The Conscription Case against the Shaposhnik and Dorfman Families
Khashchevatoye, 1861–1868
In the winter of 1863, Jewish fathers in the small townlet of Khashchevatoye found themselves caught in a trap from which there was no easy escape. The Russian Empire demanded soldiers. The Jewish community was required to deliver them. And the names of their sons had risen to the top of the conscription lists.
They did what countless Jewish fathers across the Pale of Settlement had done before them: they tried to hide their boys.
What followed was a seven-year legal ordeal that would entangle three families, community leaders, a merchant, police officers, and imperial courts — a small drama played out in a provincial backwater, yet one that illuminates the impossible choices forced upon Jewish communities under the Tsar.
Under the Russian Empire’s recruitment system, military service lasted up to twenty-five years — a sentence that, for a young Jewish man, meant the near-certain loss of his faith, his language, his family, and his world. A recruit who left at eighteen might not return until his forties, if he returned at all.
The cruelty of the system lay not only in its duration but in its design. The state did not select individual Jewish conscripts. Instead, it imposed a quota on each community and left the Jewish kahal — the community administration — to decide who would go. Each community appointed recruit elders (starosty) responsible for maintaining lists, selecting the men, and physically delivering them to the authorities.
If the community failed to produce enough recruits, the consequences fell on everyone: fines, arrests, collective punishment. The system thus turned Jews against Jews, forcing community leaders to become instruments of imperial power over their own people.
The roots of the case reached back to the Crimean War. In 1855, as Russia fought against the Ottoman Empire and its European allies, the Empire’s need for soldiers intensified. In Khashchevatoye, a young Jew named Vova (Volko) Dorfman, son of Meyer-Gersh Dorfman, was entered into the conscription records.
But Volko never appeared before the conscription board. He simply vanished from the community’s reach.
For six years, nothing happened. Then, in December 1861, the authorities launched an active search. By May 1862, the police had issued orders to locate Volko and deliver him to the Podolia Provincial Conscription Board. He was not found in Gaysin. Eventually, he was discovered far from home, working at a mill in the village of Chernaya Greblya, twenty-one miles NNW of Khashchevatoye — far enough to be beyond the community’s immediate reach, but not so far as to vanish entirely.
The mill belonged to Yudka Tonkonogiy, a third-guild merchant of Gaysin. In June or July of 1862, Tonkonogiy stepped forward and took Volko into his personal surety — a form of bail — pledging to present him to the authorities after settling certain property matters. He assumed full legal responsibility. Volko was effectively released.
But the respite was temporary. The conscription machine had a long memory.
In 1863, a new conscription levy was announced. On December 14, the recruit elders of Khashchevatoye — Borukh Tziser and Leyb-Ber Kozavchinsky — addressed a formal report to the District Police Officer of the Third Camp of the Gaysin District.
Their message was blunt. According to the records of the Treasury Chamber, the families of Mordko Shaposhnik and Meyer-Gersh Dorfman had been assigned to fulfill conscription duty. But both families had concealed their sons. As a result, the community did not have enough recruits to meet its quota.
"Having obtained evidence against the heads of these families, which we have the honor to present herewith, we most respectfully request Your Honor to proceed against them according to the law for concealing recruits."
It is impossible to know what Tziser and Kozavchinsky felt as they signed this document. Were they acting out of duty? Out of fear of the consequences that would befall the entire community? Out of personal animosity? The archives do not tell us. What they do tell us is that by writing this report, the recruit elders set the wheels of imperial justice grinding into motion.
The authorities moved quickly. Within days, young men were apprehended.
On December 24, 1863, a group of community members — a collector named Shaya, along with Itsko Kremenchugsky and Srul Shmulevich — signed a receipt confirming they had taken custody of Ayzik Leybovich Dorfman, described as “a recruit of the Khashchevatoye community,” for delivery to the Gaysin Municipal Duma.
