Families
Over 160 family names have been recorded for Shkud, in many cases with several families sharing
the same name. My family, the Mines family, was one of them.
My father, Sender Mines, was born in Shkud in 1909, the youngest son of Meyer and Rachel (nee Aizen). He worked in the shoe industry, stitching uppers, probably in the factory of his uncle and cousin, Yosef and Michel Mines. When Sender was about 25, he married his cousin Chaja (Yosef's daughter) and moved to Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania. Chaja already had a daughter, Miriam, about six, and their son, Emanuel, was born in Kaunas in 1938. When war broke out in June 1941, Sender and his family were forced into the Kaunas ghetto. Shortly after, Sender was deported to a slave labour camp in Riga, Latvia, surviving incredible hardships until his liberation from the Stutthof camp near present-day Gdansk, Poland, in May, 1945. Chaja also survived the Holocaust, but the children were murdered in the Kaunas ghetto's Children's Action in 1943. Neither Sender nor Chaja knew the other had survived.
Sender emigrated to Canada in 1951, where he met my mother, Jennie. The couple were planning to marry when they discovered that Chaja had survived, remarried, and also emigrated to Canada. Sender and Chaja divorced each other, and my parents married in 1953.
My father never spoke of his first wife and their children. I discovered their identities in about 2009, while researching Yad Vashem's Shoah Names database (Click the link and then choose "Digital Collections"). Putting together information on my own family from various sources, I decided I wanted to do the same for each of Shkud's families: to identify them, retell their stories, and memorialize them.
Based on the 161 families identified in Hana Shaf-Brener's necrology,
the Shtetl Shkud Families
page collects and provides genealogical information from Jewish Gen; photos and information from
Yizkor Books; stories from "Jews in the Memory of Skuodas People" (available on the Shtetl Shkud
site); information and photos from descendants of Shkud citizens and Yad Vashem Pages of
Testimony; and material gathered from other sources. The aim is to build up a complete picture as
possible of every Shkud citizen: names, relationships, ages, professions, and personal details.
For examples, see Terushkin
(Shkud's Rabbi), Skaist (the town's
photographer) and Malkinson (a
prominent family).