Funeral
Funeral of a respected Jew in Lida. Haeckel Brothers, Berlin (photographers); Georg Stilke, Berlin (publisher). Posted on 12 September 1916. Otto and Georg Haeckel were official German war photographers on the eastern front.
So integral is the funeral procession to the Jewish funeral rite that the entire proceedings are named after it: levayah (in Hebrew) or, perhaps more importantly in this case, levaye (in Yiddish). The term is derived from the verb to accompany. Accompanying the dead on their final journey is considered a particularly worthy form of service since it is offered in the knowledge that the recipient will definitely not be able to reciprocate. The image merits closer attention not least insofar as it demonstrates that, even within one and the same locality, male “Eastern Jews” did not all sport identical dress, beards and headwear.
Lida is located in present-day Belarus, 150 kilometres west of the Belarusian capital Minsk, 165 kilometres northeast of the Polish city of Białystok and 145 kilometres southwest of the Lithuanian city of Kovno/Kaunas. From the third Polish Partition of 1795 to the end of the First World War, it was part of the Russian Empire. It was then governed by Lithuania and, following the Second World War, by the Soviet Union. Lida was renowned for its innovative yeshivah, run from 1886 until his death in 1915 by the city’s rabbi Yitzhak Ya’akov Reines (1839–1915), a graduate of the most prestigious Eastern European yeshivah in Volozhin. A well respected and versatile rabbinic scholar, he was one of the founding members and the initial head of the religious Zionist movement Mizrahi. In the 1930s, the Jewish community maintained four schools, three libraries, a community college, an eighteen-bed hospital, a mutual aid society that ran several day care centres for needy infants and children, a milk kitchen, five theatre troupes, three sports organizations and, alongside the synagogue, a dozen smaller places of worship. Several Jewish periodicals—the “Lider Wochenblat”, “Lider Woch” and “Lider Lebn”—were published in Lida and in 1933, a historical commission was established to document the Jews’ history in the town. All this was wiped out by the Germans.
We hope you are enjoying the images and words on our web page. Please help us run this page by buying one of our books or by sending us a donation.
