NEW WORLD CONGRESS

HEROES WITH «MINUS» SIGN

BABIY YAR

AFTER «BEILIS CASE»

It is nice to witness an increasing number of critical publications in decent Jewish newspapers of late. God bless; the times of unanimous "we-are-for'ism" have sunk into oblivion. Non-professionals have taken to writing: engineers, teachers, doctors - a decent Jewish intelligentsia, in a word. They vent their pain and offenses, frustrated dreams and unrealized demands on the pages of our newspapers.

June 22, 1941 at 4 in the morning fascist planes bombed Zhytomir. The war began for the inhabitants of Polesje. By late August the entire region had been taken by the enemy. Mass shootings, lootings and killings began in towns and villages, trains packed with people pulled out westwards - to "death camps". One of such trains with 1,200 locals of Zhytomir and Berdichev departed in September to Maidanek. Needless to say the majority of them were Jews.

This line from a poem by an original author, which sounded in the Kremenchug synagogue May 26, became a peculiar leitmotif of a jubilee evening party dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the city religious Jewish community and cultural educational center "Shalom".

Pyotr Lapidus has spent sixty years trying to find out his father's fate. After the war he with his mother Ides Shoilovna Shwarzburd lived in Odessa in Hospitalnaya street 11. There they received a notice which text Pyotr remembers and will always remember "Lapidas Volko Peisakhovich, born in 1903, was called up in 1941 by the Odessa district military enlistment office, technician-quartermaster of 1st rank, deputy chief accountant of shops of the Primorskaya army group. Missing since July 1942. Excluded from the officer's lists by the order #01838 from July 17 1946".