. Raǐchonak, interview.67. Plavinski, interview.68. Raǐchonak, interview.69. “Jews in the Partisan Movement of Belarus 1941-1944”; “Jewish Family Partisan Detachments of

Belarus”; “Resistance in the ghettos of Belarus 1941-1943.”70. I. gerasimova, Vstali my plechom k plechu (Minsk: asobny Dach, 2005), translated into english

as: Inna gerasimova et al., We Stood Shoulder to Shoulder: Jewish Partisans in Byelorussia 1941-1944 (Bury St. edmunds: arima Publishing, 2010).

71. For the history of Jewish resistance in the Minsk ghetto, see epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943. For more on Jews in the partisan units, see Lester Samuel eckman and Chaim Lazar Litai, The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia During the Nazi Occupation 1940-1945 (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1977); Nachama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); gerasimova, We Stood Shoulder to Shoulder; andreas Hollender, “Jüdische Selbstbehauptung und jüdischer Widerstand in Weißrussland,” in Hollender et al., Existiert das Ghetto noch?, 250–67.

72. Marples, “Our Glorious Past,” 101. On the portrayal of partisans in Belarusian history textbooks, see ibid., 105–16.

73. Keding, “Konkurrenz der erinnerungen,” 161; Rudling, “For a Heroic Belarus!”74. a notable attempt to combine the narrative of the Holocaust with that of the partisan struggle was

the documentary Kiselev’s List (2008), directed by Yuriy Malyugin, telling the story of a Russian partisan, Nikolai Kiselev, who managed to save more than two hundred Jews from Dalhinev by bringing them into safety across the front line. Inna gerasimova’s archival research served as the basis for the script.

75. While the Yama memorial in Minsk belongs to the first Holocaust commemoration sites in Belarus, in the last decade, several new memorials were erected in the Belarusian capital city, often as initiative of german organizations, such as the memorial complex in Kollektornaia Street, including an installation by Leonid Levin (2008), a memorial plaque to german Jews murdered in the Minsk ghetto in Korola Street (1992, renewed 2008), and a monument to the ghetto victims in Iubileina Square. Notable are also Levin’s extension to the Yama memorial in 2000 and Holocaust monuments in Haradzeia (2004) and Slutsk (2007).

76. President Lukashenka appeared at the Yama memorial in 1997, 2000, and 2008, during the cele-bration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto.

77. a number of local media reported about the event, among others Belarus’ Segodnia, “Trostenets: zdes’ ubivali lyudei” 7 June 2014, 6-7; Minskiy Kurier from 10 July 2014, likewise, had front page cover-age of the event.

78. alyaksandr Lukashenka, 8 July 2014, Trostenets.79. Peter Junge-Wentrup, press conference, IBB Minsk, 8 July 2014.80. Sergeǐ Chilman cited in Der Vernichtungsort Trostenez in der europäischen Erinnerung:

Materialien zur internationalen Konferenz vom 21.-24. März 2013 in Minsk (Internationales Bildungs-und Begegnungswerk Minsk, 2013), 7.

81. Viktor Balakirev, 8 July 2014, Minsk.82. Quoted after Per ander Rudling, “The Khatyn Massacre in Belorussia: a Historical Controversy

Revisited,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 45; see also alexandra goujon, “Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and genocide in Belarus,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 6 (2010): 6–25.

83. goujon, “Memorial Narratives,” 17; Louis Fritz gibbon, “Khatyn: another Hoax” Journal of Historical Review 1, no. 3 (1980): 231.

84. Leonid Levin in andrei Levchik (dir.), Monologue (Belarusian Video Center, 2012), DVD.85. “Nerazgadannye tainy Trostentsa” Eurobelarus, 24 april 2014, http://eurobelarus.info/news/

society/2014/04/24/nerazgadannye-tayny-trostentsa.html (accessed 6 September 2014).


http://eurobelarus.info/news/society/2014/04/24/nerazgadannye-tayny-trostentsa.html

http://eurobelarus.info/news/society/2014/04/24/nerazgadannye-tayny-trostentsa.html



86. evgenii Tsumarov, “Trostenets, polveka bespamyastva,” Jewish Freedom, http://bit.ly/1w1wBXJ (accessed 6 September 2014).

87. gerasimova, interview, 2014.88. Bekus, Struggle over Identity, 207.89. Ibid., 215.90. goujon, “Memorial Narratives of WWII,” 6–12; Marples, “Our Glorious Past”; ackermann,

“Wem gehört der große Sieg?”; Rudling “For a Heroic Belarus!”91. For example, Leonid Levin’s 2008 memorial to the victims of the Minsk ghetto, consisting of a

broken table and a chair, was inspired by the Berlin memorial to deported german Jews, “The abandoned Room” [Der verlassene Raum], by Karl Biedermann (1996). Symptomatic also was the use of klezmer music during the Trostenets commemoration events in 2014—a common musical choice during Holocaust commemoration events in germany. See Magdalena Waligórska, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

92. Jewish heritage revival in Poland has been the subject of numerous recent analyses. See Ruth e. gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); Ruth e. gruber, “Beyond Virtually Jewish . . . Balancing the Real, the Surreal and Real Imaginary Places,” in Reclaiming Memory. Urban Regeneration in the Historic Jewish Quarters of Central European Cities, ed. Monika Murzyn-Kupisz and Jacek Purchla (Kraków: International Cultural Centre, 2009), 63–80; erica T. Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); erica Lehrer, ed., Na szczęście to Żyd: Polskie figurki żydów / Lucky Jews: Poland’s Jewish Figurines (Kraków: Ha!art, 2014); Waligórska, Klezmer’s Afterlife; Magdalena Waligórska, “The Framing of the Jew: Paradigms of Incorporation and Difference in the Jewish Heritage Revival in Poland,” in Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations, ed. Simon Bronner (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 313–31.

93. Krzysztof gierat cited in R. Radłowska, “Dybuk nim trzęsie niemiłosiernie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 27, 2008, 23.

Magdalena Waligórska is an assistant Professor of eastern european History and Culture at the University of Bremen, germany. She is the author of Klezmer’s afterlife. an ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and germany (Oxford University Press, 2013).


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