Jewish Community of Sokolow

Article written on the occasion of 590 anniversary of the city of Sokolow.

When I first came to Sokolow Podlaski with my father back in 1998, there was nothing, just nothing in the whole town that remembered the beautiful large Jewish Community that was an integral and important part of the town for so many generations. We were very disappointed and hurt. We felt the 5800 Jews of Sokolow were forgotten and banished from their birthplace again. That is why I am so grateful and appreciative of your invitation to include our story which is also your story in this important event. This is a blessed change which will make us all better people - pure human beings who share the same pains and the same dreams, people before they became separated by ideas of religions and countries. So let me first congratulate you, All dear citizens so Sokolow Podlaski, a town that is always in my heart. I wish you a lot of prosperity, flourishment and let All of you have better and better success in all spheres of life.

I am representing about 300 people who are decadents of Sokolow Jews who live all over the world - from Australia, United States, Israel, France and more.
Let me start telling our story from the beginning.

In 1424, when Sokolow became a town, there were already Jews In the area.
The old synagogue was built in 1650, a year in which the owner of Sokolow, Boguslaw Radzivill, gave various rights to the Jews of the town. Another synagogue which exits to theses days was built in Dluga street in 1841. The Jewish people of Sokolow were highly literate - both women and men and they spoke Polish as well as Yiddish. They were mostly engaged in crafts - they worked as barbers, bakers, furries, cap makers, tailors, butchers and also in trade.

Life in Sokolow was flourishing in all areas of life. There used to be various youth movements, libraries, schools, theatres and Sokolow Jewry had one of the most famous yeshiva court in Europe - the chassidic yeshiva of rabbi Yizchk Zelig Morgenstern-One of the most famous rabbis all over Erope. His yeshiva in pike a street included classic students who came from all over Poland and Europe to study Torah and Talmud with this special bright rabbi, who served as a doctor as well. This went on for centuries until dark clouds came wipe it all forever.

At the beginning of the 20th century the difficult economic situation together with the rise of the nationalist government of Poland, made life difficult and many Jews immigrated to the United States and Argentina. Still at the time the Jewish population grew to be 5800 people, which was 60 percent of the whole population of Sokolow in the eve of 1939. The nazis invaded Sokolow on the 1st of September 1939, clearing their way with troops on land as well as areal attacks. My father's little sister, Rachel - Ruchale in Yiddish - was killed that day together with a friend. They were both on their way to school. They were only 10 years old. 19 other Jews were killed that day and a lot more injured. A lot of discussion started among Jewish families. Should we leave everything behind and save our lives or shall we stay and hope that the Germans will be as civilised as they were in the last time they conquered Poland in the First World War. People were very confused and didn't know what to do. My grandfather, like many others in the sorrow ding decided it was enough to lose one child. He wouldn't risk his family and he crossed the Bug river which was set then as the new border between Poland and Russia in the Molotov agreement. My grandmother refused to leave her old parents behind and my grandfather had to take her by force. My family, like all other Jewish families at the time was religious and had many children each. My grandmother for example had 7 sisters and brothers and each one of them had 7-10 children. Nobody survived. Not Share not Henia not Soul, nobody.
On their arrival, the nazis made a ghetto in 2 streets around the synagogue cramming about 5000 people. Another 2000 Jews were brought to live in this tiny area front nearby towns like Lodz and Kalisz. They were all forced to work for the nazis and got in return a small portion of soup and bread. In 1941 the nazis closed the ghetto with a brick wall. Hunger, typhus and death were everyday and everywhere. Jews were desperate and some of them who couldn't bear the suffering killed themselves. According to testimonies, the catholic community reacted with either ignoring the situation or helping the nazis and turn in Jews they saw trying to run. Some of them did risk their lives to save Jews like in the case of Aaron Elster.

On the most sacred day for the Jewish people the nazis forced all the Jews to gather in the town's square- the Maly Rynek and deported them in cattle wagons to Treblinka. After their arrival there they were all burned to death. Those who tried escape were shot on the spot. More than 90 percent of the Jewish citizens of Sokolow Podlaski were killed. This of course happened all over Europe.

Today, there are a few dozens decendants of this community but their children like me and their grandchildren are doing everything possible to remember our dear families who were killed and tortured just because they were Jews. They did nothing wrong.
We live all around the world - Israel, the USA, Australia, France and more. We all remember. We will never forget and even though all of us are very successful and happy. We live in the shadow of our history, of our missing grandparents and aunts and cousins.

