Jews and Tsarist Military Service
by ROBERTA NEWMAN
Among the first archival collections digitized in New York for the Vilna Collections project is one with many documents dating back to early in the nineteenth century: the Records of the Minsk Jewish Community Council (Record Group 12).
The Jewish community of Minsk, Byelorussia was represented by a community council (kehillah) from the sixteenth century through 1920 and the advent of the Soviet Union. Under the tsarist regime, the kehillah was in charge of internal Jewish affairs and was empowered to collect taxes.
The kehillah records in YIVO’s possession are fragments of what must once have been a larger collection. They span 1825-1921 and include registers of births, marriages and deaths; tax rolls; membership lists and contribution lists to major synagogues in Minsk; records related to Jewish military service; and correspondence with the authorities. Most of the documents are in Russian, but there are also a few documents in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
This page from a document attests to efforts on the part of the authorities to curb Jewish runaways from the army. In March 1839, the Governor of the Minsk Province issued an order about uprooting the tendency to conceal fugitive conscripts and the Minsk Chief of Police ordered the kehillah to post it prominently near the city’s synagogues along with a Yiddish translation.
Seen here are instructions in Yiddish for where and how to display the notice (“in every city, town, and village outside on the walls of post offices, stores, taverns, and other places of business where people gather”). Harsh punishments are threatened for those who aid runaway conscripts, even those who merely give them “a piece of bread or a drop of water.”
A few other documents from this collection were published by YIVO in 2014 on the website, YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland. The full finding aid to this collection can be found in the Guide to the YIVO Archives.
The entire set of digitized documents from this collection will be online by mid-2017.
Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.