Memories for a Blessing Jewish Mourning Rituals and Commemorative Practices in Postwar Belarus and Ukraine, 1944-1991

Abstract

Soviet Jewish mourning practices after the Second World War offer a valuable opportunity to study the evolution of ritual life in a period of dramatic social transformation and demographic decline. Immediately after liberation and continuing throughout the postwar decades, Soviet Jewish individuals and communities revived and adapted prewar mourning practices to suit contemporary concerns and conditions. The resulting commemorative culture defies linear narratives of secularization. It also offers a valuable case study in ritual persistence through partial observance, improvised substitutes, and misremembered traditions. While ritual idiosyncrasy contributed to the atomization of Soviet Jewish religious life, such adaptation was precisely what allowed traditional practices to survive. In turn, mourning sustained a distinctive Jewish culture and reinvigorated Jewish communal life under unlikely circumstances. Just as Soviet Jews strategically selected the rituals they observed, they also strategically chose the venues in which they performed these rituals—cemeteries, private homes, synagogues, shtiebls, mass graves, and monuments. The first chapter of my dissertation addresses the interaction of families, local Jewish communities, and varying levels of the Soviet bureaucracy in the maintenance and usage of Jewish cemeteries. The second chapter analyzes individual and familial commemorative practices in the domestic sphere where the distinction between “religious practice” and “folk practice” remained murky. The third chapter examines individual and communal mourning practices in local Jewish cemeteries and emphasizes the ability of the burial landscape to elicit traditional observances. The fourth chapter turns to public mourning rituals in the synagogue or shtiebl and analyzes the role that these rituals played in sustaining holiday observance and synagogue attendance in the postwar period. The fifth chapter turns to a final site of mourning and commemorative activity—the mass grave—and examines Soviet Jews’ efforts to construct Holocaust memorials and conduct memorial services at the sites of Nazi mass shootings. By focusing on smaller towns and cities in Ukraine and Belarus, my project emphasizes local specificity and trans-regional comparison while examining regions in which Soviet secularization remained incomplete and contested well into the post-war era. To craft a compelling historical narrative that integrates state policy, material culture, and individual experience, this project draws on three major categories of primary sources: archival documents, memorial objects (such as monuments and memorial plaques), and personal accounts (including oral history interviews, memoirs, and yizkorbikher). Collectively, these sources compensate for each other’s silences, yielding a nuanced and unique perspective on postwar Soviet Jewish mourning culture. In the wake of the Holocaust and the Second World War, Soviet Jewish individuals and communities faced the dual challenge of commemoration and rebuilding. Despite logistical challenges and political barriers, Soviet Jews forged an autonomous memorial culture centered on local landscapes, experiences, and networks. The survival of traditional Jewish mourning rituals in postwar daily life reminds us that secularization is neither inevitable nor linear. Furthermore, it suggests a symbiotic relationship between mourning and rebuilding—death and the affirmation of communal bonds among the living. As a site of encounter between elderly and young, secular and religious, mourning fostered intergenerational continuity and revitalized otherwise crumbling communities.