Like many middle-class Jewish families in the region, the Pommers household was multilingual: Leon spoke Yiddish with his father, Russian with his mother, and Polish with his sisters. The chronicle was a remarkable achievement, and reflected the high educational standards of the school and the remarkable teachers who inspired the children.īy Pruzhany’s standards, Leon’s family stood near the top of the socioeconomic scale. Max Weinreich, the director of the Vilna-based YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute).
#Alice greenwood personal nightmare archive
Emanuel Ringelblum, who would later organize the Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw ghetto, and Dr.
In 1932 the students of the Yiddishist CYSHO (Central Yiddish School Organization) published a rich and detailed history of the town, which drew warm praise from many leading Jewish historians and scholars, including Dr. Pruzhany also boasted an amateur Yiddish theater. There were two Jewish weekly newspapers, one Zionist and one leftist Yiddishist. There were dozens of organizations and associations in Jewish Pruzhany, including all-important credit societies, artisans unions, religious fellowships, and several Jewish schools. Begin headed the Betar youth movement in Poland and later became prime minister of the State of Israel.) (When Leon was in his 20s he befriended Menachem Begin from nearby Brest-Litovsk. Jewish young people joined youth movements-some Zionist, some in support of the Jewish Socialist Bund-and it was these organizations that nurtured a dynamic youth counterculture based on reading, sports, hiking, and amateur theater. Pruzhany’s Jews exhibited a lot of interest in politics, and Jewish delegates played a major role on the town council. Major cultural and economic changes were transforming Jewish life. Like other towns in interwar Poland, the Jewish Pruzhany where Leon spent his youth was a far cry from the stereotypical shtetl of the American Jewish imagination. One of the titans of Jewish religious thought in the 20th century, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993)-the Rav-was born in Pruzhany. Pruzhany’s Jews basked in the reflected glory of the great rabbis who had lived there, including Rabbi Joel Sirkes (1561-1640), who was also known as the B’’kh, after his classic text B ayit Kh adash and Rabbi David ben Samuel Ha-Levi (1586-1667), or the T’’az, after his T urei Z ahav. The Polish census of 1931 showed 7,626 inhabitants, 4,208 of whom were Jews. According to the Russian census of 1897, Pruzhany had 5,080 Jews out of a total population of 7,633.
In 1644 the Polish King Wladyslaw IV issued a charter that promised Jews the right to trade under the protection of the crown. There is a town record of a Jewish burial society as early as 1450. Jews had lived there for centuries and had long made up a solid majority of the population. Pruzhany was a midsized town by Eastern European standards. When Leon was a toddler, his mother, Fania, first noticed her son’s love of music, and she took him to Minsk to study the piano when he was only five years old. Leon had two sisters: an older sister, Bertha, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s (and eventually helped Leon procure an American visa), and a younger sister, Sabina, who was born in 1926. Leon Pommers (Pomeraniec) was born on October 12, 1914, in Pruzhany (Pruzana in Polish), which belonged to the Russian Empire at the time and was then part of Poland from 1919 to 1939.
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