Sudargas, Lithuania
(In Yiddish: Sudarg. In Russian:
Sudargi)
YAHRZHEIT
(MEMORIAL) DATES OF LITHUANIAN JEWISH COMMUNITIES
Material compiled by Joel
Alpert and Joseph
Rosin
Copyright © 1998 by Joel Alpert and Joseph Rosin
Location:
55 deg, 3' North Latitude, 22 deg, 38' East
Longitude
Hilelson Family in Sudarg in September
1940
Standing from right:Yitzhak Hilelson, Gershon
Hilelson, Leah'le, her father Yehuda Goldberg. Sitting from the
right: Yitzhaks first wife (name unknown), Mina Rosin Hilelson, Elka
Hilelson Goldberg (Leah'le's mother). Mina Rosin Hilelson was the
aunt of Joseph Rosin, mother of Yitzhak, Gershon and Elka and
grandmother of Leah'le.
Guttmann Berkman family group photo from
Sudarg in 1927
The lady with the bandana on the right in front
is Chaya Rifka Gutmann, nee Berkman. The one behind her in the white
dress is believed to be a cousin from the Berkman family. She had
brothers and one sister in the US. Her nieces do not know her first
name. The other people in the picture are named Moritz and Fanye,
Hindke, and Geneshke. The group collectively was referred to in
Yiddish as "Die Treifyane" as in the word for non-kosher. The picture
was taken in Sudargas in 1927. (Photo was provided by Martin
Miller)
Click here
for
Photos and Information Provided by Martin Miller and Barabara
Clow
Article on Sudarg written by Joseph
Rosin, Haifa, Israel
Sudargas
(in Yiddish-Sudarg; in Russian-Sudargi)
The small town of Sudarg is situated in the
south-western part of Lithuania, in the county of Shaki (Sakiai), on
the left bank of the river Neman (Nemunas) and close to the border
with East-Prussia. It lies 9 kilometers (5.4 miles) down-river from
the larger town of Jurbarkas (Yurburg or Yurbrik in Yiddish) which
lies on the right bank of the Neman river and can be found on many
maps (click
here to see a map, then click on
"BACK" button to return to this page).
The town was established during the second half of the sixteenth
century, and in 1724 King August the Second granted the town its city
rights.
During the third division of Poland in 1795 the
territories on the left bank of the river Neman were given to Prussia
and during that period (1795-1807) the above mentioned rights were
annulled. From 1807 until 1815 Sudarg was within the boundaries of
"The Great Dukedom of Warsaw". At that time people used to say that
"when a rooster crowed in Sudarg he was heard in three countries:
Poland, Russia and Prussia." After the defeat of Napoleon, Russia
took over all the territory of Lithuania and ruled there from 1815
until the First World War. During these years Sudarg was a small town
with an growing population: In 1827 there were 373 inhabitants in the
town, in 1890 - 900 people and by 1901 about 3,000.
The first Jews probably settled in Sudarg at the
end of the eighteenth or at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
At that time community institutions were established and for many
years the Jews were the majority. In 1856 Sudarg had a population of
689 people, of whom 627 were Jews (91%).
A large forest of about 1,000 hectares (an area
of
2 miles by 2 miles) near Sudarg, lying partly in Lithuania and partly
in Prussia, was a convenient site for smuggling and many Jews made
their living from this activity. There were some people from Sudarg,
also including Jews, who would float timber down the Neman river; in
Sudarg these rafts of timber would be disassembled, the logs would be
sawed up and loaded onto boats for transportation to Germany. In
those days, Sudarg's connection to the world was by way of boats on
the Neman River or by carts in summer and sledges in winter. In
spring, when the ice on the Neman began to break up and the dust
roads were full of sludge and mud, the town was practically isolated
from the world.
During the period of Independent Lithuania
(1918-1940), Sudarg became a forgotten small town, where
opportunities to earn a living became ever more difficult. As a
result almost all Jewish youths left the town and moved mainly to
Kovno (Kaunas) or went abroad and the Jewish population of Sudarg
dwindled. The first census in Sudarg undertaken by the Lithuanian
government in 1923 showed only 257 people in the town.
During the years before World War I and in the
first years of Lithuanian rule many young people from Sudarg
emigrated to America (to El Paso and Dallas, Texas and Albuquerque
and other parts of New Mexico, and New York City to name a few
places) and there raised large families (Rosin-Rosen,
Hilelson-Hilson, Guttman, Goodman and others). According to Martin
Miller, Joseph Hillel Goodman (Guttman) from Sudarg helped 47 of his
fellow townsmen immigrate to El Paso, Texas in the early part of this
century (see below for more information from Martin Miller).
The Jews in Sudarg ran a few grocery and
haberdashery stores, two taverns, two bakeries, a pharmacy and a wool
combing workshop. Others traded illegally in meat, mainly with the
Germans on the other side of the border. According to the Jewish
Craftsmen Association's survey of 1937 there were then two Jewish
tailors, one butcher and one baker in Sudarg.
Throughout the whole period of the presence of a
Jewish community in Sudarg, there existed a great synagogue (Di
Shul), decorated inside with spectacular wood engravings. This
synagogue was used for prayers only in summer, while in winter people
would pray in the other synagogue, the "Beth-Midrash," in which there
was a stove. Both synagogues were built in the nineteenth century and
were made of wood. Among the Rabbis who served in Sudarg were: Tzvi
Rom (1844-1886), author of the book "Eretz Hatzvi" (Land of the
Deer); Sender Vilensky; and also Regensberg who moved to New York in
the 1920s in order to serve there as a Rabbi. In the 1930s J. Cohen
served as Rabbi in Sudarg.
