Country: Belarus

Group: Jews

Date finalized: 4/9/2022

Team: Ryan Oakley (lead), Deneb Bobadilla

Content Warning: Ethnocide, discrimination, genocide

Approximate Time Period: 1920s-Present

In the twentieth century, Belarusian Jews suffered through violent discrimination and a brutal genocide. However, the diversity of interests and perspectives within the Belarusian Jewish community itself complicates many cases that we may regard as discrimination.

The Bolshevik revolution created serious divisions within the Jewish community. Many Jews embraced communism and formed a new elite while this new anti-clerical regime punished more traditional Jews (Bemporad, 2008). The Communist Party implemented numerous restrictions on Jewish religious practice, while disavowing antisemitism. As part of a broad initiative to reduce rabbinical power, the Communist Party restricted the practice of circumcision. Even staunchly communist Jewish people, who viewed circumcision as a marker of ethnic identity rather than of religious affiliation, often risked expulsion from the Party by having their children circumcised (Bemporad, 2008).

During the Nazi occupation, Nazis and Belarusian Christians murdered about 80% of the Jewish population (Waligorska, 2016). They took 340,000 others away as slaves (Beorn, 2014). In the post-war years, under Stalin’s antisemitic repression, the state marginalized the collective memory of the Jewish people. Starting in 1948, the Soviet regime forbade prayer in most of the remaining synagogues, banned Jewish institutions and cultural organs, and eradicated institutional memory of the Holocaust. Officials destroyed Jewish cemeteries and paved roads with the tombstones (Waligorska, 2016).

Since the fall of communism in 1989, grassroots Jewish organizations have attempted to preserve their collective memory. These groups build memorials and museums hoping to show a multicultural alternative to the nationalist history that erases their presence. In line with the national discourse around remembrance, their histories often show Jews as fighting fascists rather than as victims of The Holocaust (Waligorska, 2016). Holocaust memorials in small towns, where the Jewish population was utterly annihilated by the Nazis, often obscure the antisemitic nature of the genocide (Waligorska, 2016). In these places, locals often insensitively decorate Holocaust memorials with Christian crosses (Masis, 2017). In 2016, unknown perpetrators vandalized a Holocaust memorial in Minsk with yellow paint (JTA, 2016). However, Jewish organizations in Belarus have stated that they fear political repression more than antisemitism (Sokol, 2020).

Data Quality: 3/3. The sources are reputable and peer reviewed. Any difficulty in accessing this information comes not from a lack of information but from the complexity of the Belarusian context.

Sources

  1. Bemporad, E. (2008). Behavior Unbecoming a Communist: Jewish Religious Practice in SovietMinsk. Jewish Social Studies, 14(2), 1–31. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/article/242637
  2. Beorn, W. W. (2014). Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust inBelarus. Harvard University Press.
  3. JTA. (2016, July 17). Holocaust monuments vandalized in Germany, Belarus. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. https://www.jta.org/2016/07/17/global/holocaust-monuments-vandalized-in-germany-belarus
  4. Karpenkina, Y. (2021). Trade, Jews, and the Soviet Economy in Western Belorussia, 1939–1941. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 35(3), 404–423. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcab054
  5. Masis, J. (2017, July 9). With no Jews left to protest, Christian crosses grace Holocaust memorials in Belarus. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/with-no-jews-left-to-protest-christian-crosses-grace-holocaust-memorials-in-belarus/
  6. Sokol, S. (2020, August 19). In Belarus, ‘Europe’s last dictatorship,’ Jews fear police but not anti-Semitism. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-belarus-europes-last-dictatorship-jews-fear-police-but-not-anti-semitism/
  7. Waligorska, M. (2016). Jewish Heritage and the New Belarusian National Identity Project. East European Politics and Societies, 30(2), 332–359. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325415577861