I am writing this article with the hope that telling our story which is also this town's story will enable our next generations a better future. A future in which catholic and Jews live together peacefully, knowing we were all made by the same god.
Remembering we are all children of god. God bless you, dear citizens of Sokolow.

Shoshi Shatit

Sokolow Community

Dear friends,
First and foremost, it is so exciting for me (I am Shoshi Shatit, Israel) to see that more and more descandants of SP Community are joing in and are eager to track and keep memory going. As a child , I always used to hear my parents say-"There's no one left". This increasing number of people who are joining us shows this phrase wasn't exact- it depends if you look back or look forward. I think our group looks back only to bring history and truth and legacy forward- to pass it to our children and grandchildren.

I welcome every person who wishes to become our community member, to join our group. So far, we succeeded having two memeorial ceremonies in Israel, a meeting in which people could share and find connections and of course we had the honour of enabling our dear Kasia to visit Israel and participate in the last memorial ceremony we had in Israel.

You can contact me in the following email and I will join your email to the rest of the group so you can ask and share your information with all members.

I wish you a great day,

Shoshi Shatit
shoshi.shatit@gmail.com

Visit at Rabbi Morgenstern

My dad,Ze'ev Tzudiker studied Torah with Mendel Morgenstern in the "cheder" in Rabbai Zelig Morgenstern"s Yeshiva. They were good friends until they grew up, My dad had to leave the "chder" and start working to help the family and Mendel was sent to study in the great Yeshiva of "Chaachmei Lublin".

Two years ago I arranged a meeting between both of them. They were excited to see each other. They were both in their 90's already but looked like small children again.

Here 's what I wrote about what the Rabbai told me-

The meeting between my father and the rabbai was so emotional that I could hardly speak.The two spoke and spoke and for a short time became small children in the cheder again. I will certainly need another meeting with him to complete the whole picture.

Rabbai Mendel Morgenstern is a charming nobel person and his wife too .He is now 90 years old and he has his own Yeshiva which is called Sokolow-Kotzek beit-midrash . (He is the grand-grandchild of the Great Rabbai of Kotzek)

He told me he survived the war by himself. As his grandfather told him,he ran away from Sokolow to Wilna,stayed there for half a year and then it was conquered by the Russians again,which enabled him to escape . He flew to Japan,wandering to India and China and then in 1942,came to settle in Israel. He had another sister who was the only one to survive the war out of the 19 people they were.his sister,Pearl,passed away last year.

The Rabbai and his wife have 7 children- 5 girls and 2 boys .

I sked him about visiting Poland and he said he wouldn't ever step his leg on this land. he said that the Poles were always as antisemic as the Nazis . The relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Sokolow were tense and a lot of times the Jews were victims of Pogroms.

He also told me that because of his grandfather's reputation in religion.Sokolow became a Jewish central place to which students from all around poland and even from abroad came to study in his Yeshiva.

It turned out that everything my father remebered and told me was very accurate. He confirmed to me the fact that there was a small jail in his grandfather's house. He also confimed the fact that his grandfather practiced medicine . When I asked him did he study medicine,he said that one of his grandfather's students was adoctor- and they had an agreement. Rabbai Zelig M. taught him talmud Torah and the doctor taght him medicine. He used to make accurate diagnosis better than official doctors. He was very self- confident about his observations. The farmacy in town respected his medications .

Hecame home to Sokolow the evening before the war broke out (it was Thursday,the 31th of August).His Parents prepared him a hiding place in the Boidem full with sand and intended him topractice going into it in case a war starts for the next day but the bombs came earlier than expected, the next morning before 7 ocloc'k while he was still in bed.

I showed him pictures I took of Sokolow in my visits there and also kasia's pictures of her exhibition. I told him about our group and our intentions. He listened curiously but said nothing. He looked in a great pain.

The Rabbai published his grandfather's writings. He wrote 2 books- She'erit Itzchak and She'erit Israel which deal with religious matters.

May his soul rest in peace.

Shoshi Shatit

My father and his family are running away after the war

My father is behind the tree, after him-his father, mother, brother and sister. They left their older sister, Tauba with her husband and 2 children-one of them a baby. After going through so much during the war, they had to split. The reason was because they had to leave the camp very late at night and the "hagana" people told them they don't allow babies so they won't be caught. Tragedy continues much after the war ended.

