(Jewish Group) Eyewitness account of the Felshtin massacre in 1919

Sore Oksman, also called Sore, Yankl’s daughter, was an eyewitness to the massacre, in which the murderers took the lives of two of her own children. Soon afterwards she managed to emigrate to the United States, to her children Izzie Oksman and Rose Uberman. Another son, Joseph, and daughter, Lizzie Rosenbaum, joined them later.

In May 25, 1926 Petliura was assassinated by the Russian-born Yiddish poet Sholom Schwartzbard, on a street in Paris. Schwartzbard was brought to trial in 1927 and acquitted after three weeks.

After Oksman’s death in 1929, her children found among her possessions the following handwritten account of the pogrom which they believe she wrote around the time of Schwartzbard’s trial. It was in Yiddish and she had intended to send it to the Yiddish daily newspaper Morgn Zhurnal (Morning Journal) but never did.

This account is one of 77 chapters in the 692-page yisker-bukh, or Memorial Book, of Felshtin, published in 1937, and later included in the English translation of the book which came out in 2021. The book was translated by Sidney Shaievitz, founder and treasurer of the New Jersey-based Felshtin Society, with the help of several translators. Shaievitz’s grandfather was stabbed to death in the pogrom.

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