#ussr jews

[cottoncandytrafficcones]

Hey Jumblr,

What are some non-Ashknazi marriage traditions/rituals that y'all do? I was reading up on weddings and a lot of stuff (the bedeken, the walking around the groom) was written to be Ashkenazi tradition. I know a lot about henna, but that's basically it.

[kick-a-long]

So I’ve been celebrating Shabbat for a few months (it’s unbelievably amazing btw, I rest, light candles, I limp through Hebrew but I can feel it getting easier to say and understand, have wine, feel like a winner because no one has killed me this week.) but I don’t always want/make bread. I love bread, I love making it, having bread all week, and braiding it but my husband can’t eat it so one loaf is a lot of bread. But I sometimes wonder if challah is the only option. Putting eggs, honey, and butter in a bread reads as a kind of cake to me. It also makes sense to me that cake is fitting for celebration and contemplation about the good in life.

My question is: does jumblr know if I can make babka or rugula instead for Shabbat? Can I make gluten free cookies as long as it has over 1/8th oat flour? Maybe even Cinnamon buns fit a lot of the same ingredients as challah? Not to get all rabbinical, but does the Hebrew for what bread you have on Shabbat specify bread as opposed to cakes (which I don’t think was a separate category of food from bread 3000 years ago? The internet says challah started in 15th century Eastern Europe.

The truth is I’m not following a lot of rules for Shabbat anyway, although I try to get close each Friday. I want it to be Jewish, not just a jew making a type of Shabbat type thing on Fridays. so is this: “in for a penny in for a pound�� challah is traditional, it must be bread not cake, or is it: as long as you usually do challah you can make cake and treats every once in a while?

[kaamosnoita]

Yearly Reminder the Hammer&Sickle / Russian army symbols don't belong in Pride

[nesyanast]

Margarita Iosifovna Aliger (October 7 1915 – August 1, 1992) was a Soviet poet, translator, and journalist. She was born in Odessa in a family of Jewish office workers.

The main themes of her early poetry were the heroism of the Soviet people during industrialization and during World War II. Her most famous poem is "Zoya" (1942), about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a young girl killed by Nazis. This work was one of the most popular poems during the Soviet era. From 1940 to 1950, the poetry of Aliger was characterised by a mix of optimistic semi-official verses ("Leninskie mountains", 1953), and poems in which Aliger tried to analyse the situation in her country in a realistic way ("Your Victory", 1944 - 1945).

In 1956, in a gathering of Khrushchev with the intelligentsia he admonished the writers for interfering with the political system. It is noted that Aliger was the only writer to speak up against him at the event. It was after his retirement that he apologized to her for his behavior. Aliger wrote numerous essays and articles about Russian literature and her impressions on travelling ("On poetry and poets", 1980; "The return from Chile", 1966).

[proustianlesbian]

I think a lot about these pictures of Boris Volynov (Борис Волынов) that i found last month 💙 !!

And these ones when he received the Order of Gagarin on the 17th January 2024 :

If you don't know, Boris Volynov is the first Jewish cosmonaut and unfortunately the last member of the first group of cosmonauts created in March 1960 who is still alive.

also the picture of the parachute training in color that i found just yesterday :

he is one of my favorite cosmonauts, i love him so much, i really hope that one day i can meet him to tell him how he inspired me when i was little and still does now ✡️💙🌌 !!

[the-sea-anemone]

not to complain about my best friend the internet archive that i love very much but. why are the scans of this book such terrible quality :(

[leroibobo]

Hi, I was wondering, why did you tag the sword from Dagestan with "Persian Jews?"

dagestan's jews were descendants of jews who got to the area from the sassanian empire sometime in the fourth century. their "diaspora language" is juhuri, a jewish dialect of the iranian tat language.

"persian jews" is my catch-all tag for jews who live/d in or went elsewhere after having lived in persia, sort of like "ashkenazi" or "sephardic". there's no actual term for it nor an associated religious rite they all share. most iranian-speaking jews lived within modern-day iran (a huge and culturally/linguistically diverse part of the world in itself), but many also ended up in the caucuses and central asia.

(and yes, i’m aware that “persian” is a subset of “iranian”, but “iran” is the current-day country and i’d rather not confuse anyone.)

[twyrrinren]

Sometimes I think that the Soviet project was a collective delirious dream/nightmare, because what do you mean they established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast with Yiddish and Russian as the official languages. (And right now the population of the Oblast consists of 90% Russians and 1% Jews.)