Shoshi Shatit

To Cultivate Memory

Batami Engel was a small girl when her mother was invovled in the consturction of a monument of Jews from her native town murdered during World War II. Those who had survived and emigrated to Israel would meet by the monument at the Holon cemetery every year. Year by year, their ranks shrank until there was no one on Yom HaShoah who could come to the large stone with “Sokolow Podlaski” inscribed on it. Several decades later Batami returned to the cemetery with her grandson. She and forty other people whose roots can be traced to this small town in the eastern Poland decided to resume their meetings as their parents and grandparents did. And although not all of them had ever visited Poland, it is something important for them, and what they do inspires others to engage in similar actions.

The Batami family had lived in Sokołów for generations. When I inquire about the details, instead of Batami her teenage grandson, who knows the story very well, responds. His great grandmother had decided to emigrate to Palestine even before the war. She believed that through hard work she would be able to build a new country and that it was the right place for her. Her parents, wealthy and influential town dwellers would not consent. They could not imagine living outside Poland, particularly in such a remote and unfriendly place Palestine seemed to them at that time. However, their daughter was determined to go. When she left home with her luggage, her parents informed the police that she had stolen their money and jewelry. That is how they tried to keep her in Poland. But she had put one male clothes and a cap slipped by policemen who patrolled the railway station. When the train started rolling, she changed her disguise and waved goodbye to her parents standing on the platform. That was the last time they had seen each other.

The survivors were mainly those who had managed to emigrate to Palestine or America and those who were in Russia during the war. Some of them returned to their home towns in search of any of their relatives. But hardly ever did they find anyone. “You won’t find anything here any more. Leave this place”, was the advice the Jewish Holocaust survivors heard. And so they did. They would leave, first to Łódź, and later to Palestine or the United States. Behind they left their home towns, because no one waited for them any more. They abandoned their former life and started a new one in a different place. But they could not forget about their families, their neighbors, the people they had seen every day in the street, and whom they would have no chance of seeing again. That is why monuments of Jews from individual towns who had been murdered by the Germans were erected. At he Holon cemetery in Israel, Batami's mother was involved in such a project.

For years the survivors would meet by this monument, but from year to year there were fewer of them. Finally nobody would come. No one would light a candle, no one prayed, no one read out the names of their relatives. The monument stood there on its own, and life went on at its own pace. This began to change a few years ago. Shoshi Shatit, whose father had been born in Sokołów, decided to find out more about her roots and the town where her family had lived for many years. Initially, her inquiries arose astonishment among her relatives, as they took up a lot of her time and there was no way of knowing the result, and her first trip to Poland turned out to be disappointing. “There was nothing there. Nothing at all”, Shoshi recalls.

Shoshi was not the only person to look for information about her father’s home town. It turned out that there many more such people. They are bound by the common past of their ancestors who had been their neighbors. Today, even though they live in different countries they try to rebuild this community that bound their parents and grandparents. They meet, exchange information, revive memories of a world that will never come back. When they look at it, Shoshi’s friends themselves are taking interest in their family history. And they start their inquiries.

Batami was a small girl when she visited the Holon cemetery for the last time. On 8 April 2013, on Yom HaShoah, she came here for the first time after many years. She brought her grandson, who knows the family history very well. Apart form them another forty people came, whose family history can be traced to Sokołów Podlaski. They came here because memory is a very important part of their identity. They brought their children and grandchildren so that they could also cherish this memory.

“Today is the day when we want to say that we remember the 6 million of Holocaust victims, particularly the six thousand from Sokołów Podlaski”, said one of those who came to the cemetery. “We remember their death in the ghettos, camps or on the streets of Polish towns. But this cannot be the only thing one can say about a person - that they died. Because life is most important. What you do shows how much you want to find out more about the life of your ancestors, not only about their death. And this is something we’ll never forget.”

At the Holon cemetery, on Yom HaShoah, they gather by symbolic tombstones dedicated to people from a given locality. There are still many monuments there which nobody visits...

Katarzyna Markusz

Ceremonia na cmentarzu Holon

טקס יום השואה לסוקולוב פודלסקי- 2012

נכתב על ידי שושי שתית

Zdjęcia z ceremonii upamiętniającej ludzi, którzy zginęli w sokołowskim getcie. Ceremonia odbyła się na cmentarzu Holon w Izraelu 19 kwietnia 2012 roku, a została zorganizowana przez Shoshi Shatit.

