Metadata: Jewish National Community of Tartu; Jewish Religious Community of Tartu
Collection
- Country:
- Estonia
- Holding institution:
- State Archives of Estonia
- Holding institution (official language):
- Eesti Rahvusarhiiv
- Postal address:
- Tallinn, Maneeži 4, 15019
- Phone number:
- (+372) 693 8668
- Web address:
- http://www.ra.ee/
- Email:
- rahvusarhiiv@ra.ee
- Reference number:
- f. 2283
- Title:
- Jewish National Community of Tartu; Jewish Religious Community of Tartu
- Title (official language):
- Tartu Juudi Rahvaühing; Tartu Juudi Usuühing
- Creator/accumulator:
- Jewish National Community of Tartu
- Date(s):
- 1861/1940
- Language:
- Estonian
- Yiddish
- Russian
- Hebrew
- German
- Extent:
- 233 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Physical condition:
- good
- Scope and content:
-
The collections of the Jewish community in Tartu include a substantial amount of documents which depict the variety of communal institutions and activities in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
The earliest documents in the collection include the regulations of the local burial society from 1861 to 1937. Other early documents include civil records and data on the local Jewish cemetery, including a map dating from 1894. Later marital records, as well as data on the burial society and other traditional communal institutions, including the local prayer house and charitable societies, are also available. They include protocols, account books, regulations, lists of members, and correspondence (including correspondence with Jewish communities and governmental institutions on the hiring of the community's rabbis and ritual slaughterers).
Files from the period of World War I include correspondence with EKOPO (Jewish Relief Committee for War Victims) on the community's participation in relief activities in Russia. Files from 1917-18 include materials documenting political activity in the wake of the Russian Revolution: preparations for the All-Russia Jewish Congress elections, proclamations, leaflets and other political materials. Later correspondence mentions relief activities in Russia and Ukraine on behalf of victims of pogroms and famine in the early 1920s.
The collection also includes materials which refer to various local Jewish organisations and societies, mostly from the interwar period. They include the regulations of the local Zionist organisation; papers which refer to the all-Estonia Jewish communal organisations; regulations, financial data and other documents of the local Jewish cooperative bank; regulations of a local Jewish drama circle; regulations and some other documents of the Society for the Dissemination of Jewish Studies at the University of Tartu; regulations of the Shalom Aleichem Society for Jewish Culture; and other materials.
A considerable part of the materials refers to Jewish elementary education in Tartu, including reports, correspondence, lists of teachers and pupils, and other materials on the local Jewish schools from 1893 and later. There are also materials on the Jewish secondary education in Tartu in the interwar period and protocols of the "schools section" of the Jewish community. Papers from the early 1920s include a list of Jewish students at the University of Tartu and at the local dental school.
Among other documents included in the collection are a report on an examination of an Estonian anti-Talmudic pamphlet published in Tartu in 1919 and a Yiddish-written text on the history of the local Jewish community written in 1926. The collection also contains photographs of various Jewish public and religious figures and a group picture of the students and teachers of the Slutsk-Kletsk Yeshiva.
Lastly, the collection includes the printed regulations for the burial society of the community of Jekabpils (Jakobstadt, 1911) and printed reports of the Jewish Cooperative Bank of Narva dating to the 1930s.
- Archival history:
- Along with other Jewish-related materials, the papers of the communal institutions in Tartu were transferred to the Central Archive of the Estonian SSR in Tallinn (known from 1948 until the end of Soviet rule as the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Social Development of the Estonian SSR, abbreviated to ORKA or TsGAOR ESSR), predecessor of the current Estonian State Archive.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- The first Jewish communal institutions in Tartu were established c. 1860 with the creation of a burial society and the foundation of a Jewish cemetery. During the same period, Jewish residents, then mostly soldiers in the Russian army and their families, established a prayer room in a private house. Other communal institutions were established in subsequent years. A Jewish elementary school was established in 1875. In subsequent years it was run with the active participation of Jewish students from the University of Tartu. A stone-built synagogue was erected in 1903; it was destroyed in 1944. After World War I the local community was incorporated into the system of Jewish cultural self-government in Estonia and fostered thriving cultural, educational and social activities. The communal institutions were liquidated after the Soviet occupation in 1940.
- System of arrangement:
-
Fonds no. 2283 and 2284 have a common thematic framework that includes interrelated materials, referring both to pre- and post- World War I Jewish communal institutions in Tartu. Hence, they are regarded here as one collection.
Each fond consists of one inventory and is arranged according to thematic order.
- Access, restrictions:
- The fonds are open for reference at the ERA in Tallinn (in certain cases, online access might be available).
- Finding aids:
- Basic information and inventories in Estonian and Russian are available at the National Archives of Estonia (online access is available). An inventory in Russian is available at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
- Author of the description:
- Alex Valdman, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, 2014
