Burshivker Khurbn

(The Destruction of Burshivka)

By Benjamin D. Zitomer

At the outset of 1918, Borshchagovka had an estimated population of 2,800, including approximately 1,800 Jews comprising 400 families.^[1] It was one of 124 towns and cities within Kiev province. The Jews referred to their shtetl as Burshivka in Yiddish. Located eighty miles southwest of Kiev, it is now part of Ukraine and known as Borshchahivka.

From 1918 to 1921, a wave of pogroms swept through Kiev, bringing unimaginable violence that obliterated more than eighty-five towns in the province. Eliezer David Rosenthal lived through the massacres and went on to create one of the most important works in understanding the pogroms in Ukraine. Although racked with tuberculosis, Rosenthal devoted five years of his life to traveling across Ukraine, collecting testimonies from pogrom survivors. His sole purpose was to commemorate the victims and save them from oblivion. He compiled these accounts into an anthology titled Scroll of the Slaughter (Megilat Ha-tevah). In the preface to his narrative Tetiev Khurbn (The Destruction of Tetiev), he wrote:

“Of the half million Jews who had lived in the province of Kiev, 200,000 souls were destroyed by the sword of

the Petluras, the Denikins and the various Atamans [Chieftains] who multiplied like mushrooms after rain. Of

these, 150,000 were slaughtered and 50,000 died of hunger, cold, and diseases. Those who escaped from the

sword of the murderers and the infectious diseases in their towns were compelled to take the wanderer’s staff in

hand and go to the large cities naked, barefoot and starving. Many of them, after many wanderings, hunger,

suffering and troubles, eventually fertilized with their bones the cemeteries of the large cities, and even no

memory remained after them.”^[2]

Borshchagovka met its fate in the summer months of 1919 when a series of five pogroms annihilated the shtetl, with every Jewish-owned home, store, and factory burned to the ground. According to the Burshivker Relief Committee in New York City, 1,600 of the 2,000 villagers were estimated to have been murdered*, while a 1922 report cited 480 dead, 788 wounded, and 770 raped.^[3] The complete destruction, coupled with the scarcity of eyewitness accounts, made an accurate death count impossible. Many survivors later succumbed to wounds, starvation, or diseases such as typhus. Others fell victim to subsequent pogroms in the towns to which they had fled, notably Tetiev and Skvira. Rosenthal's account of Borshchagovka documented fewer than 200 individuals in the death list, underscoring the difficulty of recording the full extent of the atrocities.

[Click here to read the testimony of Borshchagovka pogrom survivor Yaakov Broder in Scroll of The Slaughter]

Veidlinger's In the Midst of Civilized Europe notes that the reported number of deaths in many places, including Borshchagovka, had been substantially undercounted:

“In 1921, the Jewish Section of the Soviet Commissariat of National Affairs, an official branch of the Soviet

government, counted 33,398 names in the lists collected by the relief committees. In towns and cities for which

more detailed information was available, the Jewish Section found that only about a third of the fatalities had

been counted, mostly because the lists neglected those who perished of hunger and disease or died of their

wounds as a direct result of the pogroms. For instance, in Borshchahivka, a small town, 18 people were killed

in the pogrom of June 1919, but another 31 subsequently died of their wounds.”^[4]

Z.S. Ostrovsky’s Jewish Pogroms 1918-1921, compiled for the Jewish Public Committee for Aid to Victims of Pogroms in 1923 and published in 1926, chronicled the barbarity inflicted upon Borshchagovka and numerous other Jewish settlements across Ukraine:

“The most populous and flourishing communities were turned into deserts. Jewish towns and shtetls looked like

gloomy cemeteries - homes burnt and streets dead and desolate. The breath of death rushes from every corner.

A number of Jewish settlements were completely wrecked and turned into ashes - Volodarka, Fastov,

Borshchagovka, [...] and other places.

“The mass exodus of entire towns and cities was an everyday phenomenon at that time. There were cases when a

mass of thousands of Jews, for example, from Tetiev, from Radomysl, fled in panic, without direction or purpose,

guided solely by the instinct of self-preservation.

