Kapreshty

The village is located on the banks of the Reut River, 88 kilometers northwest of Chisinau at an altitude of 117 meters above sea level ^[1] .

The capreshty were founded in 1851 in the Soroksky district of the Bessarabian region - the penultimate of the 17 Jewish agricultural colonies organized in the Bessarabian region in 1836-1853. Under a new agricultural colony in 1851, 470 acres of steppe land were allocated, bought or leased from the local landowner Peter Demi, to which several dozens of Jewish families moved from the Podolsk province (211 people in total). The first tenants were Srul Verzub and Lipe Gaysiner. By 1858, there were 33 households in the colony (200 men and 157 women), a Jewish prayer school was built there. According to the All-Russian Census of 1897, there were already 1,002 inhabitants in Kapreshty, of which 866 were of Jewish faith. In 1899, 36 Jewish families of 211 souls rented 118 acres of land; In total, 135 families lived in the colony and there were 2 synagogues and 2 heders .

At the end of the 19th century, Kapreshty acquired the administrative town of Staus. In 1906 - one of the first places in the Bessarabian province - Kapreshty was connected to the county town of Soroki by a telephone line, the central street was paved and became part of the Soroka - Chisinau road line. On July 8, 1908, a loan and savings partnership (the so-called “Jewish bank”) was opened in Kapreshty, whose director was Leyzer Gaisiner (father of the future poet Herzl Gaysiner-Rivkina ). In the same year, the first pharmacy was opened, in 1912 - a public center for long-distance negotiations. The nearest train station was in Rogozheny .

From the beginning of the XX century, on Thursdays, fairs began to take place in the town, to which peasants and artisans flocked from all over Soroka and from neighboring counties. The fair tradition continued after Bessarabia became part of Romania (and even in the Soviet post-war period on Thursdays there was a market day in Kapreshty). The mayor of the place in those years was Simha Portnoy, the chairman of Sberbank - Leib Hais. The town had a commercial partnership, a communal bathhouse, two medical shops, a pharmacy, several hairdressing salons, an inn, a tea room, its own stone quarry, haberdashery shops, 18 grocery stores, 8 hardware stores, 4 vegetable shops, 4 shoe shops, 32 manufactory shops, 5 bakeries, 18 cramps; two doctors and a midwife worked. In 1927, a sparkling water factory, a people's bank , opened.

According to the first Romanian population census in Bessarabia in 1930, 1998 people lived in Kapreshty, including 1815 Jews, 94 Moldavians, 78 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 4 Poles and five Gypsies; all residents owned Yiddish . Nearby appeared a permanent gypsy settlement Old Kapreshty. The famous Romanian writer Mikhail Sadovyanu , who visited the place in 1919, wrote in his travel essays:

On one of the hot Sundays of July, driving up from Telenest , we drove into the anthill of the fair day Kapresht. This is a settlement in the steppe, on the southern border of Soroksky Tsinot, not far from Reut ... For merchants from the vicinity all merchants' shops are open, many of them are built of Orhei stone. Old signs with Russian words are everywhere replaced with Latin inscriptions ... In one corner of the market we meet a middle-aged Jew, tall, with a red beard. His caftan is wide open, he holds his hands in the pockets of his trousers, philosophically observes a motley anthill. On his Russian hat, however, as on all merchants, I notice a piece of a three-color ribbon ... To my question, he answers: Ever since the army came over Prut , we must bear this sign ...

- Mikhail Sadovyanu “Bessarabian Roads” (Chisinau, 1992 )

By the beginning of the 20th century, there were 3 synagogues in the town: “The Old Synagogue” ( Hebrew di olte shil / kloiz ), “Great Synagogue” ( Hebrew di di groise shil ), “Psalter Synagogue” ( Hebrew dus tyly shilahl / kleizl ). The Great Synagogue was subsequently divided into two: the German (reform. Orthodox) and the Hasidic ( Jewish. Hasidish Shil ) of the Rashkov sense. The rabbi in the latter was the one who came from Wad Rashkov . Meer Cooperstein. There were no prayer houses of other denominations in the town.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two prayer schools ( heders ) in the town, where several visiting melamines were involved in teaching the children. In the early years of the new century, Leib Gurman opened the first modern secular school with instruction in Yiddish (the “Gourmet School”), in 1917 the first gymnasium was opened using Yiddish , Russian and subsequently Romanian (director - Samuel Simkhovich Portnoy), in 1918 - already after the annexation of Bessarabia by Romania - a gymnasium of the Tarbut network ( Culture ) was opened here with Hebrew education (director Polinkovsky, then Zinaida Borisovna Matievich), and finally, at the beginning of the 1920s, a public school (Hebrew folkshul , rum. school and Primare ), which in 1940 became the first and only Soviet school in Kapreshty. The director of the public school was Leib Mer and all training was carried out entirely in Yiddish. In 1940, after the accession of Bessarabia to the USSR , the first Moldavian school was also founded in Kapreshty, with Boris Yanovich as its director and Leib Froimchuk as the only teacher.

