Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

This is a page in our Documents section. Click the button labeled "Documents" in the left-hand column to reach all of the other resources of the Document area.

This Membership Association page is also linked via the page Records of Emigrant Associations of Lyakhovichi and Records of Lechovicher Settlements around the World. See a full listing of links on that page.

Jewish Colonial Trust Bondholders with Lyakhovichi Ties

One of the great things about working on a website like the Lyakhovichi shtetl site is that an amazing amount of new material is being regularly added to the internet. Sometimes you find one piece of data for which you have long been searching; sometimes you uncover a type of data that starts you looking for comparable material in other venues. This page is about the second kind.

As the July 2009 update was being prepared I found the online search list for stockholders of the Jewish Colonial Trust published by Bank Leumi as it looks for folks carrying those shares issued at the beginning of the 20th century. This effort to support land purchase and building efforts in Eretz Israel appealed to a wide variety of Jews – religious Zionists, social Zionists, and all of the many strains of the time, could get behind, buying land and building infrastructure, in the Jewish homeland.

This image is from an 1899 page in the New York Times describing the progress the Jewish Colonial Trust was making in gathering bondholders, over 100,000 by the date of the article. The organization is often misidentified with a group that did not begin operations until the 1920s. Many of the members on these lists date from the period before 1914 and Lyakovichi and Baranovichi are here called by their names under the Russian government, Liachovichi and Baranowitz not Lachowicze and Baranowicze as they would have been in the 1920s.

So the first list in the right hand column is an extraction from that database. It contains the names of Lechovichers who are residing in Lyakhovichi and Baranovichi Continued on the next page, it lists Lechovichers in different cities of the US, some European cities, and those who were resident in the community of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia. Obviously the database contains many more people and demonstrably many more Lechovichers, but I will need you to search for your family members or those who you know were landsleit to your kinsmen. I cannot tell looking at a list of Louisville, Kentucky Jews, which were from our town – but you can. I cannot tell looking at a list of Canadian Jews settled all around the Windsor Ontario area who was from Lyakhovichi and its dependent villages, but you can. Additionally, because so many Baranovichers had Lyakhovichi ties, I included all from that city without proof of a Lechovicher connection. Similarly, Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, welcomed a tremendous settlement from Lyakhovichi but also made Jews from Kopyl, Nesvizh, and the entire Minsk and Novogroduk regions feel at home – I think the majority listed here have Lyakhovichi ties, but I may have listed some from the surrounding region. And finally, because the families of Lyakhovichi had so many ties to the nearby community of Kleck, I listed Kletskers here as well, but will happily pass it off to my colleague Henry Neugass who so ably creates the Kletsk shtetl site, when he wishes to host it there. Gorodische, similarly is sometimes a dependent town of Baranovichi, with strong ties to that community, and for now, its residents appear on our second page as well.

Poalei Zion in Lyakhovichi

This is an article for which we are actively gathering material but if you have already written or gathered research material for such an article and would like to write it, we would strongly encourage it. There is a guide to the Russian Archival material on the Poalei Zion in the USSR published as "Poalei Zion organizations in the USSR, 1917-1928 " by IDC Publishers, 2005.

The Bund in Lyakhovichi

This is an article for which we are actively gathering material but if you have already written or gathered research material for such an article and would like to write it, we would strongly encourage it. There is a guide to the Russian Archival material he Russian State Archives of Social and Political History (RGASPI), Moscow. Fond 271 which states that the identity cards and questionairres related to the Baranovichi area membership are at the archives.

HaShomer Hatzair

Bais Yakov

ORT