Brukhe Feldman was born in 1938 or 1939 in Bershad. Her father died fighting in the war when she was three years old, and she was brought up by her mother. She spent much of her life working in a furniture factory.
Other Interviews:
Postwar Religious PracticeHunger of 1946
Kheskele - the Clarinetist
Burial Customs
The Shiva
A Jew Must Eat Matzo
A Gravestone for My Mother
Bershad, Ukraine
Brukhe Feldman remembers in this clip the death of her mother by pointing out the help she received from the community .
The Germans vandalized many Jewish cemeteries during the war, stealing gravestones and using them for paving and construction. Once the Red Army arrived, the vandalism continued, as locals made up for the shortage in building supplies by raiding what remained of the Jewish cemeteries.
In the years after the war, local Jewish communities tended to what was left of the cemetery; they sought out toppled gravestones and replanted them on the ground as close to the grave they marked as possible. They carved new gravestones, marking the hundreds—sometimes thousands - who lay in mass graves. Since many of these mass graves lay deep in the woods or in unknown locations, often the Jewish cemetery served as the only available memorial site.
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)