Raya Kogan (nee Gelfand)
Please tell us about your family.
I was born in Zhmerynka, Ukraine. My maternal grandfather was a religious person who observed Shabbat and holidays and keep a kosher home. Before Passover, matzahs were baked for the community in our home. During the war, there was a Jewish ghetto in Zhmerynka, where they drove not only local Jews, but also Bessarabian Jews, including my father’s family. It was in the ghetto that my parents met. The father’s thirteen-year-old brother was taken from the ghetto by the Red Cross, and the boy was transported to Israel. He is now 92 years old and lives in Jerusalem. My father’s parents died in the ghetto from hunger and disease. I received confirmation of this from Yad Vashem. I still keep a form with information and a photograph of my grandmother, Rachel, after whom I am named.
My mother’s family had three children. During the New Economic Policy period, her father (my grandfather), Yitzhak Lehtman, owned an agricultural supplies store. His eldest son, Abram, was a talented person. Even as a child, he sang well, and they hoped that in the future he would sing in the synagogue and help in the family business. But one day a Jewish theater came to Zhmerynka on tour, and it sparked in my uncle the dream of becoming an artist. He went to Moscow to study acting under Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. I still have old photographs of my uncle with Mikhoels. After graduation, my uncle performed on the stages of Jewish theaters in Odessa and Moscow. When the war broke out, the theater artists received exemptions from military service. But my uncle did not want to take this opportunity and he volunteered, despite the fact that he had a bad heart. He died at the very beginning of the war. At first, my grandfather received a message that his son was missing. But then there were witnesses who saw how he died.
After the war, my parents lived in Zhmerynka, and then in Chernivtsi. They suffered greatly from antisemitism. My mother was dark, and I was blonde with a fair face. Once while line line at the store someone remarked, “Here the Jew took someone else's child in order to rush into the line.” My parents decided to leave Ukraine. Friends advised them to go to Tbilisi, saying that they treat Jews well there. And it turned out to be true. There I graduated from high school and a pedagogical institute. It was almost impossible to get a job teaching at school, so I found a job as a proofreader at a design institute. I got married in Tbilisi, and in 1976 my husband and I left for Israel.
Why did you decide to leave the Soviet Union?
You see, Jewish traditions were strong in our family. I speak Yiddish, my father taught me Jewish songs in Yiddish and Hebrew. Somehow in the 1970’s I went to Moscow, and my trip coincided with Kissinger's visit to the USSR. In honor of this, the government decided to hang advertising posters all over Moscow about the premiere of the Jewish theater performance. My aunt and I were lucky enough to attend this performance and hear our native Yiddish. I cannot forget those tremendous feelings of Jewish identity and immense Jewish pride that had been suppressed for many years. Returning home after the performance on the bus, I was filled with extraordinary elation and began to speak loudly with my aunt in Yiddish. She was frightened and was trying to restrain me, begging: “Hush, please, hush."
Having married in Tbilisi in 1970, my husband and I soon found a wonderful Jewish circle of friends to belong to. Together we attended Jewish holiday services in one of the synagogues in Tbilisi, and then they gathered with us and discussed what was happening in Israel: the Yom Kippur war, the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich. This Jewish attitude influenced our decision to leave. Another reason was that in the Soviet Union doctors diagnosed me with a terrible diagnosis - infertility. And in Israel, after the examination, the doctors laughed at their diagnosis. Soon my husband and I had a son, and then a daughter. And if we continued to live there, we would never have had children.
How was life in Israel?
After completing some courses, I began teaching in the elementary grades of a religious school for children with disabilities. And my husband, Eduard Kogan, went to work on a construction site as a civil engineer. Our Judaism flourished in Israel: we experienced the freedom to live as Jews, and shed the fear of observing Jewish traditions. Shabbat and holidays came into our home. While teaching at a religious school, I learned a lot about prayer, keeping kosher, and running a Jewish household, which is closely tied to the Jewish calendar. Our son completed his primary classes in a religious school. When my husband and I turned 40, we decided to test our capabilities again, to start something new in life, to learn a new language. And in 1990 we left for Canada. But we did not leave the traditions, we brought them with us, and we celebrated the Bar Mitzvah for our son and Bat Mitzvah for our daughter in Canada.
