Tallesim

     Dubrowna was noteworthy in that it was one of the first and only places where woolen tallesim were woven.  A factory was established in 1750, but tallesim were made here even earlier than that.  In the early 1900s, there were four tallis factories (one was the most famous factory, plus three smaller ones) furnishing about 600 families with employment in the different stages of manufacture.

     Weavers would work in their homes, often helped by their wives and children as young as 6-7 years of age.  Even with incessant work, they earned less than the dyers.  Dyers, who dyed the woolen thread a dark blue (tekhelet), earned from 8-10 rubles a month.  The launderers (approximately 10 or 12 families at the time), who washed the tallisim, earned even more, sometimes five rubles a week.  The shavers (“goler”; about twenty families), who cut the nap from the surface of the tallisim, received the least of all.  Their work was carried out amid very unsanitary conditions.  They were exploited by the dealers, who supplied them with wool, and then purchased the finished article.  The dealers (only three or four individuals), had agencies in all the important commercial centers, and agents in every town and village within the Pale of Settlement.  Depending on the quality of the wool and the look of the tallit, tallesim from the factories would cost anywhere from five to fifty rubles apiece. 

     Under the Soviets the weaving factory began to employ non-Jewish workers, who by the mid-1930s comprised more than half of the workers.  The factory also had its own newspaper published in both Belorussian and Yiddish.

     Up to the early 1900s, the Dubrowna tallesim were even sold abroad in such places as the United States, but with the advent of machine made tallisim in Lithuania and other places, the Dubrowna tallesim began to lose market share, to the extent that the Jewish Colonization Association created a fund to reorganize and raise the level of the weaving industry among the Jews of Dubrowna and to furnish employment to those who had lost their jobs.

Dubrowna Tallis Factory

Detail of Tallis Factory Showing Star of David