2019 marked the 100% anniversary of the Forgotten 1919 Pogroms in the Ukraine. This series of pogroms from 1917-1921 is referred to as “the Holocaust before the Holocaust,” a time when pogroms worsened for Jewish women. 

In 2017 I watched a new film documentary entitled “My Dear Children,” one of the first documentaries about the pogroms. I knew nothing about these pogroms. I found the film so compelling that I contacted the producer of the film, LeeAnn Dance, and purchased a license so that I could show the film in my southern Florida community.

Little did I know what would follow.

For twenty years, I thought I knew the name and location of my grandfather’s ancestral village in the Ukraine. In January 2018 I learned that I had been wrong. I would never have learned the truth without the intimate knowledge of Alexander Sharon and Warren Blatt of JewishGen. They advised me that my original “Chaswater” was actually known as Khashchevatoye.

Khashchevatoye (also Khashchuvata) had a number of people on JewishGen Family Finder who were interested in this town as well as a Google group.  I was excited by this new discovery and contacted them about the town. I had done DNA testing through Family Tree DNA and decided to run the names of these people against my DNA match list. I found two distant matches.  While we do not know of family names in common, this DNA match appears to provide additional support that Khashchevatoye or its vicinity was the correct ancestral town.

I also learned from the Google group that its Jewish population suffered the fate of both twentieth century pogroms and the Holocaust.  Having just viewed My Dear Children, the subject of pogroms caught my attention. Now I was reading that Khashchevatoye had been subjected to these pogroms.

A June 1923 report from the American Joint Distribution Committee described the following:

Khashchevatoye is one of the points of Gaysin District, which have suffered most from pogroms. The bands of Volynetz and Tiutunik rivaled with small local bands and the town was constantly pillaged during three years. There were some cases when the Jewish youths offered resistance to the bands.

The most cruel pogrom was committed by Denikin’s troops who remained in Khashchevatoye for about 3 months, pillaging the population, carrying away whole carts loaded with the belongings of Jews and violating the women: many of the latter became infected with syphilis. Finally, on the day of retreat of Denikin's Army, the officers committed a massacre in which 125 persons were murdered and 55 persons were wounded (in some cases, arms were chopped off.)

I had brought My Dear Children to my community for a showing and saw how moved the audience had been. Now I was determined to learn more about these pogroms in Ukraine. A portion of the documentary was devoted to Dr. Irina Astashkevich, whose 2013 doctoral dissertation was entitled The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1917-1920: An Alternate Universe.

I obtained a copy of her dissertation and was shocked by what it described.  I spoke with her about her research and she explained that she had written a book on this subject to be published shortly. In June 2018 I visited the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, which was prominently featured in the film and where much of Dr Astashkevich’s research was done.

My goal was to find more information on Khashchevatoye and the pogroms of that period. I was able to find a 1928 report by Nahum Gergel in which I learned that it had been subjected to twelve successive pogroms during this period, the second highest number out of 531 Ukrainian villages subjected to 1286 pogroms.

Later that fall, Dr Astashkevich’s book, Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917-1921 was published. It was described as a groundbreaking study of an important and neglected topic—the systematic use of rape as a strategic weapon of the genocidal anti-Jewish violence, known collectively as pogroms. In these pogroms at least 100,000 Jews died and undocumented numbers of Jewish women were raped. The book is based on the in-depth study of narratives of Jewish men and women who survived the pogrom violence, only to be forgotten for almost a century. This book deconstructs the motives of perpetrators, the experience and expression of trauma by the victimized community, and how the genocidal objectives of the pogrom perpetrators were achieved and maximized through violence.

My objective is to bring these events to the public’s attention through a feature film.

This story was published by Jody Gorran as a post in the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest magazine. February 18, 2019.

I always considered myself lucky, since I knew 4 of my great-grandparents. As a small child, we would get in the car and drive to Brooklyn to visit my grandparents. In some cases, the great-grandparents lived in the same house, or at least close by. I realized later that I really knew very little about these kind, sweet old people, and especially nothing about their lives before coming to the US.

Missing from my childhood was my paternal grandfather, Joe Wax. Or Yossel Voskoboynik, as he was called in Khashchevatoye. I’ll call the town KH for short.  My grandfather died the year before I was born - he was only 56. I was told that the town he was from no longer existed. I knew the names of his parents and grandparents, although I’m still searching for the maiden names of his grandmothers. And that was about it - he was a photo in the frame, an empty hole in the fabric of my family. 

As I asked questions, I was told that my grandfather had cousins in Toronto, their name was Teplitsky. Jack Teplitsky was my grandfather’s favorite cousin (sorry other cousins!). He would come from Toronto to NY for any simcha! Joe and Jack would play off each other, like a comedy act. But since Joe was long gone, we had lost touch with the Toronto side. I never thought I would learn more. 

One day in about 2007, the phone rang. It was Jack Teplitsky’s grandson! He had found me through JewishGen. He had been to KH more than once and told me something about the town. To my surprise, it was still in existence. He had also hired a researcher to look for our ancestors in the Ukraine archives. At that time, you would have to go and look for names in the old books, rather than scan entire documents as we do now. There were a few tidbits that the researcher found. My grandfather had a brother who had not survived childhood. There were a few tax records for my great-grandfather. And interestingly, the father of my 2nd great-grandfather, Nechemia Voskoboynik, was also named Nechemia. The implication was that my 3rd-great-grandfather had died before his son was born. And that was it. But still, how amazing that records existed! 

Forward to today - I have learned more about my grandfather’s family than I ever thought possible. We have the 1842 marriage record for my 3rd great-grandfather Nechemia Voskoboynik, son of Avram. He married Chaya Feiga Varyat, daughter of El David. He was 19, she was 16. Nechemia’s death record shows he passed away less than six months after the marriage (of typhus). So, Chaya Feiga was a 17-year-old widow with a baby. Sadly, so far there are no records indicating what happened in her life afterwards. Nechemia’s son Nechemia, born in 1843, was brought up in the household of his father’s brother, Meir Voskoboynik. 

The younger Nechemia had nine children (that we know of). Through the research, I have been in touch with so many descendants of this family. In the end, I know more about this side of my family than any other line. 

For the town of KH, we have acquired and translated an amazing amount of material. Please contact us if you’re searching. Some records have been uploaded to the JewishGen databases, but not everything is available online yet. 

Good luck with your searches, and please let me know if I can assist.

Marla Westberg

Find me on FamilyFinder for the town Khashchevatoye or for the surname Voskoboynik.