Rabbi Mordechai Dov Ber Pupko
In 1908, around the time my grandfather, Rabbi Eliezer Pupko, got married, he accepted a rabbinic position in a town called Velizh in the Smolensk region of Russia. Half of the residents were Jewish, and it was an enclave of Chabad chasidim, although my grandfather himself was not a chasid. He remained the rabbi there until 1930, when he, along with my grandmother and their children who were still in Velizh, escaped to Latvia under the noses of the OGPU – as the predecessor to the KGB was known.
This meant that they experienced the upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the bad times that followed. Once the communists had taken control, they ruled with an iron hand.
Now, at the time, Velizh still had a large religious community, with one main synagogue and two or three smaller ones. My grandfather would spend every Shabbat in a different synagogue, but for the festivals and High Holidays, he would be in the main one. Although these synagogues were allowed to keep functioning into the 1920s, the communists had spies and infiltrators all over. As a result, it became very difficult to do anything related to religion without being spied upon, harassed, or worse. Teaching or helping others observe Judaism was even more dangerous, especially when it came to the education of children.
One of the first things the Soviets did after coming to power was to take over the schools and compel every child to attend. At school, the children would be asked to report on the activities in their own home and if, for some reason, the child said the “wrong” thing, their parents could be taken out and shot.
As a result of this kind of pressure, there were many Jewish people – members of the Velizh community included – who decided to take on the “free life” of being communists.
In the first half of 1927, when things were really bad, a group of these Jewish communists came over to my grandfather with inside information. They revealed that the then-Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was going to be arrested on account of his “counter-revolutionary” activities in continuing to promote Judaism in the Soviet Union. These people had been Lubavitcher chasidim, and carried strong feelings of affection for the Rebbe. They couldn’t bring this information directly to the Rebbe, who was at the time in the city of Leningrad – today, as in tsarist times, S. Petersburg – and so they asked my grandfather to go to the Rebbe and pass on this message. (more…)