In the 1920s there still was a "Heder" in
Sudarg,
where children learned to read and write, also study some biblical
scriptures and a little Hebrew. Later the few Jewish children studied
in the Lithuanian school.
The engineer and architect Moshe Yitzhak Bloch
(1893-August, 1942), a native of Sudarg, devoted much of his time to
drawing up city plans. He even prepared a plan for excavating a
channel from Haifa to the Jordan river, exploiting the difference in
height between the Mediterranean and the much lower level of the
Jordan in order to produce electric energy. He also had plans for
irrigating the Negev.
The British mandatory authorities found his
plans
interesting, and in 1938 he visited London in order to discuss these
with them, but was told that Europe was on the verge of war and that
this was not the right time to deal with such plans. He taught
painting and drawing in two Hebrew High Schools in Kovno. On the 14th
of June 1941 he was arrested by the Russians and sent to a labour
camp in the Archangelsk region as a "counter revolutionary", being
the chairman of the "Revisionist" (Hatzohar) party in Kovno. He was
shot by a guard in August 1942 when he demanded that they stop
humiliating prisoners.
The municipality of Be'er Sheva on Israel named
a
street after Engineer Yitzhak Bloch.
The German Army had already entered Sudarg on
the
fi rst day of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, on the
22nd of June 1941. During the first days after their arrival, the
Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators started to plot against
the local Jews, which at that time consisted of only about 30 Jewish
families. In the beginning of July 1941 the Nazi and their Lithuanian
collaborators transferred all men as well as two intelligent young
women to Shaki, where they were murdered, together with the local men
on the 5th of July 1941 (10th of Tamuz 5701). The women of Sudarg had
sent a Lithuanian peasant to clarify what had happened to their men.
The peasant arrived in Shaki just at the time of the murders and was
an eye witness to the horror, and on his return to Sudarg he lost his
mind. The women and children of Sudarg were murdered on the 6th of
July 1941 (11th of Tamuz 5701) in the vicinity of the village of
Kidul.
(Written by Joseph Rosin, the English
corrected by Sarah and Mordechai Kopfstein, March, 1998)
Sources:
YIVO -Collection of the Jewish Communities in
Lithuania, File 673, pages 29210-29214
Verbal Evidence by Yitzhak Hilelson (A native
of Sudarg)
"Pinkas haKehiloth Lita," Editor: Dov Levin
,Yad-Vashem, Jerusalem 5756 (1996)
The biography of Moshe Isaac Bloch by Miriam
Bloch-Machlis, Holon, Israel (1987)
Communication from Martin Miller (Feb., 1998)
Other Resources:
Martin Miller wrote on February 26, 1998:
"The first family that I know of that
lived in Sudargas for sure were the Bloch family that settled in
Syracuse, NY; Scranton, PA; and Bayonne, NJ. Some also went to
various points in Nebraska, Texas and finally to California. The
Berkman family likewise lived in Syracuse, NY and also in
Johannesburg, South Africa. There was also a branch that lived in
Rochester, NY, and some in Israel. The Rothschild family also lived
in Syracuse, NY. Sarah Rothschild married Joseph Hillel Goodman in
Syracuse in 1895 and went with him to El Paso. One of her brothers
died in Springfield, MA. Another sister married and lived in
Streeter, IL. That branch of the family lived in Sweden for a time,
where one of her brothers was born."
Dan Goodman wrote on May 27, 1997:
.... I don't know when the community
actually started. I know there were some German Jews there earlier
than my family. The first of nine Goodman's to arrive there was
1882-83. The last was in 1910. My dad was I believe the fifth-in
1898. Dad's older brother Joseph became a one man immigration
service, and over the years he imported 57 members of the family. So
we had a lot of relatives. One sister, Chana Guttmann Bendalin stayed
in the Sudargas, Lithuania area and she died in the Holocaust. Six of
her 7 children ended up in El Paso, They were my first cousins. Two
are still living.
All together in my generation of the Goodman
family there were 36 children. Ten are now left; one (Anne
Goodman Gollob) died last week at the age of 92 years and 10 months.
Of the 10 still living the eldest is Ruth Goodman Carr (Anne's older
sister) who will be 97 in September, and the youngest is my sister
who is 79.
I never tried to count all the El Pasoans who
were
connected to the Goodman family over the generations, but I believe
200 is a fairly good guess. A book was written about influential Jews
in the state of Texas, and there you will find a write-up about Uncle
Joe-actual name Joseph Hillel Goodman.
It was through this book that Marty Miller in
Syracuse found that one of his wife's relatives (a Rothschild) was
married to Uncle Joe (Not the French Rothschilds but the Sudargas
ones).,
If we go back to about 1816 we find that
Sudargas
was the source of a very large group of the Guttmann family. My great
grandfather, Kofe Guttman, was, to our knowledge, the father of 12 to
14 children. A large group lives in Mexico City, and it is here that
the paths of members Joel Alpert's family and the Guttman family
cross. Or marry!!
My mother's family also is tied to Texas.
Mother
was born in San Antonio in 1886. But her roots are in the Ukraine,
Kiev to be specific.
Dan Goodman
JewishGen Family Finder
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Copyright © 1998 - 2009 by Joel
Alpert and Joseph
Rosin
Created March 1, 1998 | Last modified Nov. 29, 2009
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