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31 2 red Star on the Jewish Street Sovietizing Jewish minsk: Struggles and compromises when the Bolsheviks began to municipalize private businesses across the city, the owners of the eighteen bookstores in minsk (including one Judaica bookstore), petitioned the local authorities. They promised to follow Soviet instructions and apply “Soviet tenets” to the book business if the Bolsheviks returned the bookstores to the management of their owners.1 Yudl Shapiro, who owned a bookstore on Alexandrovskii Street, pleaded to the executive committee of the Belorussian Soviet of workers, Soldiers, and peasants not to take over his store. This would deprive his family of their only source of income. He even begged to be employed as a clerk in “his own bookstore.”2 But the Bolsheviks brushed aside similar petitions. in their sweeping move to sovietize the city and remold it in the spirit of communism, they disrupted the lives of many minsk residents, Jews and non-Jews alike. The sovietization of minsk involved an onslaught against Jewish life. Shortly after taking over the city in July 1920, the Bolsheviks dismantled most existing Jewish institutions . many religious and educational institutions such as synagogues and hadorim (Jewish religious schools) as well as the minsk kehillah, all of which had formed the core of Jewish life before the Bolshevik rise to power, were closed down and their buildings municipalized. The Jewish cemetery on university Street was requisitioned from the Jewish community by the land commission of the city executive committee and turned into a grazing field for goats. “All minsk residents who live in the center of town and own goats must obtain the permission from the city and pay a ruble and 50 32 | Becoming Soviet Jews kopecks a year per goat to have access to the field,” read an announcement in the local press.3 zionist publications were shut down. with the exception of poale-zion and HeHaluts (The pioneer), all zionist organizations discontinued their legal activity; some went underground. The Bund, which functioned as an independent party until march 1921, was forced to merge with the communist party. The words of a worker employed in the minsk tobacco factory on how to punish counterrevolutionaries echoed the growing intolerance toward non-communist parties and organizations during the red terror campaigns of mass arrests and executions: “Their place is the gallows!”4 The main sovietizing agency on the Jewish street was the evsektsiia, or the Jewish section of the communist party. The central Bureau was established in moscow in 1918.5 in minsk, the first evsektsiia was organized in 1919, but as the polish army neared the border with Soviet russia its members were drafted into the red Army and the section collapsed.6 in 1920, after minsk became the capital of the Belorussian SSr, headquarters of the Belorussian communist party, and administrative and bureaucratic hub for the new political system, the main Bureau of the evsektsiia was established once again. it became operative on August 8, as the main Bureau of the evsektsiia of Belorussia.7 its mission was to sovietize the Jewish population through Yiddish, the language accessible to most Jews, and “vanquish” all pre-revolutionary Jewish parties and communal organizations. Besides destroying the foundations of pre-revolutionary Jewish life, the evsektsiia also strove to create new educational, political and cultural institutions that would—so it hoped—replace the role that Judaism, Hebrew culture, and zionism had played for minsk Jews. * * * The sovietization of the Jewish street also involved taking over and incorporating into Bolshevik organizations existing “bourgeois” institutions. After all, lenin’s official position vis-à-vis pre-revolutionary society envisioned the employment of the professional “bourgeois” force—the spetsy (specialists)—and the exploitation of their knowledge to build the new Soviet society. in may 1921, the minsk branches of prominent pre-revolutionary Jewish communal institutions were placed under the supervision of the Jewish section of the people’s commissariat for nationality Affairs and transferred to the Soviet agency’s locale.8 For example, the minsk ort (obshchestvo rasprostraneniia remeslennogo zemledelcheskogo truda sredi evreev) was supposed to attract the local Jewish population to “productive work,” easing the transition of Jewish workers and artisans from small private workshops to large-scale plants, factories, and agricultural cooperatives.9 By virtue of the authority it still enjoyed among the local Jewish population, the old leadership could lend some credibility to the Soviet enterprise.10 But despite communist supervision, these institutions were excluded from the state financial budget, and their activities became contingent upon...

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