Dniester Jews Between

PARALLEL RUPTURES: JEWS OF BESSARABIA AND TRANSNISTRIA BETWEEN ROMANIAN NATIONALISM AND SOVIET COMMUNISM, 1918-1940 BY DMITRY TARTAKOVSKY DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Mark D. Steinberg, Chair Professor Keith Hitchins Professor Diane P. Koenker Professor Harriet Murav Assistant Professor Eugene Avrutin Abstract ―Parallel Ruptures: Jews of Bessarabia and Transnistria between Romanian Nationalism and Soviet Communism, 1918-1940,‖ explores the political and social debates that took place in Jewish communities in Romanian-held Bessarabia and the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic during the interwar era. Both had been part of the Russian Pale of Settlement until its dissolution in 1917; they were then divided by the Romanian Army‘s occupation of Bessarabia in 1918 with the establishment of a well-guarded border along the Dniester River between two newly-formed states, Greater Romania and the Soviet Union. At its core, the project focuses in comparative context on the traumatic and multi-faceted confrontation with these two modernizing states: exclusion, discrimination and growing violence in Bessarabia; destruction of religious tradition, agricultural resettlement, and socialist re-education and assimilation in Soviet Transnistria. It examines also the similarities in both states‘ striving to create model subjects usable by the homeland, as well as commonalities within Jewish responses on both sides of the border. Contacts between Jews on either side of the border remained significant after 1918 despite the efforts of both states to curb them, thereby necessitating a transnational view in order to examine Jewish political and social life in borderland regions. The desire among Jewish secular leaders to mold their co-religionists into modern Jews reached across state borders and ideological divides and sought to manipulate respective governments to establish these goals, however unsuccessful in the final analysis. Finally, strained relations between Jews in peripheral borderlands with those at national/imperial cores, Moscow and Bucharest, sheds light on the complex circumstances surrounding the inclusion versus exclusion debates at the heart of all interwar European states and the complicated negotiations that took place within all minority communities that responded to state policies. ii Acknowledgements This project would have never seen the light of day if not for the consistent support and encouragement of a group of generous scholars and intellectuals at the University of Illinois. First of all my advisor, Mark D. Steinberg, has always extended steady and unyielding positivism that has been paramount. Diane Koenker provided critical readings and ideas about Soviet history throughout; Keith Hitchins gave me many good suggestions and kept me honest on my interpretations of Romanian life and politics; Eugene Avrutin importantly put my work in broader perspective in realtion to Jewish history; Harriet Murav prepared me for researching in Yiddish, helped me appreciate the uses of literature in historical writing and generously introduced me to a family of young scholars whose input was important to me. Among these were David Shneer, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Simon Rabinovitch, Gennady Estraikh, Jarrod Tanny, Deborah Yalen, and Rebbeka Klein-Peišova. Even more certain is that without the personal support I received from family and friends, I would have failed also. I will always remain grateful to my mother, Rita, for her patience, support, and prodding; for my great friend, Matt, who donated hours of his time to force me to speak to a non-specialized audience and in the process taught me the meaning of real friendship; to my son Alex for his inspiration; and most of all to my wife Elena, who understood me and maintained faith in me, and through her sacrifice and love allowed me to complete this endeavor. This project is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Polevoy, a man who saw the beginning of my scholarly development and believed in me always. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: A Borderland Transformed…………………………………………………….31 Chapter 2: Under a New Roof: Hope and Disappointment in Post WWI Bessarabia…….90 Chapter 3: The Rise of Jewish Nationalist Politics in Bessarabia after 1924 ……………156 Chapter 4: Jews in Transnistria: Against the Grain……………………………………....221 Chapter 5: Jewish Politics and Identity across the Divide: Dreams in Common………...291 Epilogue.............................................................................................................................369 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………...379 iv Introduction At the coming of the Russian Revolution in 1917, most Jews of Transnistria and Bessarabia, regions along both banks of the Dniester River that today comprise the Republic of Moldova, still maintained traditional lifestyles marked by particular Jewish dress, food, festivals, religious observance and urban life in shtetls that culturally, linguistically, and physically set them apart from surrounding peoples. These ―Dniester Jews‖ maintained extensive contacts not only with co-religionists across the Dniester, but also with communities throughout the southern Pale of Settlement. Their economic condition and occupational distribution differed not significantly from the rest of Russian Jewry, although many more made their living through agriculture than was common across much of the Pale. Travel by Jews throughout the region, especially between market centers such as Odessa (first and foremost), but also Kishinev, Soroca, Benderi, and Tiraspol, formed a regional identity that traversed the Dniester River and recognized no boundary along its length. Less than one generation later, by the onset of military operations in the region in 1939, circumstances had changed significantly. As a result of the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, a term of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in August 1939 with Nazi Germany, all of the region‘s Jews again found themselves united under Russian (now Soviet) rule as before 1918. The preceding two decades, however, had witnessed Bessarabia under Romanian control and Transnistria under Soviet authority, when the Dniester River was a zealously guarded and patrolled border between the Soviet Union and Greater Romania. On the left or Soviet bank of the Dniester, Jews had to a great extent ceased to live as they had before under autonomous Jewish traditions: many had become integrated into Soviet culture and had moved toward Soviet cultural and economic centers and away from the region despite state efforts to support 1 Map 1: Eastern Europe, 1919-1929, Times Atlas of European History (London, 1994), 173. indigenous minority cultures. Those that remained witnessed Soviet domination of economic and cultural life. There were many Jews in positions of authority, yet the primacy of Jewish concerns was no longer central for Jewish leaders as before—divisions within the Jewish community far outweighed the common ground. On the opposite side, in Romanian Bessarabia, because of the arrival of refugees first from Ukraine, then from Germany, and finally Poland, there were more Jews residing in 1939 2 than before 1918, even though the state did everything possible to make the place inhospitable for them. Many Bessarabian Jews continued to live on much as they had, with traditional institutions and leaders still largely intact, despite tremendous economic difficulties. The challenge to their authority from new ideas and a new generation of Jewish youth was unprecedented, however. Vast gulfs of opinion among residents had formed over the Jewish future, which, in the context of European-wide debate over responses to modern transformations, was standard. Yet, there remained a sense of Jewish community; in fact in the late 1930s, Bessarabian Jews moved toward greater unity in the face of extreme discrimination and political isolation. Overall, increasingly virulent discrimination and rigid exclusion from Romanian society kept the community together, while in the Soviet case the already present centripidal forces within the Jewish community were successfully exploited by Soviet policy makers. Within the span of just over twenty years, a regional community that was more or less one was torn violently into two. Even more remarkable was the level of social, political, institutional, and cultural transformation achieved. The modern had been encroaching on the traditional here for at least the previous century, but in the interwar years the pace of change quickened to render the past almost unrecognizable: historical continuity of the gradual if quickening transformation of Jewish society toward a West European standard was ruptured. This rupture was not unitary, but rather took place on opposites sides of a created political divide along the Dniester River, occurring simultaneously and in different directions; in parallel. How could such radically abrupt changes have been accomplished? Jews on both banks of the Dniester came to bestride the greatest ideological separation in an age of extreme ideologies: ethnic and racial nationalism on the one hand and socialist internationalism on the other.1 Was this political division, perpetrated by two eagerly modernizing, authoritarian or near- 1 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History

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