APPENDIX J
In December 2002, a quick email tip that the author of Tears Over Russia received from an Israeli genealogist/writer eventually led to the rediscovery of the original copy of what might be one of the most significant pogrom manuscripts ever compiled. The genealogist heard that a few years earlier researcher Michael Ben-Gershon, who followed a lead in an Encyclopedia of Hebrew Authors that he believes he probably looked at in Israel’s National Library, saw, with his own eyes, the historical treasure in a Tel Aviv archive.
The location of Eliezer David Rosenthal’s (1856–1932) original copy of the Megilat Ha-tevah (Scroll of the Slaughter) may have eluded many Jewish historians. Rosenthal, a writer living in Odessa, felt compelled to leave a written testimony of what happened to the Jews of Russia (and Ukraine) during the pogroms of 1917–1921.
Rosenthal, who was seriously ill while struggling to complete his work, traveled from town to town across Ukraine, collecting eyewitness accounts and evidence of the pogrom massacres. He penned his masterpiece in a beautiful Hebrew script and organized it in alphabetical order by the names of the afflicted towns.
Emma Goldman, the Jewish political activist, anarchist, and writer who was deported by the United States to Russia in December 1919, wrote of an interesting chance encounter that she had with the poet Chaim Nahman Bialik in Odessa.I Bialik, who later became one of Israel’s most famous writers, was accompanied by a man whom Goldman referred to as a “literary investigator.”II While she did not name this “investigator,” she reported that he had visited seventy-two cities, collecting the richest materials on the pogroms. It’s possible that Goldman may have met with Rosenthal.
In the mid-1920s, it is rumored that Rosenthal may have smuggled the manuscript out of Ukraine in pieces to his son who lived in Israel.III Possibly with the help of Chaim Nahman Bialik, who also hailed from Odessa, the first half of the manuscript was published in three volumes in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during the years 1926–1930.IV The publishers of these volumes included a brief introduction, written by Bialik, providing details of Rosenthal’s struggles to compile his historical masterpiece.V
After the deaths of both Rosenthal (1932) and Bialik (1934), the second half of this rare historical find, which contained the pages on Stavishche, was never published. The original handwritten work, which also included many pogrom memorial lists naming the victims from various towns, was believed to be eventually donated by Rosenthal’s survivors to Gnazim National Institute, known to Israeli researchers as the Archive of the Hebrew Writers Association.
The original manuscript appeared to have been sitting untouched in Gnazim for many decades until Ben-Gershon took it out of its old brown envelope. The librarian who assisted Ben-Gershon said that in the many years she had been working there, she had not seen anyone else looking at the document. Ben-Gershon, however, spent three hours that day looking through Rosenthal’s masterful compilation in amazement. It would be a few more years before the author would learn of his discovery.
From her computer in the United States, the author, after receiving a tip from and communicating extensively with Ben-Gershon, began a search for the Israeli archive, which, at that time, had no online presence or email. She contacted and was assisted by Benjamin Haspel of the University of Tel Aviv Archive, who then communicated back and forth for months with the staff at Gnazim on her behalf.
In June 2003, Mr. Haspel wrote to the author that he was informed by Gnazim that they did not have the materials she had requested. However, since Ben-Gershon had seen the document just a few years earlier among their holdings, an exhaustive search soon followed that was conducted over the summer. On August 27, 2003, the institute’s general manager was kind enough to email the author from her own computer to tell her that the Megilat Ha-tevah had at last been located. She then advised the author that, unfortunately, the document was found in very bad condition and could disintegrate upon handling. The manuscript could only be handled by a paper preservation specialist, which would mean that the pages of interest could not be sent to her at that time.
The historical importance of the Megilat Ha-tevah prompted a restoration project that soon followed. It was done in the restoration department in the National Library of Israel, headed by Tova Szeintuch, and generously funded by the Vivienne and Sam Cohen Charitable Trust.
Finally, in March 2004, sixteen months after her search first began, the author was able to experience the thrill of holding a few coveted pages of eyewitness testimony on Stavishche!VI Never before published, they confirmed the horrors that her grandmother Anne described long ago in her bedtime stories. A chilling 1919 tombstone list with the names of Zhelezniak’s victims, depicted in the eighth chapter of this book and translated in Appendix D, was found among the pages on Stavishche. A small pinhole at the top of the page resembling a tack mark indicates that the list was likely posted somewhere in the shtetl following the massacre.
Officially titled (in an English translation) Scroll of the Slaughter: Material about the Days of Pogroms and the Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine, in Greater Russia, and in White Russia, it is item number 341 at the Gnazim National Institute.VII The author believes it to be one of the most significant sources regarding this often-forgotten time period of Jewish history, rivaled in importance by the distinguished files in YIVO’s Tcherikower Archive.
1. I. Certain historical timelines place Goldman in Odessa in September 1920.
2. II. Source: Goldman, Emma. My Further Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924, page 10.
3. III. Some referred to Israel at that time as Eretz Yisrael. Prior to its independence in 1948, Israel was a British Mandate of Palestine.
4. IV. Some of Rosenthal’s entries also appeared many decades ago in the Hebrew journal Reshumot.
5. V. Some of the information in this appendix regarding Rosenthal’s early struggles to write and publish his masterpiece was based on the aforementioned introduction. (See Notes for more details.)
6. VI. The institute’s then general manager assisted the author in retrieving the pages on Stavishche.
7. VII. This item number was current at the time when the author was first in contact with the archive. The archive has since moved to Beit Ariela.