Metadata: Attorneys’ Consultation Office for Legal Aid to Indigent Jews of St. Petersburg
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- Russian State Historical Archive
- Holding institution (official language):
- Российский государственный исторический архив
- Postal address:
- 195112, g. Sankt-Peterburg, Zanevskii pr., d. 36
- Phone number:
- 8 (812) 438-55-20
- Web address:
- https://fgurgia.ru
- Email:
- fgurgia@mail.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 1547
- Title:
- Attorneys’ Consultation Office for Legal Aid to Indigent Jews of St. Petersburg
- Title (official language):
- Консультация присяжных поверенных по оказанию юридической помощи неимущим евреям г. Петербурга
- Creator/accumulator:
- Attorneys’ Consultation Office for Legal Aid to Indigent Jews of St. Petersburg
- Date(s):
- 1901/1917
- Language:
- Russian
- Hebrew
- Yiddish
- Extent:
- 94 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual Material
- Scope and content:
-
Housed in the fonds are reports of the Consultation Office: financial statements; reports on the number and subject matter of inquiries received; on shifts taken by members of the Consultation Office; and on general assemblies of the organization, with appended lists of its members and donors (1909-17); minutes of meetings of the bureau and general assembly of the Petrograd Consultation Office, including on its liquidation (1910-17); logs of inquiries to and responses of the Consultation Office, indicating the names and residences of persons seeking consultations, and notes on the nature of their cases and the progress thereof; logs of the receipt and disbursement of money and items (1908-16); copies of Senate decrees on complaints and petitions filed by Jews, regarding: provincial authorities’ orders that Jews be expelled from particular areas; residence rights on rented land, and in Jewish agricultural colonies; the right of Jewish merchants and members of their families to reside in provincial capitals; Jews’ right to move from one locality to another; the residence rights of Jewish women, independent of the rights of their husbands; the residence rights of persons with higher education; the reassignment of Jewish merchants from the 2nd to the 1st guild; and procedures for paying the korobka (kosher meat tax), and for establishing houses of worship (1901-11); copies of Ministry of Education circulars on Jewish students and externs, and on Jewish admission quotas for secondary educational institutions (1911-12); and indictments for distributing illegal literature and proclamations of the Bund (1907-16).
Much of the fonds consists of documents on the organization’s activities during the First World War: circulars, instructions, and resolutions on the mission of the Consultation Office; on the activities of local Jewish legal aid organizations; on the organizing of regional and army commissions to hear claims for damages caused in the course of combat actions (with appended rules for procedures for paying claims and for disbursing stipends, loans, and compensation to refugees; draft rules on loan assistance to the population affected by the war; a memo on refugee issues, including as pertained to claim forms, passports, relative searches, and cities to which institutions of enemy-occupied locations had been evacuated, with a list of such cities) (1915); minutes of meetings and activity reports of the legal departments of the Vitebsk, Voronezh, Saratov, Penza, Ufa, and Kherson committees of the Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims (EKOPO) and of the Bobruisk Legal Commission (1916-17); information, communiques, bulletins, and reports of plenipotentiaries of the Consultation Office on the status of the local Jewish population; pogroms and anti-Semitic agitation; the expulsion of Jews from frontline areas; the arrest and execution of Jews on charges of espionage; the dismissal of Jewish staff members from institutions of the Committee of the Western Front of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, with appended copies of petitions for the investigation of cases of pogroms, and for the release of unlawfully detained persons and of the bodies of persons who had been executed; copies of rules governing the holding of Jewish hostages (Russian subjects sent to the city of Poltava) under guard in private apartments; copies of documents on hostages taken from the Jewish population in provinces of the Kingdom of Poland, including lists of hostages, by city; of questionnaires of the General Staff about Jewish soldiers; a list of questions on Jews’ attitudes toward the war; of orders of the head of the General Staff of the Commander-in-Chief regarding the Jewish population of the frontline provinces, and of anti-Semitic leaflets; copies of memoranda by N. M. Fridman and R. Kresin of the Petrograd branch of EKOPO, and by unidentified persons and organizations, submitted to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the information of governors on deportee and refugee issues; materials on the situation of Jews in frontline regions, and information on Jewish residence rights in the fifty-verst border zone in Bessarabia and the western provinces (1903-15); minutes and findings of preliminary investigations (copies) of cases of pogroms, including in Gomel (1903), Orsha, and in the town of Kuzhi (Tashkent province) (1915); on cases in which particular Jews were suspected of aiding Austro-German troops; and documents pertaining to particular criminal cases, including the case of Mendel Beilis (1907-16); copies of indictments of persons accused of distributing illegal literature and proclamations of the Bund in Vilna; statements by the soldiers A. Roitwarf, H. Blumstein, and others, who had managed to escape from German and Austrian POW camps, about living conditions therein (1915-16); petitions by Jews requesting the right to reside in Kiev, Mogilev, Petrograd, and elsewhere (1916); copies of circulars and instructions of the Central Military-Industrial Committee on procedures for providing draft deferrals, and procedures by which engineers, technicians, and specialists could return from army service to industrial enterprises (1916); a survey of the work of the All-Russian Congress of Representatives of Military-Industrial Committees and the All-Russian Union of Plenipotentiaries of All-Zemstvo and Citywide Unions (1916); a report on “the Jewish question” to the Central Committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) at a conference held 6-8 June 1915; an order of the commander of the 44th Army Corps instituting corporal punishment; an order of the commander of the 443th Infantry Regiment requiring the taking of an oath of loyalty to the Provisional Government; etc. (1917); and an agreement between the finance minister and a bank syndicate on the issuance of domestic “liberty loans” (1917).
