Soviet Jewish Children Holocaust Survivors in Post-War Soviet Lithuania

• In Event: Bitter Years: Soviet Antisemitism in the Wake of the Holocaust

Abstract

Psychiatrist Iosif Rebelsky (1894 – 1949), a specialist in children war trauma (which he first began to study when he began treating young victims of civil war pogroms), has written in his medical notes, that when he was stationed in Vilnius, in 1944, he was presented with the case of an eight year old boy, who was hidden by a Lithuanian farmer during the war. In fear of being exposed, the rescuer prohibited the child to speak in Yiddish. After the war had been over, the child did not know how to speak at all. Rebelsky provided some treatment to that boy and other Jewish children survivors. After realizing the massive scale of the problem (most of 600 children survivors had psychiatric issues), he worked with a local teacher, Tsvia Vildshteyn to establish a Jewish school, orphanage and kindergarten for such children in Vilnius and in Kaunas. Both, Vildshteyn and Rebelsky were arrested for this work in 1945. Rebelsky was shot and Vildshteyn spent 11 years in Gulag.
The paper analyzes this unlikely collaboration, between Rebelsky, a highly-positioned officer of the Soviet army and Vildshteyn, teacher and a survivor of Vilna ghetto, and their role in helping Jewish children to process and overcome their wartime trauma. Of a special interest is how both of these individuals negotiated Soviet official structures and Jewish communal organizations of the early post-war Soviet Lithuania.

Author

• Anna Shternshis, U of Toronto (Canada)