Expedition diary: July 14, 2021

The fourth day of the Belarusian part of the expedition was divided between two places: Lyubcha and Navahrudak.

In Lyubcha, we were looking for three former Jewish synagogues: the white, red and wooden ones. It is interesting that the former white synagogue is now yellow. Now it hosts the Lyubcha House of Culture.

We played the violin here as well. Tradition is tradition.

We also met the owner of half of the former Jewish building next to the “cultural” synagogue, which was put up for sale.

By the way, the mikvah in Lyubcha is just as abandoned as the mikvah in Zembin. Now it does not look like a mikvah, but local residents have long called this building the “bath”. Therefore, most likely, it was actually a mikvah. We lurked inside and streamed for our Polish friends outside.

Impressions of the expedition participants:

“We were very excited by the peculiarities of the sexual life of traditional Jewish men and women. The guide told us a story about a rabbi who made a mistake in defining the “kosherness” of the mikvah.” What does sex have to do with it, you can find out from the video notes from Lyubcha’s location.

We visited two women of the golden age, one of which told us a romantic Lyubcha love story: about a Jewish girl whose parents wouldn’t let her marry a Belarusian.

We saw the exposition dedicated to the Jewish resistance. Although the topic of the Holocaust was not the focus of our expedition, the group was deeply impressed by the stories told by our Navahrudak guide, Tamara Vyarshitskaya.

We listened to a panel discussion in Zoom by our colleagues from Poland on the topic: “Tykocin – the richness and diversity of Jewish culture on the Polish-Belarusian border”. Meanwhile, a part of the working group met with informants.

The evening for the Belarusian expedition ended with a visit to the Navahrudak painter Kastus Kachan who is called the songster of small towns. Whether Navahrudak has signs of the past and whether the urban space preserves something about Jewish history, you can find out from the notes in the section “Archive of the expedition”.

Meanwhile, the Polish part of the Shtetlfest team spent an eventful day in Tykocin, where they learned about its Jewish history.

They met with a large number of experts, including: Ewa Grochowska, Alicja Grabowska, Tomasz Wisniewski, Jan Maciejewski. We were lucky enough to join this cross-border meeting in Zoom, it’s a pity it wasn’t offline.

The team conducted an active field work and visited Mrs. Marya Markievicz, who met the members of the expedition group in her own wooden house. She told many touching stories about the Jews of Tykocin during the war and after war period.

They met Antanina Andruszkievicz, born in 1930. She is probably the oldest resident of Tykocin.

In the evening, a workshop on Jewish cuisine was held. Kosher food was cooked, and everyone could feel like a real Jew and a cook at the same time.

At the end of the fourth day, Poland and Belarus met online to discuss working issues.