Note: Ayzik’s patronymic, Leybovich, identifies him as the son of Leyba Dorfman (also spelled Dorman) — not of Meer-Gersh Dorfman, whose son was Volko. Leyba and Meyer-Gersh were two separate individuals from two branches of the Dorfman family in Khashchevatoye, and their cases, though intertwined in the same court file, followed very different paths.
Two days later, on December 26, Tziser and Kozavchinsky themselves signed a receipt for Benzion Shaposhnik, who had been seized and was being held at the Ternovetz local police station. They pledged to present him to the Gaysin Municipal Duma and then to the Podolia Recruitment Board “for transfer into military service.”
On January 7, 1864, the District Police Officer forwarded the case upward, reporting to the District Police Chief that he was taking “the most active measures” to ensure the Jewish community of Khashchevatoye delivered its required number of recruits. He also reported an additional allegation: that Mordko Shaposhnik had demanded fifty silver rubles — though from whom and for what purpose, and whether this was ever proven, the documents do not make clear.
A week later, on January 15, the Gaysin Municipal Duma reviewed the case and reached a telling conclusion. According to the 1862 recruitment register, Mordko Shaposhnik was 48 years old and Meer-Gersh Dorfman was 46. Under the Imperial Manifesto governing the 1863 levy, men over 30 could not themselves be drafted.
The fathers were too old to serve. But concealing recruits was a separate crime, punishable by assignment to penal military companies. The Duma could not impose such a sentence on its own authority. It requested that a formal judicial investigation be opened.
The case was no longer a community matter. It had become a criminal affair.
On January 23, 1864, Leyba Dorfman — father of the arrested Ayzik — dictated a petition to the District Officer. He could not write it himself; he was illiterate, and the document was signed on his behalf by a man named Moshko.
His words, filtered through the formal language of imperial petitions, still carry the weight of a father’s desperation.
Two of his sons, Moshko and Yankel Itzko, had died. With their deaths, Ayzik had become the sole surviving worker in the family. Under Article 854 of the Recruitment Statute of 1862, the only working son of a family was legally exempt from conscription.
Leyba explained that he had already submitted petitions to the Gaysin Municipal Duma requesting that Ayzik’s name be removed from the conscription list, and that the death records in the metric books be used to correct the family’s status. But the Duma had not yet completed the necessary paperwork when, on August 13, the District Officer had suddenly seized Ayzik, accusing the family of concealment.
"I most respectfully request that my son Ayzik be left free from persecution until a final decision is issued."
Attached to his petition was a piece of stamped paper worth twenty kopecks in silver — the required fee for filing an official request. Twenty kopecks: the price of a father’s hope.
While Leyba Dorfman fought for Ayzik’s release, the parallel case of Meer-Gersh Dorfman was taking a darker turn.
Volko — the son whom Meer-Gersh was accused of hiding — had been released on surety to the merchant Tonkonogiy back in 1862. But by March 1864, Volko had not been produced before the authorities. His whereabouts were unknown. The guarantor had failed to deliver him.
The consequences fell not on the absent son, nor on his guarantor, but on the father. Meer-Gersh Dorfman was arrested and held in the townlet of Khashchevatoye. He had been in detention for four months when, on March 25, 1864, his wife took action.
Malka Rukhlya Dorfman addressed her petition to the District Police Chief. Her words were measured but firm. Her husband, she wrote, was being held “without guilt.” The matter concerned their son Volko, who stood in the conscription queue — but neither she nor her husband had any information about him, as “for a long time he has been away earning his livelihood in another place.”
She requested that her husband be released and allowed to provide “reliable surety.”
The same day, the District Police Chief responded. He forwarded the petition and ordered the district police officer to explain on what grounds Meer-Gersh was being held. If there were reasons to bring him to trial, a formal report was to be drawn up. If not, the arrest was unlawful.