Wśród jej uczestników było dwóch urodzonych w Sokołowie mężczyzn, którym udało się przeżyć wojnę.

Dziękuję im wszystkim za obecność.

1.

ב-22בספטמבר 1942 במוצאי יום כיפור ירד חושך על העולם ועל סוקולוב פודלסקי. יהודי העיר וסביבותיה רוכזו בכיכר השורק הקטן ב- MALY RYNEK  ושולחו ברכבות מוות לטרבלינקה שם נשרפו למוות בידי מכונת ההשמדה  והרשע הזדונית.

עיר, שאלפי הודיה חיו בה מאות שנים, והעשירו את העיר בתרבותם וביצירתם ,,עיר שהצמיחה נוער ציוני שכמה לעלות לארץ ישראל, שהתברכה בישיבה מפוארת שחסידם הגיעו אליה מכל רחבי פולין. 

המשפחות היהודיות דיברו ברובן יידיש והיו דתיות, שמרו שבת והביאו לעולם ילדים רבים. עזרה הדדית וסולידריות, שמחה ושירה והשקט של השבת. תנועות נוער כמו השומר הצעיר ,ויכוחים ,משחקי שח מט .עיר קטנה אך שוקקת חיים.

יד הרשע קטעה את החיים היהודים העשירים האלה בסוקולוב לנצח. 

אבל היום , הנייה, שרול, רויזה, מנדל, שור'לה, היום באנו לומר לכם שלא שכחנו

Tzudiker Family

After the war, in an American refugee camp in Germany - the surviving family - my father - standing on the left, his sister Tauba and her husband Izik Szmerlak and Mirele Tzudiker - my father's sister. Sitting - my grandparents - Moshe and Chaya Tzudiker, on lap - Frida Szmerlak and little girl Leya - both Tauba's daughters

My father's family after coming to Israel in 1948.
My father - on the right behind, his sister - Mirele Tzudiker and her fiance Joseph Last from Łuków. Their parents - Moshe Tzudiker Hacohen and his wife Chaya Tzudiker

Joseph-Shaye Tzudiker, my father's brother and his cousin Elii Wechter.

Two visits

Sokolow Podlaski - a town without a past? (1998)

After 60 years, in a blue shining mercedes dad comes back to his old hometown, to the house he was born in, to the street he played in. He comes back to the grave of his little sister, Rachel.

Rachel Tzudiker was only 10 years old when she was killed by German air bomb on the street on her way to school. It was the first of September and Rachel, being a hard-working student, was walking gladly to school with her friend, who was also killed that day. The bomb hit an electricity column, which fell on both of them, leaving their school-bags and families alone and in grief.



Rachel Tzudiker-my fathers little sister with her 2 school friends


Rachel was the youngest daughter of Moshe and Chaya-Gittel Tzudiker - my grandparents. She had black hair and blue eyes-like my father's. She had a smile like an angel. The whole family, together with their plenty of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, lived in the same town of Sokolow Podlaski in the heart of Poland.

I will never know Rachel. I will neither know any of the dozens other family members my father grew up with. They were all humiliated and murdered in the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. Some of them were writers, some of them doctors, artists, shoemakers, butchers. Most of them were tailors- a talent that ran in the family for generations.

The Tzudiker - Wechter Family

Moshe Tzudiker Hacohen,  my  grandfather , was born in 1895 in Warsaw to Rachel and Ze'ev Tzudiker Hacohen.  He was 5 years old both his parents died and he was sent to his uncle who raised him. When he was 18 years old  he left religious life and became secular.  After he got married he came close once again to religion; kept sabbat, went to the synagogue,  not   too religious but he tried to make the best he could.
My grandmother, Chaya Gitle was born in Sokolow Podlaski  in 1894 to Avraham-Ber and Channa Wechter (Gryn). Her father was a rabbai , a well appreciated man and a very talented tailor.
During the summer vacation when she was 17, the family sent her to Warsaw to their family's house to work as a maid and bring home some money. This is how she met my grandfather.

Moshe and Chaya

My grandfather left Warsaw and came to live with her and her family in Sokolow. My grandfather had only one brother, Srul (Israel) Tzudiker, who stayed in Warsaw with their uncle. During the summer vacations he used the spend time in Sokolow with his brother. During the war time he was a student in Warsaw University, studying history.