Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

Descendants of those who emigrated from what is now Belarus, at the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Centuries, are pretty sure they know why their ancestors moved, but the assumptions made are often wrong.

“They left because of the pogroms.” Not true - there were no pogroms in Lithuania and Belarus before the twentieth century, the guberniyas of today's Ukraina, contained almost all of them.

“They left because of the 25 year military conscription.” Not possible - 25 year conscription had ended with the death of Nicholas I in the 1850s and military service had been standardized at six years in the 1870s, and shortened even further in the late 1880s.

“They left because the Jews were expelled from their towns.” False- Russian law rearranged the Ukrainian provinces this way numerous times but such expulsions were rare after the first years of the Nineteenth Century in Belarus and Lithuania. However some Jews, living in Imperial cities like St Petersburg and other important cities, did hold individual permissions to reside in those places, which could be revoked. But whole communities were not uprooted in Minsk guberniya.

Actually - Most Jews finally moved from the Russian Empire between 1871 and 1912 because of fears that they were going to be forced out if they waited, and fears that they would then have to leave under even worse circumstances than they could manage before the crisis.

Jews who emigrated from the Russian Empire in the 1850s through 1880 moved to cities elsewhere in Russia and in European communities including those of Austro-Hungary, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. They did not move because of impending disaster. Nor was it a sense of doom that was the motivation of those who put even more distance between themselves and Holy Mother Russia - those who landed in Great Britain’s Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast, or those who made it all the way to America in the 1860s and 70s. Over 70,000 Russian Jews arrived in the United States in the 1870s alone, a decade largely overlooked in the traditional emigration tales, probably because the 1870s migration was not for particularly “Jewish” motives. Rather, these migrations, overseas and internal to the Russian Empire, shared a long-set pattern with the movements of non-Jews, both inside and outside of the Pale of Settlement.

“You can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city” is a common American expression, in an older version than the World War I song that gave that billing to “once they’ve seen Paris.” Migration, in all nations and regardless of religion, in the nineteenth century, was from farms and rural areas to small towns, to cities that were regional centers. For individuals without compelling arguments to move on, an end to the movement could occur at any point along the way: outlying farm or tiny village to next size up small town; small town to a larger town in the vicinity; or pass the large regional center altogether and go to a major metropolitan area outside of the region entirely.

People moved as new employment and new business opportunities opened up. They moved as respected figures opened schools or offered apprenticeships or provided other services, that the migrant wanted. Rural residents also moved for the hope of inexpensive land and took advantage of land and colonization plans offered by their own nations as well as opportunities abroad. Russia’s land expansion opened up opportunities to many and the occasional uneven facilitation of Jewish farming settlements moved an equally intermittent stream of Jews from the guberniyas of Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev, into the more sparsely settled Ukraine and Bessarabia.

Translate all of that into the lives of Lyakhovichi Jews. The son or son-in-law of the keeper of a small inn in Medvedichi, Mala Lotwa, or Koniunchy, (little villages around Lyakhovichi), decides that there is not going to be sufficient income to support the current innkeeper and his son or son-in-law’s family. He moves into the town of Lyakhovichi proper, with its large cobbled streets, numerous stone buildings, at least five synagogues, and factories owned by Jews that employ Jews.

A young man,whose father is active among the Koidanover Hasidim in Lyakhovichi, knows that the Rebbe has established a court in Baranovichi, the new railroad town just built in 1870, less than 8 km from Lyakhovichi. The town has many new employment opportunities and he can work and study with the Rebbe as well.

Another young man, sees an entirely different educational opportunity in that same Baranovichi. One of the great leaders of Traditional Judaism, whose teaching chain descends from both the great Rabbi Elijah of Vilna and Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, has set up a school in Baranovichi too. Both the Hasidic and traditional Jewish schools attract thousands of students from all over the Russian Empire, and Lyakhovichi residents tend to feel that both schools really belong to them, set up as they were, in the newly built "suburb" of Lyakhovichi. Their opinion doesn't change, even though five hundred year old Lyakhovichi soon becomes a much smaller town than the railroad town built in 1870s and 1880s.

A man in his forties with a large family to support, hears that as a blacksmith and metal worker, there are inns on the major routes that will subsidize his setup of a shop for taking care of carters, teamsters and stage-drivers. The innkeepers typically provided no-rent accomodations for a period of time and if the smith makes the tools that his sons will need to set up their own places, he can set them up in business for little out of pocket investment. The network of roads around a central town such as Lyakhovichi or Kopyl can be their patrimony.

Kletsk, Mush, Nesvizh, and Kopyl, saw population growth in the 1830s with the paving of the old post roads. You can look at the pictures of Lyakhovichi at the end of the nineteenth century to realize that cobbled paths could substantially increase the number of people and the kinds of traffic, the roads could support. Many of the 1830s immigrants into those communities had businesses connected to the roads - innkeepers, teamsters, merchants who hauled their own goods. It was in this period that families with Lyakhovichi histories from at least the 1780s appear in these paved-road towns. The name Lyakhovitski, Lechovitcher, and other variants on our town's names, also start to appear in Mush, Kletsk, and Slutsk, in the 1830s.

Railroads allowed new communities to develop and breathed new life into old ones. Mush, today called Nowa Mysh, which was just a couple kilometers away from Lyakhovichi on the old road west to Slonim, and Slonim itself, were both tremendously enriched by the railroad in the 1870s.Hansewicze, today called Gantsevichi, was on the railroad line that ran from Luniniec to Baranovichi and the majority of its Jewish settlers came from the nearby community of Lyakhovichi, after 1870.

Tracing the movements of Lyakhovichi Jews in the Russian Empire Tracing your individual family, you can take advantage of sources that are denied a researcher who tries to follow the movements of entire towns. Starting in whatever Russian Empire town in which you found your family member, you can move back through record after record– Voter’s lists; conscription lists; official documents with signatory pages; revision lists (censuses); etc. Investigating these records, eventually you will come to a point where your person does not appear in an earlier set of records or where it is stated that they arrived from a different town. We need the data that you find when it cites their previous residence as Lyakhovichi or one of its subsidiary towns such as: Koniuchy; Mysloboje; Paszkowce; Zubelwice; Niedzwiedzica (Medvedichi); or any of the fifty other small towns that have been dependencies of Lyakhovichi at one time or another.

This page hopes to have regular updates on Lyakhovichi people found in other towns and also on records that can be studied to extract that data for our research community. We will have articles on tracing the movements of Lyakhovichi and Minsk guberniya Jews out of Russia; onto agricultural settlements in Russia and Eretz Israel; and into the large cities of the Russian Empire.

Residents or Former Residents of Lyakhovichi
in the Records of other Russian Empire Towns