In Search of Hussakow
Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Wednesday, 12 May 2004
Rabbi Bayfield reports on his recent trip to the Ukraine, and the search for his family's roots.
My mother was a Mann before she got married. Her paternal grandparents came from a little shtetl called Hussakow which was sequentially in Ruthenia, Little Poland, Poland/Lithuania, Red Russia, Galicia, Poland, The Soviet Union and, today, Ukraine. In search of Hussakow, birthplace of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev as well as several generations of Manns, we flew to Lviv.
The moment we walked into the centre of the town, it was clear that we weren’t in Lviv (the Ukrainian) or even in Lwow (the Polish) but in Lemberg — the German name for the town that was for such a long time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dignified, if faded buildings, broad streets, cobbled squares full of trees, trams and central European elegance. It was as if time had stood still and nothing had changed.
Daniel, Lisa, Miriam and I walked down Old Hebrew Street, once the heart of a city that had been 30% Jewish. At the end, by the Arsenal, was an empty site, unkempt and litter-strewn where one of the great European synagogues, the Golden Rose, had been. There was a small plaque and the remains of a candle. As we began to read it and showed signs of interest and attachment, a man came over and began to sing menacingly in German.
The square became threatening as well as shabby and we left hurriedly. Nothing had changed.
It occurred to me as I stood later in Hussakow, on the place where the Nazis had obliterated more than sixty wooden homes and murdered all 249 Jewish inhabitants, that we Jews are not just haunted by our past but by our present too. If only the world would make an effort to understand that it is not just past angst but present fear that drives us, we might be able to respond more positively than we do to the challenge of living in multi-faith societies and in a land which has to be shared.
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