Five days earlier, on March 19, another petition had landed on the Police Chief’s desk — this one from Yudka Tonkonogiy himself, the third-guild merchant of Gaysin who had taken Volko into his surety.
Tonkonogiy explained that on the 16th of March, the district police officer had removed Volko from the Chernaya Greblya mill. He protested that Volko had not evaded service at all — that he had been ill and undergoing treatment in Gaysin with a physician named G. Galichinsky. Furthermore, Tonkonogiy argued, Volko had been incorrectly entered into the conscription records by the Khashchevatoye community “without proper grounds and without allowing him to present his explanations in his defense.”
But the heart of Tonkonogiy’s petition was not compassion. It was commerce. Volko, he wrote, was “necessary to me for the rendering of accounts regarding the products under his charge.” He requested Volko’s release on his personal surety — not to save a young man from the army, but to settle his books.
It was a petition that revealed, perhaps more honestly than any other document in the file, how Jewish lives in the Pale of Settlement were caught between multiple forces: the demands of the state, the pressures of the community, and the calculations of those who employed them.
In April 1864, the District Police Chief ordered a review of the legality of Meyer-Gersh’s arrest. The review apparently found it unjustified: Meyer-Gersh was released on surety, with the bond signed by a man named Kravetz and by Avrum Itzko Kroyn.
The criminal case — the charge of concealing recruits — was transferred to a judicial investigator. On June 12, 1864, the district police officer formally forwarded the entire correspondence to the investigator of the Gaysin District.
And then — nothing. Or almost nothing.
On January 26, 1865, the Acting Judicial Investigator, a man named Linetsky, issued a resolution. It was not a verdict. It was an admission: he had no possibility, due to his workload and other important matters, of proceeding with the case. It would have to wait for a more convenient time.
A more convenient time. For the families of Shaposhnik and Dorfman, living under the shadow of a criminal charge that could send them to penal military companies, there was nothing convenient about waiting. But the imperial bureaucracy moved at its own pace, indifferent to the anxiety of Jewish townsmen in a provincial backwater.
Three and a half years passed in silence.
On September 18, 1868, the case finally came to a resolution. The Acting Judicial Investigator and the District Prosecutor reviewed the file one last time.
The resolution recapitulated the facts. Mordko Shaposhnik, while under arrest, had demanded fifty silver rubles from the community in exchange for producing his son, and when the community attempted to comply, he had avoided delivery under various pretexts. Volko Dorfman, son of Meyer-Gersh, had been caught as an evader, handed over by the district police officer to residents of Gaysin for delivery to the conscription board — and had then vanished again, reportedly spotted at a mill in the village of Kuna.
The investigator acknowledged that under Article 1321 of Volume VI of the Conscription Statute, Shaposhnik and Dorfman were subject to sentencing to penal military companies for the intentional concealment of their sons. This was the maximum punishment — assignment to disciplinary battalions, a fate in some ways worse than ordinary conscription.
But then came the word that changed everything: however.
Taking into consideration certain provisions of the law — Article 158 (or 258) and the decree of the Criminal Chamber under No. 10736 — the investigator resolved that the proceedings should be terminated. The case was forwarded to the Gaysin District Court for formal closure.
On September 20, the court received the file. On October 7, 1868, the Gaysin District Court, its official seal stamped on the final page, confirmed the decision: the case was closed.
And on October 11, 1868, the last entry was written: the file was to be consigned to the archive for storage, and all people involved were to be notified at their place of residence.
Seven years after the first search warrant was issued, the case was over. Neither Mordko Shaposhnik nor Meer-Gersh Dorfman was condemned. The file was tied up, numbered — No. 2856 — and placed on a shelf in the archives of the Gaysin District Court, where it would sleep for more than a century and a half.
What emerges from these pages is not a story of simple criminal evasion. It is a story of families trapped between the machinery of the state and the impossible obligation placed upon their own community.
