CITY OF LIDA

Alternate names: Lida [Rus - Лида, Yid - לידע , Pol, Bel - Ліда], Lyda [Lith] at 53°53' N, 25°18' E, 55 miles S of Vilnius/Vilna, 25 miles NW of Navahrudak [Nowogrodek]. 1900 Jewish population: 5,294. MapQuest

Lida was the the equivalent of the county seat for a long time, but it lost that position when Lida district was combined with Nowogródek distict, with Nowogródek (now Navahrudak) as its seat. Lida is now just another town in the Hrodno region. 

Leon Lauresh maps of Lida through the ages. 1939 map is very similar to that in Sepher Lida, in Polish, but easier to read 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 on the right, marked "Dzielnica Zydowska" (Jewish District) is area heavily populated by Jews..

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

• A brief History of Lida is in Yad Vashem's "Lost Jewish Worlds", 1996.
• Jews in Lida in Russian - use browser translation app
• Virtual Guide to Belarus
• still active Landsmanshaftn in the US and Israel. Contact by regular mail. Please contact Irene Newhouse for the addresses.
• Lida Holocaust Memorial Foundation
• Information on 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.
• A heritage trip to Lida - use browser translation app
• Mikhail Baranchik's story (Lida area)
• Wikipedia
• History of train travel in the Lida area unfortunately has many broken links
• A history of education in Lida, with specific mentions of Jewish schools
• A history of the growth of Lida. Unfortunately, browser translation extensions translate a key word as burials when choronyms are meant. Yes, I had to look that one up. A choronym is the proper name for a region. In this case the regions are parts of Lida & the surrounding area. Unfortunately, the Russian translation also means burials. Ignore that.
• Another history of Lida
  

OTHER INFORMATION

• Early 20th century voter lists
• Antisemitic events just after World War I, from the JDC archives
• April 1919 - scroll down to page 7 for mention of Lida events. The entire document, though, provides a depressing picture of the process by which Poland and Lithuania enacted their independent governments, as sanctioned by the Treaty of Versailles, in the face of opposition by the Bolshevik government of Russia, which sought to maintain its former borders.
• April 1919
• June 1919 - scroll down to page 11 for a bit about Lida
• June 1919
• May 1921
• Business directories For a long time, only the 1929 business directory was easily available. There are now some others, some even from multiple sources, but I've picked one.
• 1923-4
• 1929
• 1930
  

HOLOCAUST

• Holocaust links page
• Holocaust in Lida on Yahad in Unum site
• autobiography of Dr. Frances Dworecki
• The Holocaust Monument in Lida was vandalized in August 2002. FSU Monitor for 21 Aug 2002 story went offline late 2006.
• The movie "Defiance", based on Nechama Tec's book, inspired many articles on survivors from the Lida area. These stories eventually went off-line
• Isaac Koll - originally in the Jewish Times. There's the story of his sister's & his survival elsewhere.
• Ann Monka - the Jewish Telegraph article is offline, but her story was on the Lida Memorial Society site. YouTube has a video in English with Spanish subtitles. There's another video on the US Shoah Foundation site. There are many ephemeral sites - use a search tool. 
• Helen Terris (nee Cyderowicz) - original link went stale in 2018 & hasn't been archived on the Wayback Machine. However, her life story is also on the Lida Holocaust Memorial site
• The Jewish Partisans Educational Foundation has a page on the Bielskis.

CITY OF LIDA RESIDENTS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS

• 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.
• CANADA:
  • Beth Lida Synagogue in Toronto cemetery records are in the Toronto Jewish Genealogical Society Collection at the North York  Library. Thanks to Elaine Rosenbloom for a copy. Rhonda B. Cohen updated cemetery records by transcribing tombstones in the Beth Lida section of Roselawn Cemetery in March 2005.
  • Beth Lida Synagogue no longer has web pages that include its history other than a mention of its age of more than 100 years. you can, however, recover the former page on the Internet Archive
  • Leybush (later Lewis) and Grunia Ferman settled in St.Johns, Newfoundland
• GERMANY
  • 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. Source: Michael Skakun in Aufbau, issue 2, 2003. He's mentioned in a book "Jews in Nazi Berlin" . There's a page dedicated to cards issued by his company. The factory ended up being in East Germany, and there were reparations issues in 1990. He now has a German wikipedia page. There's a possibly ephemeral page with photographs of the abandoned properties & decription of the family's Holocaust experiences. There's a page with historical postcards of the factories.
  • Thomas Garbaty, grandson of Josef, was a professor of Medieval English Literature at University of Michigan. He recorded a testmony that's only available on-site.
  • Eugene Garbaty's experience with Nazi expropriation is detailed in a very long war crimes document, so search for Garbaty to find the places. He, too, was Josef's grandson.
• ISRAEL
  • 1944 Letter to Nakhum Katzin Israel from his brother Gershon in the Lida area - The link went stale in June 2022. Enter this URL: http://nbergman.scripts.mit.edu/docs/Letter.pdf into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
  • Karen Alkalay-Gut of the English department at Tel Aviv University wrote some of her poems about her family's Lida heritage: A Lithuanian Legacy
• MEXICO
• Shifra Berenstein, called Shura, (Szura) married Sioma Pupko, son of Lida brewery owner Meilakh. Survivors, they moved to Mexico. Her descendant Batia Cohen-Fux has written a family history centered around Szura, Un Amapola entre Cactus (A Poppy in the Cactus). Yes, it's Spanish.
  