[nesyanast]

Jewish Soviet Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak was a fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force during World War 2.

With five solo victories, she claimed up to twelve solo victories and two to four shared kills in 66 combat sorties. In about two years of operations, she was the first female fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft, the first of two female fighter pilots to have earned the title of fighter ace and the holder of the record for the greatest number of kills by a female fighter pilot. She was shot down near Orel during the Battle of Kursk as she attacked a formation of German aeroplanes.

When she shot down a Bf 109 G-2 "Gustav" on the tail of her squadron commander, Raisa Beliaeva, the Bf 109 was piloted by a decorated pilot from the 4th Air Fleet, commanded by General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen (a distant relative of the Red Baron), the 11-victory ace, staff Sergeant Erwin Maier of the 2nd Staffel of Jagdgeschwader 53. Maier parachuted from his aircraft, was captured by Soviet troops, and asked to see the Russian ace who had outflown him. When he was taken to Litvyak, he thought he was being made the butt of a Soviet joke. It was not until Litvyak described each move of the fight to him in perfect detail that he knew he had been shot down by a woman pilot.

[proustianlesbian]

i am honestly so in chock at how my post about boris volynov's birthday had and is still getting so many notes 😭 !! why me ? why just today, a few days after it was posted ? but it's what he deserve 🥺🥰🥹 !! a lot of thank yous to everyone who shared it, i spent a while searching for good pictures and i hope he knows he is loved (at least by me haha) and known even outside of ex-ussr countries !!

[chichi-the-treetea]

1941 Love

Name: Ruth Benowitz Aliases: N/A Age: 19 Birthday: 1st December 1922 Gender: Female Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Straight Race: Human Ethnicity: Austrian, German, Russian Nationality: German (She speaks German, Russian, and French) Religion: Judaism Social Class: Upper Middle Wealth: Not wealthy, but had enough to live comfortably.  Appearance:          Ruth has brown eyes and short brown hair. Her skin is a lighter tan and she has no freckles or scars. She wears a green dress with a light brown belt, a white blouse underneath the dress and a ribbon the same green as her dress around the collar of her shirt. She wears a brown jacket that used to have the Star of David on it, identifying her as a Jew. Her mother removed it when they escaped to Ukraine. She wears black town shoes and a hat that matches her dress.  Personality:  Her family has more money than Rodion and Nadia and thus she likes to rub it in. They think she is a bit stuck up sometimes and she thinks they are jealous. She acts as though she is the most important person in the world and doesn't like to do things like help make meals or pack up camp. She is a bit bossy, stubborn, constantly annoyed and is annoying. Talents: She can play the piano very well. She can listen to a song and then play it on the piano with very little mistakes. Hobbies: Playing the piano. Likes: Lilies, playing the piano, wide open spaces

Dislikes: Dirt, Nazis, Ivan Braginsky, fish

Habits: She tosses her hair back when she is annoyed at people.  Pet peeves: She hates it when people ask her to help clean up. Strengths: She can speak three languages, is stubborn,  Weaknesses: Is stubborn, thinks she is the most important person alive Fears: She is scared that the Nazis will catch her and kill her. Mental disorders: None, although she carries great guilt from her act of killing a German soldier.

Physical disorders: None Relationships:  Nadia Landowska (Friend) Rodion Kovalenko (Friend) Maichail Frankfurter (fiancé) Anselm Barfuss (Nazi commander who has sworn to kill Ruth and everyone dear to her.) Ivan Braginsky (The 'Russian Rat'. Red Army general who constantly runs into her.) Uncle Abram (Ruth's crazy uncle who lives in Moscow. She is trying to get to him so she can live with him.) Jonathan Wakstok (Jewish boy who is taken by the Germans.)

Family: Mother (dead) Father (Dead) Four uncles (Dead) Uncle Abram (Alive) Mariam (Sister, in a concentration camp) Rolf (Brother, dead.) All grandparents (dead) Love interest:  Maichail Frankfurter (Fiancé) Pets: None Residence: None, her home was taken by the Nazis and she now lives on the run with Nadia and Rodion while making her way to Moscow. Description of residence:  She lives on the run with Nadia and Rodion. Occupation: Dress maker.

Backstory:  Nadia was born in Germany in 1922 to a Jewish German/Austrian father and a Jewish Russian mother. She is the youngest of three children; her brother was beaten to death in the streets during Kristallnacht in 1938 (The Night of Broken Glass.) and the following year her sister and brother-in-law were taken away to a concentration camp. Her sister died in childbirth on the train there. Ruth, her father and mother were smuggled out of Germany by a Christian family to Austria where an Atheist family then helped them get to the border of Ukraine. They stayed in Ukraine until June of 1941 when the Nazis invaded. Ruth wouldn't leave her parents and they did not manage to escape in time. The Nazi commander Anselm Barfuss was in charge of the group of Jews she was in. When they were taken outside the town, they knew what was going to happen and Ruth refused to go down without putting up a fight. Her father, mother, and several others started to put up a fight, managing to take several guns from the Nazis. Ruth saw the Nazi commander on the ground and took her chance, managing to slice her face. The Nazis got back control and Ruth's father made her and her mother make a run for it. Her mother then instructed Ruth to find her brother (Ruth's uncle) in Moscow before sacrificing herself so her daughter could run and be free. Later Ruth met a Jewish family on the run who old her that Anselm had sworn to kill Ruth and her family as an act of revenge for the new scar he had on his face from the Jewish girl. The family wouldn't let Ruth travel with them out of fear that Anselm would track her down with such passion, that they would be in danger too. Instead, she went East and settled in a town by a river until August when the Germans reached it. She fled to the forest when news reached her that they were coming and there, she meets Nadia Landowska, a Russian woman who is trying to find her family and Rodion Kovalenko, a Red Army soldier accompanying Nadia while he retreats from the German army.  Theme song: Origin by Besomorph & Neoni Quote: "You smell horrible!" -Ruth

[nesyanast]

Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (11 November 1891 – 26 April 1981) was a Soviet child psychiatrist. She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925.

The article was created almost two decades before the case reports of Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner, which were published while Sukhareva's pioneering work remained unnoticed. As Sukhareva’s autism research was translated and published in German-language journals within a year of its domestic publication in Russian, there existed no serious barrier to access of these materials by Asperger and Kanner.

The autism researcher Hans Asperger likely chose not to cite her work, due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party and her being a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union.

[cowpokezuko]

Soviet Propaganda

[yanzinator]

A tired Jew is riding the train, when he notices another Jew on the train, reading anti-Jewish goyish newspaper. He walks up to this Jew and asks "why would you read that? They hate us!" so the one reading the paper replies "Hate us? this is the only news source that gives me any joy! in our own communities all anyone ever talks about is the pogroms and anti-semitism and how we're constantly oppressed. It's so negative! I read this because these are the only papers with any positivity. They are constantly saying how good we have it! We're rich and we control the world! I'd rather control the world."

This is a joke from the USSR, I really wanted to share it.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

I’ve been seeing a lot of what I’m going to term “Judenrat Behavior” from American Jewish organizations and individuals over the last week and a half; I am speaking, of course, as a member of the American Jewish community.

The Judenrat were councils of highly respected Jewish individuals the Nazis set up as governing parties in the Jewish ghettos of Poland, Lithuania, and the Western USSR.

They were expected to carry out any and all German orders regarding the Jews, while they simultaneously sought to protect their communities from those orders as much as possible.

Comprised of highly educated, respected men, when the kashariyot (the female functionaries I refer to in my book title as “the girl bandits”) started showing up with evidence of mass murders of Jews in the territories Germany occupied in the summer of 1941, the Judenrat were not having it.

When the male leaders of the organized Jewish youth argued that the evidence needed to be taken seriously, the Judenrat were still not having it. They refused to believe that “this” could happen right in the “middle of Europe,” in the middle of the "civilized world."

Therefore, went the Judenrat's thinking, these young women and men were nothing more than dangerous, hysterical provocateurs. The evidence was right in front of them, and the Jewish Councils refused to accept the reality of the fact that the Germans were carefully, deliberately, and methodically massacring the Jews of Eastern Europe.

We often conflate the Jewish Councils with the Jewish camp guards and ghetto police. I don’t think that’s fair; with the exception of Chaim Rumkowski, the Councils were comprised of individuals who simply couldn’t conceive of This happening in the world they thought they understood.

They weren’t the collaborators the ghettos saw them as. They weren’t putting their parents in deportation trains. They weren’t informing on other Jews. They were just people incapable of, and ultimately, unwilling to see what they were living through for what it was.

Today, we all have the benefit of these histories to learn from. Denying what we see, what we hear, what government officials say won’t get us anywhere, besides maybe dead.

Right now they’re coming for the Latin American and trans communities. And we can’t just all sit back and reenact Martin Niemöller's "First they came for..." We just can't.