Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

Conclusion: This World and the Next

Conclusion: This World and the Next For the Jewish community of the Russian Empire, the Great War was a battle between this world and the next. Fighting on the side of this world were the innumerable relief organizations, international aid societies, hospitals, soup kitchens, theater societies, literary groups, artists, and ordinary people who worked to maintain what they could of a normal social and cultural life in what was evidently a flawed but (some would say) ultimately salvageable world.1 Fighting for the next world was a diverse group that included socialist revolutionaries, religious extremists, and diplomatic visionaries, all of whom were convinced that they could harness the raw energy of war to create another and better utopian world in place of the one the ideologues and tanks were destroying. Nowhere was the triumph of the “next-worldniks” greater than in Soviet Russia, where the thirst to destroy was insatiable. One of the most powerful accounts of that war and the destruction it wrought among the Jewish community of Eastern Europe was written by S. An-sky, whose Khurbn Galitsye (Destruction of Galicia) chronicled the Jewish community of Austrian Galicia during these turbulent times. An-sky not only documented the destruction but also helped bring aid to the affected populations and worked with the JHES to preserve the cultural legacy of the Jewish communities under threat. Like many other associations and societies of the era, the JHES responded to the chaos of total war by reinventing itself as a voluntary aid society and playing an important role in collecting and preserving Jewish artifacts. In the fall of 1915, the JHES leadership voted to embark on a campaign to transfer articles of historic and ethnographic value from the war zone to synagogues and other social institutions far from the front, where they could be preserved in relative safety. The JHES authorized An-sky, who was in the Pale of Settlement at the time conducting his ethnographic expedition, to take charge of such activity.2 In January 1916, the committee decided to place advertisements in all the major Russian Jewish journals urging those who lived in the war zone to send objects or writings of “national significance” to the JHES for preservation. The society sent funds to B. N. Rubenshteyn, a member of the society who was in the Pale, 284 Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire to collect such items. The society also asked the Petrograd synagogue for permission to store Torah scrolls retrieved from the war zone in its sanctuary and sought additional resources from the Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims.3 Rubenshteyn spent the next two months trying to negotiate a way to bring the holy objects and archival material to the newly renamed capital, Petrograd, before concluding that it could not be done without investing at least 1,000 rubles and that taking the items directly to Petrograd would not be possible. He recommended first collecting the objects in an urban center within the Pale, such as Minsk or Vitebsk, and from there arranging for relocation to the capital.4 By March 1916, Rubenshteyn was working on collecting materials from the Vitebsk region, while An-sky was broadening his efforts to save material from the Kiev region. The JHES followed Rubenshteyn’s advice and allocated an additional thousand rubles toward the effort while simultaneously asking the Petrograd synagogue to match its donation with another thousand rubles.5 A private philanthropist helped fund the frantic effort with a donation of 3,000 rubles, but additional funds were still needed from the Petrograd Jewish Assistance Committee.6 Unfortunately, wartime tariffs prevented the evacuation of the Torah scrolls from proceeding as planned.7 By August it had become clear that the evacuation work had failed: Rubenshteyn was instructed to switch his efforts from recovery to documenting lost treasures.8 In December, hope was restored when the Academy of Sciences announced a plan to rescue items of historic importance from the war zones. The JHES sent a letter detailing the inventory it had composed and asked the academy to continue the work it had begun.9 Late in the year, the society succeeded in opening a Jewish Ethnographic Museum in Petrograd that included materials rescued from the front. However, the society closed the museum the following summer as revolutionary unrest swept through the capital, and it did not reopen it until 1923. In 1929, the Soviet government closed the museum and dispersed its collection to various academies...