• POLAND
  • Postcard from Isaac and Maria Pupko, who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto
• UK
• The Goide Family History - the link went stale in 2021. In order to see the site, paste this: http://www.tzorafolk.com/genealogy/history/goide.htm into the search box at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine 
• USA
  • Dr. Nittai K. Bergman, a Lida descendant, has a letter written from Lida to Palestine right after WWII.
  • Marv Brooks' mother and her parents emigrated from Lida in 1917. She kept some bills from the trip.
  • Miriam Brysk nee Miasnik is an artist and author of a memoir: "Amidst the Shadows of the Trees: A Holocaust Child's Survival in the Partisans" (2007). She has recorded a testimony, the link to which went stale in Dec. 2018 (https://www.holocaustcenter.org/research/testimonies/brysk.miriam). The Holocaust Memorial Center  is redoing its site, and the putative link to an index of testimonies, has dead links to the  indices. About 11 minutes of her testimony are on YouTube. The transcript of an interview  is at the University of Michigan  Oral History Archive.
  • 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 father of Bernard Kouchel Z"l. Picture donated by Bernard Kouchel
  • Lieder Brothers' Section in Beth Moses Cemetery Photographs donated by Roslyn Sherman Greenberg z'l
  • Artist Alex Katz's father was from Lida. The bio that mentioned this is offline, and has been replaced with another one.
    
  • 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 remained 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 tribute.
    
  • 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. The original link has been taken offline.
  • Laura Levy is looking for relatives of her Tzigelnitski /Cegelnicka /Sigel family from Lida and Voronovo by way of Smorgon & Minsk.
  • Dr. Harry Polachek (1913-2002) was born in Lida and emigrated in the 1920s. He had a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University and was ordained as a 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 original link in "Nuclear News" is offline. There are 2 pdfs online [links can't be pasted] that may be of interest. One is a 3-page obituary in "IEEE Xplore". It's the first hit if you copy his name into an online search engine. The other is a transcript of an interview with him, focussing on his career, in the Smithsonian Archives. It's the second hit in the search.
    
  • Ralph Rose (abt 1918 - 2005), and his brother Sidney (abt 1919-2010) businessmen and philanthropists, Lida descendants, endowed a chair at Clark University in Massachusetts: the Rose Professorship in Holocaust Studies. The chair was to honor the memory of their father, whose parents, two sisters, and twelve nieces & nephews were Holocaust victims. They also donated a sculpture by Steve Linn, "I Heard the Voices", depicting their father's life. Further, they donated a fund for graduate students; this made Clark the first university in the world to offer a Ph D program in Holocaust Studies [from an obituary for Sidney Rose, from the Worcester MA Telegram, Dec. 13, 2010, accessed Jul 2015 -  http://www.telegram.com/article/20101213/OBIT/12130314 - I'm not hyperlinking because this will probably go stale.] Deborah Dwork was the first professor appointed to this chair, in 1996. [soc.culture.jewish.holocaust, posted 1/16/1996, accessed 7/14/2015] There was also a Boston Globe obituary with photo. [http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=147105335 , accessed Jul 2015] Dates for Ralph Rose from http://dictionary.sensagent.com/Temple_Emanuel_(Worcester,_Massachusetts)/en-en/#Prominent_members, accessed Jul 2015.
  • 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 to study mathematics, moving to Goettingen after two 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 came to the US and obtained a position at Washington University in St. Louis. After several moves, he settled at the University of Minnesota, where he built the Mathematics Department. In 1963 he moved to UC San Diego's La Jolla campus as department chair.
  • Mikro Kodesh Anshe Lida and Pinsk was a Chicago congregation originally founded by immigrants from Lida. Eli Pollock and a friend bought the original building at 1253 S. Lawndale Ave. in the 1920. They remodeled it as a Shul, removing the ceiling/floor between the 1st & 2nd floors to create a women's gallery. His sons Bernard and Herman found a suitable chandelier in a salvage yard, and installed it. (--Berna Heyman, granddaughter of Eli Pollock, who was told the story by Herman Pollock)
  • Mikro Kodesh Anshe Lida and Pinsk has a section in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery that has been indexed by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois.
    
• URUGUAY
  • Family history page of Dr. Ernesto Mordecki Pupko, a mathematics professor whose family is from Lida