I knew that she had a brother in Vilna and a sister in Kovno, and that they had stayed in Lithuania. Of their two families, about 20 people, only one woman, a doctor, had survived. The others all died in the holocaust. Then I found some letters in Yiddish that her brother Tevye, in Vilna, had sent my grandmother. At that stage I didn’t know any yiddish and couldn’t read the letters. There was a photograph of Tevye’s family,  but there weren’t any names.

I travelled to Vilna, but again I found out very little information. I had Tevye’s address, but his house in Pylimo Street was no longer there. This is the park where his house had been.

So I began to learn Yiddish, and to search through Jewish genealogical websites. On Wikipedia I read about someone called Solomon Salit. 

He was a researcher at Warsaw University, and had written about a Jewish agricultural colony called Kolonia Yitzhak. It was an interesting fact, but I didn’t know whether it had any connection with our family. Then I discovered on the JewishGen website that Tevye did indeed have a son called Solomon (Shlomo). 

In one of the letters Tevye wrote to my grandmother I read the following: ‘About myself. I can tell you that I am, baruch hashem, healthy, and I have a lot of joy from the children. One of them, a doctor, works in the University and she’s thought in Vilna to be one of the best doctors. I also have a son, an engineer-agronomist who works in his profession for the ORT organisation’.  

I knew that ORT was a well-known Jewish organisation that helped train people, particularly youngsters, in various professions. I also discovered that Kolonia Yitzhak had been set up by ORT. So now thanks to the letter and thanks to the genealogical web information, I was now certain that Solomon was in fact my grandmother‘s nephew.  But what had he written? I discovered on the Warsaw University website that it was possible to download Solomon’s thesis. 

It was written in Polish (but that’s another story). Shlomo had written about the history of Jewish agricultural colonies in Poland and Russia. In 1835 in order to deal with the terrible problem of unemployment among the Jewish population, the Russians had changed the law to allow Jews to work the land and to set up agricultural colonies. 

I haven't got enough space here to talk about that, but by the year 1900 there were about 100,000 Jewish people living in these colonies.  After writing a general introduction to these places, Solomon focuses on just one of these, Kolonya Yitzhak, giving a statistical research thesis, but also describing the life of the village. The colony was founded in 1849 in an area that is today on the border between Poland and Belarus. As a result it is not possible to visit there anymore. 

You can see that it is exactly on the border. It is near a town called Adelsk, and about 26 families in the colony actually came from there, so there were always very strong links, both industrial and economic, between the colony and Adlesk. Although the land was not very fertile, the inhabitants worked there, they worked the earth, they cultivated grain and vegetables, and tended cattle.

In his thesis, Solomon describes the life of the Jews there (by the way not all the inhabitants there were Jewish). He wrote that the houses were clean and tidy, and every family had a garden. The Jews had acquired pleasant furniture, tables, cupboards and chairs. On the walls, there were mirrors, clocks, paintings and photographs, and there were also books and even phonographs. The raising of children was particularly important for them. 

The thesis was written in 1934, and of course, in 1941, Jews were gathered up from there and sent to death camps. The settlement was then abandoned and destroyed. My grandmother’s nephew, Solomon (z’l), returned to Vilna and the ghetto. On the Internet, I came across a website which is like a yiskor bukh, a memorial book, about Kolonya Yitzhak, about the settlement and about the people that live there.