Sofia Geller was born in 1929 in Bratlsav. Her father worked as a coachman before the war. During the war, she evacuated to Central Asia, where she worked in a collective farm. When she returned to Bratslav after the war, she worked in the city council. She is married to Dovid Geller. She and Dovid have two daughters who live in Moscow.
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Hebrew – the Language of Prayer
Bratslav, Ukraine
Women in the prewar period were not commonly taught the Hebrew language in which prayers were recited. Only a few Jewish women from the pre-revolutionary generation had acquired some reading knowledge of Hebrew. Some of the younger women whose mothers had acquired rudimentary Hebrew-language skills remembered with pride how their mothers were able to follow along in the Hebrew text. Many women prayed extemporaneously in Yiddish, uttering heartfelt supplications to God. But women with bookish knowledge learned to say their prayers according to the canonical version, in Hebrew, the Holy Tongue. In this clip, Sofia Geller tells us that her mother prayed in Hebrew, but as a young girl Sofia not only didn’t understand the Hebrew, but didn’t even know why her mother was using a strange language. Only now does she understand that her mother was praying in Hebrew.