In the 1920s, an amateur theater operated in the town. Several permanent correspondents of the Chisinau daily newspaper Undzer Zeit ( Our Time , in Yiddish edited by Z. Rosenthal ), as well as the Chisinau publication Dos Cooperative Worth ( Co-operative Word ) lived here. The life of the town in the 1920s was described in his "Rashkov Stories" by the writer Ihil Shraibman , who in those years served as a synagogue singer under the famous Kapresht cantor reb Duvid Zilberman (1870-1935). A well-known Bessarabian poet and teacher Mordhe Goldenberg lived in the town. Jewish writers Herzl Gaisiner-Rivkin , Earl Zelman , Arye-Leib Koprov , Sosl (Sofia) Kleiman, as well as the famous prose writer Talmud and Hebrew literature scholar Mo (s) Sambation came from here .

In the summer of 1941, the Jewish population of the village , who had no time to evacuate, was deported by the Romanian occupation authorities to the Transnistrian ghetto . The deportation was carried out by the so-called death marches - a walking procession during which the elderly, sick and lagging behind for any other reason were shot by gendarmes. For these purposes, the local population was forced to mobilize during the movement to dig trenches and bury the executed.

Some of the Jews evacuated at the beginning of the war and exiled to settlements in remote regions of Siberia after the war returned to Kapreshty (now the Kotyuzhensky district of the Moldavian SSR ) and until the beginning of the 1960s made up the majority of the population of the village. Avrum Shmoishman was appointed chairman of the village council. A collective farm was organized to them. Kaganovich (chair - Itzik Herzenstein), Moldavian elementary school and Russian seven-year school; in the village the Biruinetsa newspaper was published ( Pobeda , since 1951 ) - the organ of the political section of the local MTS (machine and tractor station).

In 1964, two neighboring villages - the Jewish Kapreshty and the Ukrainian New Prodanesti - were merged into a single administrative formation of Prodanesti, after which the Jewish population quickly declined. On the basis of the new village, the united Druzhba collective farm was formed (chairman - Alexander Siyanov), since 1987 an agricultural company has been operating on its basis. In January 1992, by a resolution of the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova, Capresci was separated from Prodanest with the return of its historical name; administratively, the village remains subordinate to the municipality of Prodanesti .

According to the 2004 census , 837 people live in the village of Kapresti (402 men, 435 women) ^[2] .

The ethnic composition of the village ^[6] :

• In the local folklore of the town, the household name of the strongman Shmila Kotlyar was imprinted, who, according to local tradition, drove out visiting “happers” from the settlement ( recruiters - new colonies in those years were exempted from paying taxes, recruiting and forced provision of housing for quartered soldiers for 10 years) .
• Part of the filming of the film directed by Emil Loteanu “ Lautari ” ( 1971 ) took place in Kapreshty, for the mass scenes in which the local population was attracted.
• The life of the town in the 1920s is described in the series "Rashkov Stories" by the famous Jewish writer Ihil Shraibman .
• The prototype of Hertz Rivkin ’s famous poem “Haim-Bureh-o-o-fur-x” ( Haim-Burykh-is-about-food ) was the Kapreshta cab driver and the joker Burykh-Khaim Belotserkovsky.
• The only known song about Kapreshty - “Come to Kapreshty” ( Yiddish קאַפּרעשט - Kaprest ) - was written by the composer Zlata Tkach to the verses of the poet Joseph Kerler ( audio file number 10 ).
• In Kapreshty, the honored artist of the RSFSR , the theater teacher Oleg Vykhodov (born December 8, 1949 ) was born.

• קאפּרשט עײרתנו - אונדזער שטעטעלע קאַפּרעשט ( Kapresht airatenu / Undzer shtetele Kaprasht - Our place of memory of the Besarabian town of Kapreshta, Yiddish and Hebrew), edited by M. Rishpi (Fayerman) and A. Beret Järnov Järnov Järnov Järnov Järnov Järnov Yaelov : Haifa , 1980.
• Ichil Shreibman, “Seventeen-year-olds (novel) and New Rashkov Stories” (in Russian), Art Literature: Chisinau, 1977.
• Vasile Trofaila , “ Caprest and Prodesti ”, in Russian and Romanian, Chisinau, 2000 ( see the photo from the book of the Reut river in the Kapresht district ).

• Kapreshty in the list of Jewish colonies of the Soroksky district of the Bessarabian province
• Israeli geriatrician and medical scientist Wolf Gershkovich (Zeev) Fidelman (born 1938, Kapreshty) (link not available)