Boris Lorman
Please tell us about your roots. Were Jewish traditions observed in your family?
You can even see it from the names. My grandfather’s name on my father’s side was Aron, and my grandmother’s name was Bronya. They lived near the Ukrainian city of Olevsk. After the war they moved to Kyiv. In Kyiv at that time there was the only synagogue, in the Podil neighborhood, and my grandparents had personal assigned seats in it. They observed kashrut and all the traditions of Jewish life. I went with my grandmother to buy food - chicken and meat were bought only from the shochet (ritual slaughterer). This shochet (I remember his name was Shmul) was also a mohel, who circumcised me and my brother. We would always gathered with our grandparents for the holidays. They read the blessings and performed all the rituals, but we didn’t learn any of this. I once asked my grandfather: “Why don’t you teach us Hebrew and prayers?”, to which he replied that life is already hard enough and he doesn’t want to complicate it for my brother and me. And this is the grandfather who went through the entire war with a tallit under his tunic. He and my grandmother had five children, and their parents raised them strictly, trying to instill in them honesty, kindness, and respect for people. My mother's father, my grandfather David, disappeared in 1942. All my ancestors on my mother’s side came from Chernobyl. I heard that one of our relatives was married to a girl who came from the family of the famous Chernobyl Rebbe. Grandfather David and his father, my great-grandfather, were blacksmiths. They kept livestock and had a home dairy. After the revolution people tried to dispossess them and wanted to shoot them, but all the local non-Jews stood up for them, saying: “Without them we will die of hunger, since they are the only blacksmiths in 4-5 villages in the area.” And they were left alive, but all their property was taken away. Was Jewish tradition observed in the family after your grandparents? There are some traditions that remained in our family. neither my parents nor my brother and I ever ate bread on Passover. To provide the family with matzah, it was necessary first to bring flour to a place familiar only to Jews, and after a few days to pick up the finished matzo. Moreover, all this was done at night, so that there were no witnesses. I still remember that they gave us matzah in pillowcases. Absolutely everyone is talking about this. For some reason, everyone put matzah in pillowcases. I remember my uncle, my father’s cousin, a colonel in the Soviet army, carrying matzah in a pillowcase across the city to another colonel in the Soviet army, my father. I graduated from school in Kyiv, started working, and literally six months later we left for Israel. In Israel, I worked at Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, located in the city of Beer Yakov. We assembled large containers for transporting food. Shortly after that, the Yom Kippur War began, and we began converting our containers into large refrigerators, since there was a shortage of refrigerators to transport food for the army. We worked around the clock then. After staying in Israel for a year and a half, I came to Italy.
Why to Italy?
Because in Italy there were organizations that helped people move to Canada, America, Australia. I lived in Italy for three years. What did you do there? I worked as a loader, a mechanic, a cook, dishwasher – in short, I did whatever had to be done. Soon an event occurred that strengthened my Jewish position. While in Israel, I began to celebrate Jewish holidays. I did not work on holidays, and also fasted on Yom Kippur. One day on Yom Kippur in Italy, I told my Italian employer that tomorrow was a Jewish holiday, that I had to fast and I wouldn’t be able to work. He didn't mind. Unfortunately, there was a Jewish “well-wisher” who, when asked by the employer to replace me, replied that there was no holiday, and that I just wanted to have a day off. In the evening, the owner called and said that if I didn’t come to work on Yom Kippur, he would fire me. There was no choice: I was the only one in the family who worked, and besides, my father then had knee surgery, and I was forced to go to work. At the same time, I was also fasting. That day we had to work at the airport. But the Almighty, apparently, was pleased that I did not want to work on Yom Kippur, and made sure that the necessary documents were not delivered to us. We sat all day doing nothing. They brought us back in the evening. I approached the owner and asked why he made me go to work. To which he replied that my colleague said that there was no holiday. Then I told him: “As far as I know, your wife is a religious person and goes to church. Ask her to ask the priest if there was a Jewish holiday that day and what kind of holiday it was.” The next day after lunch, the owner came to me with an apology. In Canada, I continue to observe all holidays and, in addition, I always try to help our Jewish community.