The case file interweaves the fates of three families; each caught in different circumstances but united by the same dread:
The Shaposhnik family: Mordko’s son Benzion was arrested and held at the Ternovetז police station. Mordko himself was accused of demanding fifty silver rubles from the community in exchange for his son. After seven years, the charges were dropped.
The Meyer-Gersh Dorfman family: Their son Volko had been a fugitive from conscription since the Crimean War — found once at a mill in Chernaya Greblya, handed over, and then lost again, reportedly at another mill in the village of Kuna. When the merchant who guaranteed him failed to produce him, it was the father who was jailed. His wife Malka Rukhlya fought for his release. After four months of detention, Meyer-Gersh was freed on surety. After seven years, the charges were dropped.
The Leyba Dorfman (Dorman) family: Leyba’s son Ayzik was arrested despite what appears to have been a legitimate legal exemption — he was the last surviving son, his brothers Moshko and Yankel Itzko having died. The illiterate father dictated a petition with his twenty kopecks in stamped paper, pleading for his son’s release. Ayzik was freed, and went on to raise a family of eight children.
Each family’s story reveals a different face of the conscription system’s cruelty: Volko, the young man who fled and kept fleeing, always to a mill, never quite far enough; Meyer-Gersh, the father jailed for his son’s absence; Malka Rukhlya, the wife who had to beg for her husband’s freedom; Leyba, the illiterate father armed with nothing but the law and twenty kopecks; Ayzik, the last surviving son dragged from his home; Tonkonogiy, the merchant for whom a Jewish conscript was above all a bookkeeper who owed him accounts.
And behind all of them, the recruit elders — Tziser and Kozavchinsky — who bore the terrible responsibility of denouncing their own neighbors to save the community from collective punishment.
In the end, the imperial bureaucracy defeated itself. The case was passed from police to prosecutor, from investigator to court, delayed for years by an overworked judiciary, and finally closed without punishment. The system that had terrorized these families for seven years simply moved on.
These documents, preserved in the State Archives of Vinnitza Oblast, offer a rare and vivid window into the daily reality of Jewish life in Khashchevatoye in the 1860s.
The petition of Leyba Dorfman appears to have succeeded. His son Ayzik was not taken by the army.
Ayzik Dorfman, born on April 22, 1836 — the young man who was pulled from his home in August 1863 and for whom his illiterate father begged with twenty kopecks in stamped paper — went on to live a full life. He married and had eight children.
But the wars of empire were not finished with his family. Ayzik’s youngest son, Nukhim, born in 1880, served in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. On August 19, 1915, he was captured by Austro-Hungarian forces near Lutsk and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp at Wieselburg an der Erlauf, in Austria-Hungary. Half a century after his grandfather Leyba had fought to save his father from the Tsar’s army, Nukhim found himself a soldier of that same empire — and a prisoner of its enemies.
Itzik, his grandson, the son of his son Shmil, fell in 1943 in Bershad. But he had married Golda Shuster and had three children. And on September 19, 1920, in the midst of the devastating pogroms that swept through Khashchevatoye and the surrounding region, a great-granddaughter to Ayzik was born. Sarah Dorman came into the world in a time of fire and terror. She survived. She married Isaac Tashlitzky — from another of the great families of Khashchevatoye — and lived until 2001.
From Leyba’s petition to Sarah’s death, the arc of this family spans nearly a century and a half. It is a story of persistence against forces that sought, again and again, to destroy them — conscription, war, pogroms, and genocide. That any of them survived at all is a testament to the stubborn, desperate courage of an illiterate father who knew his rights and refused to be silent.
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Jerusalem
Reference: HM2-9190.1
Original source: State Archives of Vinnitza Oblast (DAVO), Vinnitza
Fond 471, Opis 1, Delo 903
Gaysin District Court: Charge against Jews of Khashchevatoye
for concealment of sons from military conscription, 1861–1868
Translation from Russian by Eva (2026).
Narrative prepared for the KehilaLinks Khashchevatoye website.