“The situation of these thousands of refugees was truly tragic: ragged, barefoot, exhausted and sick, deprived of

the most basic necessities, mercilessly thrown into the vortex of poverty, hunger and disease, they accumulated

in the big cities and border towns, lying in train stations, synagogues, sheds, barns and simply on the pavement

in the open air, forming everywhere terrible centers of contagion and death.

“Several tens of thousands of completely ruined people gathered on the Romanian border, who fled in whatever

clothes they had and were subjected to savage abuse by the Romanian border guards, who did not let them

cross the border.

“The destruction of Jewish settlements was of such a barbaric nature that in the near future, any possibility of

their restoration is excluded. Hundreds of localities in the region of the former Pale of Settlement were so

devastated that even after the final consolidation of Soviet power and establishment of an absolute guarantee

of security, the Jewish population has no opportunity to return to their old bloody ashes.”^[5]

A similar description, which also cited Borshchagovka, appeared in The Pogroms in the Ukraine Under the Ukrainian Governments (1917-1920):

“The vast majority of townships, and even many towns, are entirely cleared of Jewish property. Among these

places are: [...] Borshtshagowka (sic) [...] The Jewish houses were converted into heaps of smoking

rubbish. But where all the visible traces of destruction have not yet been destroyed by fire, Only ruins remain.

It is all chaos and desolation.”^[6]

Those who lived through the Borshchagovka pogroms recounted harrowing tales of their ordeals. Here are some of their stories:

1. Thirteen members of the Zitomersky family were among those slaughtered in the summer of 1919, including their patriarch, sixty-year-old Yitzhak. His son, Schloime, barely survived. In a devastating letter to his brothers in Brooklyn, New York, Schloime implored them to save their remaining family members. His desperate plea ultimately led to his brother Fawel rescuing more than fifty survivors of the Borshchagovka pogroms:

Click here to read "Exodus from Borshchagovka: Fawel Zitomersky’s Rescue Of More Than Fifty Survivors of the Pogroms"

2. Basya Matusenko (a daughter of Yitzhak Zitomersky) was born ca. 1900 in Borshchagovka. As recounted by her son Irving P. Matos, Basya was among a group of women who were lined up against a wall and shot by bandits. A bullet pierced her neck, causing her to collapse. The assailants, mounted on horseback, then trampled over the fallen bodies, thrusting their sabres downward as they advanced. Basya owed her life to the protective shield formed by the women who fell on top of her. The scar the bullet left on her neck was a lifelong reminder of that terrible day. Basya and her husband, Morris (Moische Leib) Matos, were in the group of Borshchagovka refugees eventually rescued by Basya’s brother, Fawel Zitomersky.

3. Max Zitomersky was born ca. 1885 in Borshchagovka. After marrying Rose Rybak, he left for the nearby village of Volodarka, located seventeen miles to the east, to run her family’s dry goods store. Their oldest daughter, Marion, was born in 1914 and was almost five years old at the time of the pogroms. In a 1982 family video, she looked back at their life in Volodarka and how they managed to survive:

“During the massacres my father was separated from us, and we didn't know where he was, because we were

behind a wall and the soldiers made him come out. He was gone for two or three weeks. He went by hay cart to

another town [possibly Belaya Tserkov, as Schloime had mentioned in the letter he sent to his brothers in

Brooklyn], which was very dangerous because when a hay cart would pass, the soldiers would bayonet it, thinking

that a person might be there. Finally, we were reunited.

“The most traumatic part of my life was ... we were hidden in the cellar and they put coal over the trap door, and

cigarettes in the far corner of the house so the soldiers would go there. Eventually we came out and were in a little

courtyard, soldiers were shooting at us right through the window. The boy in front of me was on his mother's arm,

and he had his right arm shot off right in front of me. I was very lucky I wasn't hurt. Then we went into the cellar,

he was bleeding terribly. I also remember that we all had typhus, we were lying on the synagogue floor. We came

through, and very often when I'm in extreme danger in a hospital, I always say, if God put me through that, and I

lived with no medication, no hygiene, no nothing, I'll probably survive this time."

