I. SHMULEWITZ BIALYSTOK — A HISTORICAL SURVEY The Jewish community in Bialystok, which achieved so much on all fronts, goes back some 500 years. Its story is fascinating and unique. Until World War II, Jewish Bia- lystok was renowned in Russia, Poland and other coun- tries 25 a center of commerce and industry. It was also celebrated for its Torah learning and charity, a broad network of cultural and community activities, labor, art and industry. To understand Bialystok is to appreciate the enter- prising spirit of its Jews, as well as their boundless capacity for compassion — helping the helpless, com- forting the downtrodden, sustaining the impoverished. Above all, Jewish life and thought in Bialystok were diversified; many different points of view were held concerning all the important issues of the day. Bialy- stok was a place for people to grow and thrive, to face challenges and overcome adversity. This community accommodated multiple economic classes, social strata, political parties and theological positions. Living in freedom was the major goal of Jews in Bialystok from all walks of life. No one held a monop- oly on truth, ideas or values. The environment bubbled like a cauldron into which ingredients of all kinds were thrown. There was a sense of community among Bialy- stok’s Jewish inhabitants. They all felt they belonged to one another. If the ugly head of alienation appeared from time to time, it did not endure for long. For there existed an intricate network of aid institutions, whether organized or informal, reaching out to those on the fringes of society. As we will soon see, the very emergence of Bialy- stok from a barren, uncultivated swampland in the forests of Eastern Poland into a flourishing, sprawling center of human life was a tribute to the creativity, industriousness and hard work of its Jews. Let us go back in time and briefly review some milestones in its evolution. Around the 10th century CE, the Bialystok region was populated by a barbaric Baltic-Latvian tribe. Sub- sequently, its members were expelled from the area by Russian-Lithuanian conquerors. In 1320, Bialystok was founded as a village by the Lithuanian Count Gedimin. After being passed on from one generation of this Lithuanian family to the next, the village became the private fiefdom of King Zygmunt August, a Polish ruler, in 1542. At the end of the 16th century, the Arians, a hereti- cal Christian cult that did not accept several major Catholic dogmas, occupied Lithuania and Poland. They invaded a temple in Bialystok built many years before- The Bialystoker Memorial Book hand and “‘defiled”’ it. These apostates were driven out, and in 1668 Bialystok went on to become an entrenched Polish territory. In 1795, following the partition of Poland, Prussia annexed Bialystok. Napoleonic armies on their way to Russia took over control of Bialystok and ruled for one year. Then in 1808, the city fell into Russian hands. Napoleon reconquered Lithuania and Poland in 1812, and three years later, after the Tilsit Peace Conference, Russia once again imposed its juris- Izchok Zabludowski (known as the “wealthy Reb Izchok”) came to Bialystok at the beginning of the 19th century and engaged in the lumber business with the Russian government. In his day, he was Russia’s richest Jew and gave a great deal of money and real estate to charity. His descendants were among the wealthiest and most influen- tial families in Bialystok. He died in 1865. diction over the city, ruling for more than a century — until the first World War. Poland took over in 1919 until the outbreak of World War 11 in 1939, when for two years the Russians controlled Bialystok. The Nazis captured the city in 1941 and destroyed it in 1943. The above reflects a history of political and social instability in Bialystok for almost 1,000 years. This town was a veritable football, kicked back and forth, first between groups and then nations vying with one another for dominance in the area. Under these condi- tions of flux and uncertainty, it is all the more amazing that Bialystoker Jews found it possible to grow, to build, to establish security and continuity through the many institutions they established. Documents in Tyktin, the original capital city of the region, show that Jews already lived in Bialystok around 1658. In 1703, Polish Count Jan Klements Bro- nicki built for himself a wooden palace in Bialystok. 3