Also housed in the fonds is a Russian translation of an article by F. Hertz titled “Anti-Semitism and Science” (1917); newspaper clippings (from Vestnik Volyni [Volhynia Herald], Vestnik Ufy [Ufa Herald], Vostochnaia zaria [Eastern Dawn], Viatskaia rech’ [Viatka Speech], Kievskii vestnik [Kyiv Herald], Kolokol [Bell], Nasha zhinz’ [Our Life], Novaia rus’ [New Rus’], Odesskie novosti [Odessa News], Reforma [Reform], Rech’ [Speech], Severnyi vestik [Northern Herald], Sibirskaia zhizn’ [Siberian Life], Smolenskii vestnik [Smolensk Herald], and Tovarishch [Comrade]) containing articles and items on pogroms against Jews; Black Hundreds organizations; the activities of the Hieromonk Iliodor; the rights of the Jewish population of Russia, etc. (1905-10).
- Administrative/biographical history:
- This office was established in 1908 in St. Petersburg to provide legal advice to indigent Jews on issues of social legislation, and in criminal and civil cases, including those pertaining to Jews’ residence rights and restrictions; military service requirements; registration as members of particular communities; rights to acquire and lease real estate; special fees applicable to Jews; etc. Day-to-day operations of the Consultation Office were carried out by members who, on duty two or three times a week, gave oral or written responses to inquiries. Members of the Consultation Office were also sent to various provinces, where they organized special legal commissions, bureaus, etc. under the auspices of local committees of the Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims (EKOPO). In their activities, these local commissions and bureaus were connected with the Consultation Office as their central governing body, transmitting to it communiques, bulletins, and reports on local-level conditions of Jews, and on cases of pogroms, forced resettlement, violation of property rights, etc. A particular emphasis was put on gathering materials on legislation pertaining to Jews (so-called “Jewish law”). Conclusions on the inquiries received were edited by a special commission, and the most difficult questions were discussed at general assemblies of members of the Consultation Office. General assemblies were also responsible for electing a secretariat, an audit commission, and the office’s managing bureau. During the First World War, the Attorney’s Consultation Office provided assistance to Jewish refugees, with most of the queries made in this period dealing with residence rights, the issuance of passports, and expulsion from frontline areas. On 20 March 1917, the Provisional Government declared the abolition of all ethnic- and religious-based restrictions in Russia, and on 26 March, the general assembly of the Consultation Office adopted a resolution stating that “with the end of Jews’ lack of civil rights … the reason for the Consultation Office’s existence is no more,” and the question of its liquidation was raised. At this point, the leading role in legal assistance to Jewish war victims passed to EKOPO.
- Access points: persons/families:
- R. Kresin
- Subject terms:
- Agriculture
- Aid and relief
- Beilis affair
- Bund movement
- Expulsion
- Financial records
- Jewish colonies
- Jewish Question
- Jewish quota
- Jewish soldiers
- Legal matters
- Newspaper clippings
- Passports and visas
- Personal records
- Pogroms
- Prisoners
- Professions
- Professions--Lawyers
- Real estate
- Refugees
- Residency issues of Jews
- Restitution and compensation
- Taxation
- Trade and commerce
- World War I
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes a single inventory systematized chronologically.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary