Other Names

• Lyda

View Lida via MapQuest (Latitude 54°14´, Longitude 23°31´)

(Then click your browser's "Back" button to return here.)

Maps

• See Lida Area Page
• Leon Lauresh has a set of maps of Lida through the ages. The one from 1939 is very similar to the one in Sepher Lida,  but in Polish, so it's easier to read the street names.  The rectangle near the river about 1/4 of the way down on the right, "israelicki cmentarz" is the Jewish cemetery.  Further down, also on the right, marked "Dzielnica Zydowska" (Jewish District) is where Jews were centered.

Pictures

• Lida's Market Square with Synagogue
• A mock wedding held in Lida in 1905. Contributed by Fred Cutter
• Drawing of Lida Synagogue from a 1917 book on Lida.  Contributed by Leon Lauresh
• Postcards of Lida
• A postcard collection
  
• Photo of the Jewish Cemetery in Lida, 1916.  Donated by Marv Brooks
  
• Leon Lauresh has an amazing postcard collection on his site. If you like, you can skip to the page illustrating the Jewish section of Lida.
• S. Kalmanowitz fought the Germans in WWII.
• Two Pupko family photos
• We're working on scanning all the illustrations in Sepher Lida for the Yizkor site.  This is a major project, and will take some time to complete.
• Lida section of the 1934 Nowogrodek county telephone book.
• A letter of recommendation written by Rabbi Jacob Reines.
  

Background Information

• Brief History of Lida
• Another Brief History of Lida
• Virtual Guide to Belarus
• There are still active Landsmanshaftn in the US and Israel. Contact is by regular mail. Please contact Irene Newhouse or Ellen Sadove Renck for the addresses.
• Translations from Sepher Lida temporary site until they're on Yizkor site
• Information on the Pupko Brewery in Lida
• Ellen Vine Jakobson's trip to Lida, June 2002
• Naples Florida Daily News reporter Alan Scher Zagier visited Belarus and Lida in late 2002.
  

Holocaust

• The Holocaust links page
• We are proud to be able to present the autobiography of Dr. Frances Dworecki
• The Holocaust monument in Lida was vandalized in August 2002. The story in the FSU Monitor for 21 Aug 2002 has gone offline as of late 2006.
• The movie "Defiance", based on Nechama Tec's book, inspired many articles on survivors from the Lida area. If the links go stale, please contact me.
• Isaac Koll
• Ann Monka
• Helen Terris (nee Cyderowicz)

Documents

Former Lida residents and their descendants abroad

• There is a Beth Lida Synagogue in Toronto. [Search for Lida on the site's search page] Cemetery records for the Beth Lida cemeteries are in the Toronto Jewish Genealogical Society Collection at the North York Library. Thanks to Elaine Rosenbloom, we have a copy.  Rhonda B. Cohen has updated the cemetery records by transcribing the tombstones in the Beth Lida section of Roselawn Cemetery in March 2005.

• Josef Garbaty left Lida, eventually settling in Berlin. He pioneered employee perks like employee libraries, and even unemployment insurance.  In 1929 he retired & his two sons took over a firm employing 2000.  This information is from an article by Michael Skakun in Aufbau, issue 2, 2003.   These links have gone off line as of 2005.  There's a link in German, associated with the renaming of a train station in the Berlin suburb Pankow after Garbaty. This, too, may be temporary. 
  

• Karen Alkalay-Gut is in the English department at Tel Aviv university.  Some of her poems are about her family's Lida heritage

A Lithuanian Legacy

• Postcard from Isaac and Maria Pupko, who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto

• Dr. Nittai K. Bergman descends from a Lida resident, and has a letter written from Lida to Palestine right after WWII online.
• Marv Brooks' mother and her parents emigrated from Lida in 1917.  She kept some bills from the trip.
• Ticket for a Lieder Brueder Unterstitzungs Verein drawing. Donated by Howard Zakai
• Lieder Brueder Unterstitzungs Verein Golden Jubilee (1941)
• A kiddush cup presented as a dancing prize by the Lida Relief Society won by Bernard Kouchel's father. Picture donated by Bernard Kouchel
• Lieder Brothers' Section in Beth Moses Cemetery Photographs donated by Roslyn Sherman Greenberg
• Artist Alex Katz's father was from Lida [offline as of 12/2003; http://www.alexkatz.com]
• Tamara Katz nee Kaplinski (1914-2004) was born in Lida. Her parents and husband, Abraham Dworzinski, were shot in a mass murder in
  Lida in 1941, leaving her with her 3-year-old son Nathan.  She evaded the May 19, 1942 mass murder by hiding in an outhouse with Nathan.  Peasants
  who had worked with her father hid her for a few nights; she moved among families who'd known her father until a cousin heard she was alive, and
  sent someone to take her to the Bielski brothers.  She stayed there until  she got false papers, and spent the rest of the war on the run.  She
  married another partisan, Abraham Katz, in 1944.  On being widowed in 1957, she got a job as bookkeeper in an antiques store [she'd been trained in
  bookkeeping in Lida], eventually learning the business and running her own store. She was active in Hadassah and a charter member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Another obituary.
  
• Aaron Leibowitz  born in Lida, emigrated to the US in the 1930s.  He served in World War II in the US army, and was awarded a Purple Heart
  for wounding on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invastion.  His mother and nine siblings were murdered in the Holocaust.  He worked in a kosher
  butcher shop.
• Dr.  Harry Polachek  (1913-2002) was born in Lida and emigrated in the 1920s.  He had a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia U and was ordained Rabbi from  the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. During World War II, he was a mathematician at Aberdeen Proving Ground.  He remained with the Navy labs, becoming Director of the Applied Mathematics Lab. He received the Navy Distinguished  Civilian Service Award for his pioneering work in computer applications. (The more informative link above doesn't mention Lida.  That datum is in a much briefer death notice).
  
• Ralph Rose -  http://www.clarku.edu/departments/jewishstudies/rosefolder/rosepage.html -This page, which has been taken down, had a photograph and short biography of Ralph Rose, a businessman & philanthropist whose family was from Lida & who endowed a chair at Clark University in Massachusetts.  Similar details of his life can be found in a press release from 1996 archived on Shamash. Since this is an archive of the entire day's postings, use your browser's search feature to find the reference to Rose.  As of 5/2005, listserve archive searching on Shamash has been disabled , along with which this page is no longer up.
• Dr. Stefan E. Warschawski  (1904-1989) was born in Lida. His family moved to Koenigsberg during World War I, where he graduated Gymnasium and entered University there to study mathematics, moving to Goettingen after 2 years.  When his advisor moved to Basel, Warschawski did, too.  On graduation, he was offered a position at  Goettingen, which he occupied from 1930 until Hitler came to power. He was able to come to the US and obtain a position at Washington University in St. Louis. After several moves, he settled at the University of  Minnesota, where he built up the Mathematics Department. In 1963 he moved to UC San Diego's La Jolla campus as department chair.
  
  

• Family history page of Dr. Ernesto Mordecki Pupko, a mathematics professor whose family is from Lida

Emigration

• Lida Residents who entered the US via St. Albans, VT, compiled from an LDS film by Janet Lavine for the Soundex code L-150 only.
• Lida Residents who emigrated via Hamburg, compiled from LDS films by Janet Lavine. You can view this list alphabetically or chronologically
• Lida Residents for whom tickets were purchased through HIAS, on the Rosenbaum Steamship line, compiled from LDS films by Janet Lavine.
• Lida Residents for whom tickets were purchased through HIAS, on the Blitzstein Steamship line, compiled from LDS films by Janet Lavine.
• Lida Passengers found on National Archives microfilmed ships' manifests, compiled by Janet Lavine.
• Former Lida Residents aided by HIAS in the US, compiled from LDS films by Janet Lavine.

 

Searchable Databases

Jewishgen Family Finder