Rechitsa: The History of a Jewish Shtetl in Southeastern Belarus. Russia Judaica

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Rechitsa: The History of a Jewish Shtetl in Southeastern Belarus. Russia Judaica:
$29.00

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Albert Kaganovitch, Rechitsa. Istoriia evreiskogo mestechka Iugo-Vostochnoi Belarusi
Альберт Каганович,Речица: история еврейского местечка Юго-Восточной 2007 г., Hardcover, 450 pages, 100 photos and maps
The history of Jewish Rechitsa began in the late sixteenth century, when official tolerance in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania combined with economic opportunity to attract Jewish settlement. In the mid-seventeenth century Rechitsa, as other shtetls in Eastern Belorussia, fell victim to the Khmelnitsky campaigns and invasion by Muscovy. The steady decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth translated into hard times for the Jewish community in the eighteenth century, including a relative de-urbanization. The differing treatment and experience of the Jews in the former Lithuanian lands and those of Poland led to the development of a strongly differentiated sub-ethnos, the \"Litvaks,\" in the Lithuanian lands of Belorussia and the Baltic. After the Partitions of Poland brought the area into the Russian Empire, the new authorities maintained the existing system of communal responsibility for interactions with the government such as payment of taxes and provision of recruits, reaffirming Jewish distinctiveness from the rest of the population. The government\'s growing commitment to \"Russification,\" and the reimposition of legal restrictions on the Jews, had the counter-effect of stimulating the national self-consciousness of the Empire\'s non-Russian peoples; in the case of the Jews, the last decades of the Empire witnessed an increasing desire for national reorganization and recognition, emigration to America, the birth of the Zionist movement, secularization, and the growing attraction of Jewish youth to the revolutionary movement. The late nineteenth century witnessed an increase in Jewish charitable activity, personified in the career of the tzadik (rebbe) Sholom-Dov-Ber Shneerson. By that time Rechitsa had become one of the most important centers of Hasidism in the Empire. After the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution political activity remained possible only within the framework of institutions created, or at least approved, by the ruling party.