Click here to read more of Marion (Zitomersky) Wolf's memories

4. Morris “Menasha” Berlind was born in Burshivka in 1908. In a 1999 letter, he described his grandmother's murder and his family's survival:

“Our family together with our grandmother hoping to avoid disaster, crawled into a deep earthen cellar where we

lingered for 3 days. When we thought the murderous gang left our area, we emerged from the cellar and scattered.

And we were wrong, so wrong. The murderers were still doing their work. Soon our grandmother [Haike

Rabinowitz] was spotted and she was shot. Later in the evening in my wandering, in search of food, I was spotted.

But this time, the hooligan, apparently wanting to save bullets, began to strike my head with the butt of his gun

causing a deep gash and crack in the skull. I was thrust to the ground bleeding profusely, and must have appeared

lifeless. I say that I am alive today because the murderer thought I was dead. I must have lain on the ground in a

pool of blood for about 8 hours. In the morning a relative lifted me and covered the wounds with some kind of

cloth. Soon I was reunited with my family and joined the entire community in the exodus from Borshchagovka.

We survived the last pogrom.”

Click below to read Morris Berlind’s memories of Borshchagovka:

Morris Berlind’s Description of Life in Borshchagovka, Surviving the 1919 Pogrom, and a New Life in America

Morris Berlind’s Memories of the 1919 Borshchagovka Pogrom and his Family's Escape

5. The Novofastovsky family of Borshchagovka: The following narrative is based on a 1994 interview with Sonia Olin Spiel conducted by Bess Olin Kaplan, with additional details from Nathen Gabriel:

Sonia Olin Spiel was born in 1916 and lived in Tetiev with her parents, Leib and Giessel (Novofastovsky) Olin. Tetiev was a large town with a Jewish population of 7,000. Sonia’s maternal grandparents, Zanvel and Chava (Revitch) Novofastovsky, were sixteen miles away in Borshchagovka.

During the 1919 Borshchagovka pogroms, Zanvel Novofastovsky and five of his children - Idis, Ruchel, Moyshe Yossel, Aron and Udel - fled to Leib and Giessel Olin’s home in Tetiev. Udel had been shot in the side and foot, and the family’s escape was expedited by a balagula. (Yiddish for wagon driver.) Sonia had only recently returned to Tetiev after a stay in Borshchagovka with her grandparents. She had been sent there to protect her from a typhus epidemic that had swept through Tetiev and claimed the life of her baby sister, Esther.

Chava Novofastovsky, Zanvel’s wife, survived the Borshchagovka pogrom by concealing herself behind a door to evade the murderers. She then fled to Skvira, a distance of twenty-five miles. When Chava learned that the rest of the family had survived, she reunited with them in Tetiev, only to die there a few months later of typhus. Zanvel was killed in the final Tetiev pogrom of 1920 that resulted in the murders of 5,000 Jews. The community of Tetiev was completely destroyed - the same fate that had befallen Borshchagovka several months earlier.

Towards the end of her interview, Sonia shared her family's account of the murders of their cousins, Yitzhak Zitomersky and his teenage son, Ayzik:

“A lot of people were murdered [in Burshivka.] The Zitomerskys [...] the bandits took them out and shot them. The

kid (a boy of 15 or something) wouldn't let them. He wouldn't have been killed but he said that if you are going to

kill my father kill me too. So they did.”

Following the pogroms, the First Burshivker Sick And Benevolent Association, a landsmanshaft formed in New York City in 1904, placed a memorial pillar at the entrance to the Burshivka Society burial section in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Queens, New York. The pillar bears an inscription honoring the memory of their loved ones who perished:

Eternal Memory

To the martyrs that were killed that were slaughtered

That were burnt in sanctification of His Holy Name

500 human beings

Men women and children

In the city of Borshivke

During the time of the pogroms in Ukraine

In the year 5679 (1919)

May Their Souls Be Bound Up in the Bundle of Life

(Hebrew translation courtesy of Nathen Gabriel)

[Click here to view the pillar and inscription.]

*The counts were cited in the reference letter from the Burshivker Relief Committee included with Fawel Zitomersky's passport application to travel overseas and rescue the pogrom survivors: Fawel Zitomersky’s Passport Application File

Notes: