The Shapiros of Fastov and Kadlubitsya

A family history — for Izya

Written in September 2026 from our family research. Every date, name and age here is taken either from a document that was read, or from family testimony that was written down and kept. Where the documents disagree with each other or with family memory, both versions are given; where we do not know, it says so. The text also contains interpretations and links between sources — they are marked as such. At the end there is a short note on where each kind of information comes from, for anyone who wants to check.

How to read this story

The Shapiro family has no family paper older than the photographs of the 1930s. Everything before it had to be put together from lists the state drew up for its own purposes: tax revisions, conscription lists, rabbinate registers, lists of the dead after the pogrom. None of them says "the Shapiro family of Kadlubitsya". They say: "Duvid son of Gershko, 34, sons Srul 6, Gershko 1". A family tree is what you get when such lists, decades apart, are laid side by side and asked: is this the same Duvid?

Four things are worth knowing in advance.

The surname is young and took a long time to settle. Jews of the Russian Empire were required to have fixed surnames only from 1804. In our documents the same family is written SHPIR (1816), SOPIR (1818), SHAPIRA (1822), SOPIRA and SAPIRA (1834), SHAPIRA (1897), SHAPIRO (1919); today the family's name is Shapiro, and the older spellings below are given as the clerk wrote them. That is why a surname alone was not enough for the search: first names, fathers' names, ages and the make-up of the household were matched.

An age in a document is not a date of birth. Duvid, the father of the five brothers, is recorded as 16 in 1875 ("by appearance", that is, by eye), 38 in 1897, 50 in one copy of the 1919 list of the dead and 55 in another. We keep all four numbers. None of them is a birth record.

Memory and paper are different witnesses. The hand-drawn tree of the American relatives (2021), the letters of Gail Cantor in Philadelphia and your own, and the family tree file our family keeps are all testimony. They lie in a separate layer, and in the text it is always visible where a document speaks and where family memory does.

How much has been collected. Behind this text is a database: 565 sources, from the revision of 1795 to letters of this year; 850 person records, about four hundred of them Shapiros, in Fastov, Kadlubitsya, Bila Tserkva, Kyiv and Rozhny; and nearly three thousand statements, each with its own source. Most were read from JewishGen indexes and translations, a couple of dozen documents from the manuscripts themselves.

Your line, from Usher to you

The table is the working reconstruction adopted in the research; every link can be revised if new documents are found. Your mother was the seventh generation from Usher known by name.

1The shoemaker Gershko (Fastov to 1795)

Fastov in the eighteenth century was neither a royal town nor a magnate's estate. It belonged to the Catholic Bishop of Kyiv — the "Fastov key", as this cluster of villages was called, was administered from afar. Jews lived here from leases — inns, distilleries, mills, bridge tolls — and from the road: the town stood on the way from Kyiv to Bila Tserkva. In 1768 the haidamak leader Shvachka made Fastov his headquarters, and more than seven hundred Jews and Poles were killed. In the 1770s Rabbi Avraham "the Angel", son of the Maggid of Mezritch, lived here; his grave is still shown.

The Polish poll-tax censuses of 1765–1787 count the Fastov community — 460 souls in 1765, 706 in 1787 — but give no names. The inventory of the bishop's estate of 1784 lists 146 tenants and payers; Usher is not among them. This is the history of the community in which we later find the family; its presence here before 1795 has not yet been established.

The name appears on 23 September 1795. Two years after the region passed to Russia, the first "revision" was held here — a census of the tax-paying population, house by house. In Fastov it finds three men whose father was Usher:

That they are brothers the document does not say — but the patronymic, the town and the year are the same. (The book is bilingual: in the Polish column Gershko is 30, in the Russian one 36; Reyzya is 28 in both.)

The document shows what the family lived on: not leases, but a trade and the road — a shoemaker and two houses serving the merchants passing between Kyiv and Bila Tserkva. Usher himself is not in the list; by 1795 he is mentioned only as a patronymic.

2How the family got its surname (1816–1834)

Revisions — censuses of the tax-paying population — were held in Russia from the early eighteenth century to 1858, ten in all; this region saw the last of them, from 1795 to 1858. Each "revision list" describes a household: the head, his wife, sons, daughters-in-law, unmarried daughters, sometimes brothers and nephews — with the age at the previous revision and at the current one, and notes such as "died 1852", "skipped at the last revision", "given as a recruit". Sons are always tied to their fathers, so three or four consecutive revisions let you follow a family across half a century. The first four generations of our tree stand on these lists.

11 August 1816. In Fastov the household of "SHPIR Gershko son of Usher" is recorded. His age is given twice — 46 at the last revision and 41 now; both numbers stayed in the document as written. Wife Feyga, 40; son Mendel-Khaim, 18, with the note "skipped at the last revision"; daughter-in-law Kuptsya, 17; daughter Finklya. This is the first record of a surname in the family.

1818. A supplementary list records in Fastov the household of three brothers "SOPIR": Khaim-Gdal, 20, head; Duvid, 18; Khaim-Bir, 12; with them Gitlya, 18, wife of Khaim-Gdal, and Nekhama, 17, wife of Duvid. The father is given simply as "Gershko".

1822. Here the family was read for the first time not from an index but from the page itself: "Gershko Usherovich Shapira", Feyga, "Duvid Gershkovich Shapira", Nekhama and "his brother Khaim Bir". On this page the surname is written out in full for the first time — Shapira. The form the family bears today, Shapiro, is the Russian spelling of the same name: the Fastov register of 1849 already writes it that way ("Srul Shapiro"), and so does the list of the dead of 1919. One name, written by different clerks. The file that holds this page is titled "supplementary revision lists of those who returned from flight" — possibly the family had left Fastov for a time and was registered anew.

28 April 1834 is the fullest list of that generation, and the first in which the brothers are recorded each as his own family. Family 158: "Gershko son of Usher Sapira", 51 at the last revision, and in the column of departures — "died 1830": the shoemaker of 1795 lived to about sixty-five. The house is held by his son Mendel, 36, with Kuptsya, 35, and their son Pinkhas, 10; Finklya, 20. Family 159: "Duvid son of Gershko Sapira", 34, Nekhama, 33, and their sons Srul, 6, and Gershko, 1. Then Khaim-Bir, 28, and Falya, 25; Khaim-Gdal, 36, and Gita, 35, with Moyshe-Aron, 17, Menakhim, Yos, 4, and three daughters. The ages have moved on from 1818 by exactly sixteen years.

One detail from another time belongs here. In the census of 1897 Gershko son of Duvid — the one-year-old boy of 1834 — will give as his birthplace "the village of Ofirna, Vasylkiv district" — near Fastov. This ties the family to a village even before the colony existed; where exactly Duvid's family lived in those years, the documents do not say.

Between the two lists stands the statute of 1827 on the conscription of Jews: boys were taken from the age of twelve — first as cantonists, then for twenty-five years of service — and the community was obliged to fill a quota. The revision of 1834 was therefore also a recruitment list. There is not a word in our documents about anyone in the family being taken.

3To the land: Kadlubitsya (1844–1860)

In 1844 Russia abolished the kahal — Jewish self-government — and issued a regulation on Jewish agriculturists: a family that took up farming was freed from the poll tax, and its sons received a deferment from conscription. Kadlubitsya, according to the local historian Doroshenko, was founded in 1850 by Jews from Fastov, across the river, on privately leased land. It had no cemetery of its own — the dead were buried in Fastov — and no rabbi: births and deaths were entered in the Fastov registers.

1849. The Fastov rabbinate's register for 1849, in which every entry is made in Russian and in Hebrew, lists the members of the synagogue; fifth on the list is "Srul Shapiro / שרול שפירא" — Duvid's eldest son, about twenty-one. In the same register two infant deaths: Mordkhe, son of Srul Shapiro, aged one, 8 March 1849; Avrum, son of Nakhim Shapira, 27 May 1849, "6 weeks and 4 days". This is the only Fastov register known to the research; the registers that have been found contain neither the births of Duvid's sons in the 1880s and 1890s nor the family's marriages.

1850, the ninth revision. Duvid son of Gershko is head of the household; sons Srul, 22, Gersh, 17, Avrum, 15; Nekhama daughter of Srul, 49; Duba daughter of Itsko, 20, Srul's wife.

22 May 1858, the tenth revision — of the Jewish agriculturists. This is the main document of the move to the land. In the list of Kadlubitsya, family no. 18 is Duvid's household, now without him:

Two little Zlatas, cousins, both aged two, in one household. Family no. 13 of the same list: Khaim-Gdal son of Gershko, 52 at the last revision, and in the departures column — "died 1852".

Doroshenko's published list of the same revision counts 31 farms in the colony and exactly 430 souls, among them "Khaim-Gdal Gershkovich Shapira (15)", "Srul Davidov Shapira (11)" — the numbers are souls, not ages — and "David Moshkov Shilshtut (16)". The Shilshtut family, from which Dina, Duvid's wife, would come, was also among the founders of the colony. Her father Leyzor and his brothers are in the chapter on the censuses below.

August 1860 — a survey of the colony's farms gives the only material picture we have: "Srul Davidovich Shapira", 11 revision souls — a wooden house without a hallway and a small shed; a horse, a cow and three head of small livestock. "Moyshe-Aron Shapira", 15 souls — a wooden house, a threshing barn and a shed; three cows and three head of small livestock. One line below — "Duvid Moshko Shilshtut (died); in his place the heads of the family are his sons Mordko and Khaim", 16 souls.

Why they went to the land. The documents give no direct answer. The historical frame is known: the regulation of 1844 freed Jews who took up farming from the poll tax and gave their sons a deferment from conscription. The documents show why this mattered to this family in particular: in 1850 Duvid has three sons — 22, 17 and 15 — exactly the ages at which the army of Nicholas I took recruits; in 1849 Srul is on the list of members of the Fastov synagogue; by 1858 the family is on the land and Duvid is dead. The move happened between 1850 and 1858. The transfer file itself — the petition, the community's consent, the allocation of a plot — has not yet been found.

4The colony and the censuses (1866–1897)

In 1866 the government cancelled the special rights of the Jewish agriculturists; the colony kept its lease but lost its privilege. In 1870 the Kyiv–Balta railway reached Fastov, and by 1876 it was a junction. The JDC report of 1923 would describe it in hindsight: "a large railway station, 60 versts from Kiev, owing to which the town rapidly progressed". In 1874 universal military service was introduced, and under it the Jews of Vasylkiv district were counted in 1875.

6 April 1875. In the census of the Jews of Veprik volost — the rural district to which the colony belonged — household 71, revision family 18: Gershko son of Duvid, 40; his son Duvid, 16 — the age stands in the column "by appearance", that is, the enumerator estimated it by eye; brothers Srul and Avrum; nephew Duvid son of Srul. In the Fastov list of the same year, 20 April, Shmul son of Nakhim, 31, is recorded with his sons and the note "farmer of the Kodlubitskaya colony" — colonists were written where they were registered, not always where they lived.

The eldest branch leaves. Family lists of the village of Rozhny in Chernihiv province record "Yosel-David son of Srul", 29 in 1882 and 34 in 1888, with Srul, 70 → 73, and Duba, 62 → 67: "living in Rozhny since 1868" (in the 1888 list — since 1870), "registered in Veprik, Vasylkiv district", on a passport of 10 February 1882. Srul — the synagogue member of 1849, the owner of a horse and a cow in 1860 — spent his old age in another province, on a passport, still registered in the colony.

The census of 1897. The first and only general census of the Russian Empire, January–February 1897, recorded every person on a printed sheet with columns: name, father's name, age, relation to the head, marital status, birthplace, religion, mother tongue, literacy, occupation. It is the only document in which Duvid and Dina and all five of their sons stand together on one page.

Religion — Jewish; mother tongue — "Jewish", that is, Yiddish; in the literacy column all have a negative mark — most likely literacy in Russian: the enumerators did not always note the ability to read in other languages. The occupations differ: the grandfather is recorded as "farming", the father as "trader". Thirty years after the loss of the farmers' privileges the second generation of the colony lived from trade; the 1919 list of the dead nevertheless records Duvid as a farmer.

Khaim-Ber is line 4: fifteen years old, born "here", in the colony (1880 by the family tree, about 1882 by the census age). In the family he was called Boris — hence his son David's patronymic, Borisovich.

In the first part of the same census: Godel Fastovsky son of Khaim, 39, and his wife Zlata daughter of Gershko, 39 — the two-year-old girl of 1858, Duvid's sister — with Leyzor, 16, Nukhim, 10, Radya, 7, and Mot, 4; and Moyshe-Aron son of Khaim-Gdal, whose age is written as 90. In Bila Tserkva: Avrum son of Duvid, 60, Gershko's younger brother, with his wife, children and grandchildren — and among the grandchildren a five-year-old boy named Usher. A great-great-great-grandson of Usher, bearing the same name.

Dina Shilshtut's family. The Shilshtuts stand in the same censuses as the Shapiros. In 1875 the colony household is held by Khaim son of Duvid Shilshtut, 41, with his brothers — Leyzor, 39, Man, 27, Nukhim, 22, and Duvid, 15 — and their sons; Leyzor's sons: Shimko, 12, Duvid, 7, Pinkhas, 3, Avrum-Ber, 1. Daughters were not written in the conscription census, and Dina, then about fifteen, is not on it — but her father is: the patronymic "daughter of Leyzor" in the Shapiro household of 1897 and "Eliazer", Dina's father on the American chart, both point to him. In 1897 Leyzor son of Duvid, 60, heads his own house with his sons Pin, 25, and Berko, 23, and a daughter-in-law Sura daughter of El, 18; next to it — a separate house of Duvid son of Leyzor, 31, with his wife Tsipa daughter of Iona, 21, and a one-year-old daughter Ginka; and the house of Khaim son of Duvid, 63, with his wife Rysya daughter of Avrum, 63. So Dina had four brothers, uncles with their families, and a grandfather named Duvid — judging by the documents, the "David Moshkov Shilshtut" of the founders' list: the survey of 1860 says he had died and that his sons Mordko and Khaim had taken over the farm, and Khaim son of Duvid is the eldest of the brothers who held the Shilshtut house in 1875.

Around them: in 1897 Fastov had 5,595 Jews, 52 per cent of the town; by 1900 six synagogues and two Jewish schools. Kadlubitsya had 826 people in 1896; in 1900 — 29 farms, 434 people, a synagogue and about 1,047 acres owned by the "colonists' society"; 65 houses before 1917.

The American chart. In December 2021 Jeff Colvin, a grandson of Sam (Yankel-Shmul), sent a hand-drawn family chart. It completes the household of David and Dina with the children born after the census: Eli (c. 1904), Radi (c. 1905), Menukha (c. 1909), and a Nathan of 1888 who is not on the 1897 sheet — an open question. The sons' birth years on Jeff's chart — Beryl 1882, Mayer 1886, Shmil 1889, Motel 1893 — differ from the census by only a year or two, so family memory and the documents coincide here. The chart also says that Mayer married Radi Fastovski — apparently the seven-year-old Radya from Zlata's household, his first cousin — and that Shmil married Sarah in 1911, a daughter of Yental, Dina's sister.

5Kyiv (1877–1914)

Kyiv province was inside the Pale of Settlement, but the city of Kyiv itself was excluded from it. A Jew could live there only by right — as a registered artisan, a merchant of the first guild, a person with higher education — or in the suburbs beyond the city line, and the police carried out expulsions from time to time. So every record of a family member in the Kyiv registers is also a question: on what grounds was he living there.

The registers of the Kyiv rabbinate record the branches that left the colony. On 2 March 1877 Yos son of Srul marries Mikhlya Khalamskaya — the couple from Rozhny. On 13 January 1898 and 9 March 1905 two grandsons of Khaim-Gdal marry in Kyiv. On 10 December 1911 Yos son of Avrum dies, aged 43. On 14 September 1913 Yos-David son of Srul dies, aged 60, and the next day, 15 September, his son Yankel, 18. The record gives no cause. On 4 November 1913 a son, Girsh, is born to Meyer and Radya — Meyer's family is already in Kyiv. On 12 November 1914 Avrum son of Duvid dies, aged 77.

These are the years of the October pogroms of 1905 and, in September–October 1913, of the Beilis trial, held in Kyiv — the very weeks in which Yos-David and his son were buried. Context of the time, not a cause.

6September 1919

The army. Sam's grandchildren, Jeff and Barbara, grew up on his stories of Fastov; while Sam was still alive, Jeff recorded them on tape. From those stories: Sam and Khaim-Berl both served in the tsar's army in the First World War. Sam was in General Ruzsky's forces, which were sent to the front near Kraków, then in Austria-Hungary; after two or three years in the trenches he shot himself in the hand, with a comrade's help, and was discharged as wounded. The trace stayed for life: the index finger of his right hand would not straighten, and he told his grandchildren he had shot it to get out of the army — without that finger you cannot fire a rifle. Whether it happened that way, only he knew. There are no service records for either Sam or Khaim-Berl.

What happened in Fastov. In 1918 the town took in about five thousand refugees from places already devastated. On 25 August 1919 (old style) Denikin's Volunteer Army entered Fastov for the first time; Cossacks broke into houses, and families paid officers up to ten thousand roubles a night to stay with them and protect them. On 8 September the army returned, and on 9 September (dates in the old style; the same source also gives "25 Elul 5679") a pogrom began that lasted six days: families were burned in their houses, killed in the synagogues, seized on the trains. By most sources — more than a thousand killed; according to Emma Goldman, who visited afterwards — up to four thousand, counting those who died of their wounds. In the colony of Kadlubitsya itself, that same September: 23 killed, seven orphans taken in by peasant families from the surrounding villages, all the houses burned.

The list. After the pogroms the Jewish relief committee in Kyiv compiled lists of the dead, town by town, from the testimony of those who had buried them. The Fastov list survives. Row 121:

Shapiro David son of Gershko · 50 · farmer · colony · Fastov · Denikin · Fastov

— killed in Fastov by Denikin's men, buried in Fastov. A second copy of the same list records him under number 254, aged 55, in the group "from the colony"; the list was drawn up in September 1919 from the words of the people who buried the dead. Neither copy gives the exact day. This is the only written record of a violent death in the family — and it is the death of Duvid, the father of the five brothers.

What is known from family stories. Sam told his grandchildren about those years; their retellings differ in the details, and where it matters we give both.

As it was told in Sam's family. Sam had not been home from the front for long when the Revolution came, and in the fighting that followed his parents, David and Dina, were killed — "or so the story was told to us" — and with them his wife and small children; one or more of the younger brothers disappeared; Beryl and two other brothers moved to Kyiv. In the other retelling the family's death looks like this: the "armies" — both sides — came into the shtetls to take the men; when one approached Fastov, the young men left to hide, and the soldiers, not finding them, killed their families.

Dina Shilshtut, Duvid's wife. The family tree gives her death in 1919, in the pogrom; that is how Sam's family told it too. But the second page of the American chart says otherwise: after David's death she lived in Kyiv, and the news of her death reached Sam in Romania in a letter from Mayer, "on the third day of Hanukkah" — the year is not given. The year and the circumstances of her death have not been established.

Mindel Ledis, Khaim-Berl's first wife, Anyuta's mother. The family remembers that she was killed in the pogrom of 1919. The American chart, drawn from Sam's memory two generations later, lists Mindel Ledis among those who went to Kyiv after David's death. Her name is not in the Kyiv committee's lists of the killed and wounded. Which is right, we do not know.

Sarah, Sam's first wife, and their children were killed; there were two or three children — the grandchildren remember it differently. Sarah, by family memory, was a sister of Duba Shenkman. There was also an infant, a son of Sam and Nechama, who died in Russia.

In the Kyiv registers: Zlata daughter of Gershko — Duvid's sister — dies in Kyiv on 26 November 1919; her age is written as 75, though in 1897 she was 39. The date and the place fit the account that the family fled to Kyiv.

The relief committee's papers show what the following years looked like. In October 1922 the JDC's representative allots Fastov 25 food parcels and 400 pairs of warm underwear and demands distribution reports; a Jewish children's home is operating in the town; on 23 October 1922 a "detailed list of those killed in the Vasylkiv pogroms" is requested for a monograph. On 29 June 1923 the JDC's report sums up: 12,000 Jews before the pogroms, 6,000 now; of 600 Jewish houses 400 burned, 90 taken over by peasants, 110 inhabited; 300 widows, 150 orphans, 350 half-orphans, 200 disabled; and 565 refugees from the agricultural colonies Chervonyanskaya and Obraztsovo-Kadlubetskaya living in Fastov. The six enclosures listed in the letter — among them the list of the killed drawn up by the burial society — are not in the two files that were read; they have still to be looked for in file 496 of the JDC archive.

Sam leaves. How Sam met Nechama Shulotskaya is told two ways in the family. In one, it was the Jewish underground that brought them together: Nechama was trying to get to America with her younger brothers and sisters and her stepmother, to join her father and eldest brother, who had emigrated before the war, and the marriage was arranged for the sake of the escape. In the other, Sam moved to another shtetl after his family was killed, walked into a bakery, saw a beautiful young woman behind the counter and, in his own words, "got a sparkle again". From there the story is one: around 1920 they left Fastov — mostly on foot, hitching rides on trains — through Yugoslavia, where Nechama's half-sister lived, to Romania, where they waited for visas on the sponsorship of her father in New York; the whole journey took almost two years. In April 1922 they landed at Ellis Island — and there, Sam used to tell, they nearly turned him away because of the bent finger as unfit for work, until he grabbed the official by the shirt and lifted him off the floor. Their daughters were Diana (Dina in Yiddish), born that same year, and Frances, Jeff and Barbara's mother. Gail remembers "Uncle Schmelik and his two daughters" coming from New York to Philadelphia.

The farewell in Kyiv. Before leaving, Sam went to Kyiv to say goodbye to his brothers. Beryl, Mayer and Ovsey (Eshia on the American chart) were there — and their mother Dina. The brothers urged him to stay: according to Sam, Beryl had a substantial business and was well off. Sam answered that Nechama was going with him or without him. He never saw any of them again. Later, abroad, he received a letter from Mayer: their mother had died soon after that farewell, on the third day of Hanukkah. The story was written down from Sam's words by his grandson Jeff many years later. After leaving, Sam lost touch with Beryl, and in America it was assumed that Beryl had not survived the Civil War — or, if he had, that he had not survived the German occupation twenty years later.

7The second colony — Khaim-Berl and Rivka's years (1922–1941)

The JDC rebuilt Kadlubitsya: more than fifty houses, some of them standard "American houses" on both sides of the road, for eighteen thousand dollars. In 1925 the colony became a Jewish national village council of Fastov district; it had a primary school; in 1929 the Jewish collective farm "Royter Poyer" — "the Red Farmer" — was founded; in 1931 the colony had 515 Jews — more than in 1900. In Fastov, meanwhile, the synagogues were being closed, at the end of the 1920s the cemetery was destroyed and its stones used for building, in the 1930s the Yiddish schools were closed, and the famine of 1932–1933, emigration and persecution brought the town's Jewish population down by 1939 to 2,149 (by one source) or 3,545 (by another).

Two photographs. In the photograph of the Jewish village council of Kadlubitsya, 1930, Khaim-Berl Shapiro stands second from the right — that is how the family knows him. In the other, taken in Fastov, he stands with his daughter Anna; the date is not established: Anna, born about 1917, is no longer a child here, so the picture was most likely taken in the early 1930s — not long before Khaim-Berl's death and before she left. These are the only images of Khaim-Berl that we have.

The household. From the family tree: Khaim-Berl, born 1880 in Kadlubitsya, died 1934 in Fastov. His second wife, Rivka Vishnepolskaya, was born in 1892 in Trylisy, a village south-west of Fastov. The 1892 list of the Jews of Trylisy records her father's family: Khaim son of Yudko Vishnepolsky, his wife Sheyns-Beyla and the children — Srul-Borukh, Feyga, Shlioma, Rivka, Duvid and Berko. So Rivka's father was Khaim, her mother Sheyns-Beyla, and she had four brothers and a sister. Rivka died in Fastov on 17 August 1952. Their children: Dina, born on 2 December 1921 — two years after the pogrom — and David, born on 6 June 1926; the family tree gives Fastov as the birthplace of both. In 1930, when Khaim-Berl was photographed on the colony's council, Dina was nine and David four; when he died, they were twelve and eight.

Anyuta. Khaim-Berl's daughter from his first marriage, born in 1916 — so says her gravestone at Montefiore Cemetery outside Philadelphia, and so it follows from the marriage licence of 1939, where she is 22 (the family tree gives "about 1917"; the birthplace by the tree is Kadlubitsya). She went to America alone. Her daughter Gail tells us: Anna had a grandmother in America, Ida Ledis — her mother's family had left earlier — and at eleven, around 1928, Anna was still sending her a photograph of herself from home; the American chart, for its part, gives 1927 as the year she left. When exactly she went is not established. In Philadelphia she worked in a garment factory and was active in the labour union. On 16 July 1939 the Reading Eagle printed in its list of marriage licences: "Bernard Cantor, 23, Philadelphia, and Anita Ledis, 22, Philadelphia" — in America she bore her mother's surname. Her children are Barry (1943–2020) and Gail (1947). Anna died of breast cancer on 21 October 1954, when Gail was seven; she is buried at Montefiore Cemetery — the cemetery's records and the gravestone confirm the date. Gail knew that her mother's father had died after she left, but "didn't know about Dina and David". You wrote, for your part: "We all know about Anjuta from our childhood. She has been a treasure for Dina and David who had a dream to see their older sister Anjuta in their lifetime."

Motl — Markus. Mot, the five-year-old of 1897, appears in the survivors' registration at Yad Vashem as "Markus Shapira": born 1896 (the family said 1892), son of David, a geodesist by profession, married to Polina Rubalskaya, born in Kyiv in 1906 into the family of Naum Rubalsky. Their sons Rafail (24 June 1933) and Boris (2 December 1938) were born in Kadlubitsya; the third son is Naum. Today Rafail and Boris live in Israel, and Naum in Germany.

A family that went to the land in the 1850s sits, in 1930, on the Soviet council of the same colony, and its children are born there until 1938 — nearly ninety years in one place.

81941–1945

On 20 July 1941 the Wehrmacht entered the colony; Fastov was occupied from July 1941 until the autumn of 1943. By the autumn of 1941 the Jews of Fastov aged 12 to 60 had been shot: by one source 50 by the Wehrmacht and 292 by Sonderkommando 4a, by another 30 and 262; on 6 October 1941 women, children and the old, and refugees from Zhytomyr with them, were shot in a ravine by the Veprik forest — "Fastov's Babi Yar". In the colony, in the late autumn, the sixteen Jews who had stayed were shot at the edge of the forest. In all, about a thousand Jews of Fastov and its surroundings were killed; many managed to evacuate.

The evacuation in our documents is the story of Motl's family: Markus, Polina, eight-year-old Rafail and two-and-a-half-year-old Boris — Kadlubitsya → Poltava → Alma-Ata → Sarytogai in Kazakhstan; "alive at the end of the war"; they returned to the colony, and the post-war village lists name "Shapiro Polina and her sons Boris and Naum". Meyer had lived in Alma-Ata since the 1930s (the family tree gives his death there in 1946). His granddaughter Masha — Maria in print — Vinitskaya wrote in 2011 to the Almaty Jewish newspaper Davar: the Shapiro and Vinitsky families "were forced to leave" in the 1930s — grandfather Meyer Shapiro to Alma-Ata, grandfather Aron Vinitsky to Kyiv; in the war the Vinitskys were evacuated to Alma-Ata, where Yakov met Sonya Shapiro again, with whom he had grown up in Kadlubitsya, went to the front, and after the war they married and lived together for almost sixty years. The same letter carries a family legend the documents do not support: that the great-grandfathers had served twenty-five years in the tsar's army and been given land in Kadlubitsya for it. That branch of Meyer's family lives in Canada today.

Dina and David. Dina was nineteen in June 1941, David fifteen. They left at the last moment. As the family tells it, a man drove past on a cart and said the Germans were close; the decision had to be made at once. Dina, David and those with them got on and left; those who stayed were killed. That is how they reached Kazakhstan — as Markus's family did. Where exactly in Kazakhstan they lived, who else was with them, whether Rivka was, and how they came back to Fastov — the documents do not say.

9After the war (1945–1990)

Most of the colony's Jews came back from evacuation. The kolkhoz chairman after the war was a Shapiro whose three sons lived in Fastov, Baltimore and New York. The village lists published by the local historians name "Naum and Borys Shapiro", "Shapiro Polina and her sons Boris and Naum", "Samoil Lvovych Shapiro with sons Izia, Sasha (went to Israel) and Lionia (Canada)", "Shapiro Kutsia and Fania". Until the 1960s the colony baked its matzah together, in one house; in 2016 one Jew remained there.

The branches. Dina's branch — Izya and his family — is in Australia. David's branch — his sons Grisha (Zvi) and Peter, my father — is in Israel today, together with Rafail and Boris, Markus's sons. When David's family moved from Fastov to Kyiv, the documents do not say.

The five brothers:

Germany. Naum's branch left in the 1990s: first, in 1994, his daughter Polina emigrated; three years later Naum and his wife Betya followed her. Bremen at first; in 2003 Polina moved to Berlin, her husband's home town, and in 2019 her parents moved there too, to live close by. Betya died two years later. This was written to me by Dan in Berlin, of Naum's family.

America. In New York Sam worked in the garment district and Nechama kept a small shop selling women's underwear and housedresses; on those two incomes they raised their daughters in Manhattan, and in the late 1950s bought a two-family house in Brooklyn — Diana and her family in one half, Sam and Nechama in the other. Jeff, the only grandson, lived with them for long stretches as a boy, went to synagogue with his grandfather and learned Russian and Yiddish from him. Nechama died in 1977; Sam spent his last years with his daughter Frances in Houston. "Sam was a gentle soul, and a wonderful man and grandfather," Barbara writes; their grandmother did not like to talk about the past, and did not like it when Sam did.

Fastov, 1995. In 1995 Jeff, a physicist, came to Ukraine to see colleagues and went to Fastov. From the descriptions he had heard from his grandmother he found the neighbourhood and, he believes, the house where Nechama's family had lived — not far from the railway station and the market square. The farm outside town where, as his grandfather told it, Sam, Beryl and the whole Shapiro family had lived was no longer there.

10Over to you

This is what the documents and the family's letters can say today. You knew your mother and father, the Fastov of those years and your uncle David, and much of what was said at home never reached any archive. So instead of a list of questions — an open request.

• Corrections. Is there anything here that differs from what you know or were told — a name, a date, a place, who was related to whom? Where the paper and your memory disagree, we want to know: the paper is not always right.
• Additions. What would you add — about your mother and her family, about your grandparents, about the house and the people in Fastov, about anyone named here?
• Stories. What was told at home — about the colony, the pogrom, the war, the brothers who left — that is not here?
• Your own questions. Is there something you always wanted to know about the family that this text does not answer? The archives may still be able to find it.

Any remarks, in any language and at any length, will be useful.

Ilay

Where this comes from

State Archive of Kyiv Oblast (DAKO), Kyiv. Revision lists of 1795, 1816, 1818, 1822, 1834, 1850 and 1858 (fond 280) — the first four generations; the survey of the colony's farms of 1860 (fond 1); the 1875 census of Jews under military service (fond 12; the colony's file is 555, of whose 56 sheets one has been read so far); the all-Russian census of 1897 (fond 384; our family — file 169, sheet 101; the Shilshtuts — file 168); the lists of Jews living in villages, 1892 (fond 1270) — Rivka's family in Trylisy; the Kyiv Jewish committee for the relief of pogrom victims (fond R-3050) — the lists of the dead of 1919, house files, correspondence with the JDC of 1922–1923. A microfilm of the whole fond R-3050 is at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and open to everyone. A possible target to check: the Fastov civil registration books from 1919 (fond R-5634) — the births of Dina (1921) and David (1926), the death of Khaim-Berl (1934).

Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine (TsDIAK), Kyiv. The metrical books of the rabbinates. For Fastov only 1849 is known in this archive (fond 1159): the synagogue members' list with Srul and two infant deaths. The Kyiv rabbinate's books (fond 1164) gave the marriages and deaths of the Kyiv branches, 1877–1919. Fond 2227 — the inventory of the bishop's estate of 1784.

State Archive of Chernihiv Oblast. The family lists of the village of Rozhny, 1882 and 1888 (fond 127) — Srul's old age.

JDC Archives, New York. Reports and correspondence on Fastov, 1921–1923: the figures of the destruction and the 565 refugees from the colonies.

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Survivor registrations — Markus, Polina, Rafail, Boris (catalogue data; the forms themselves are open to relatives) — and Pages of Testimony on unidentified Davids.

Local historians and websites. jewua.org (the pages on Kadlubitsya and Fastov, with Doroshenko's list of 1858, the post-war lists of residents and the two photographs); the Fastov KehilaLinks site (JewishGen); the collection of Polish poll-tax censuses of 1765–1791.

American records. The marriage-licence list in the Reading Eagle (16 July 1939); the burial database of Montefiore Cemetery (Abington, Pennsylvania) and its gravestones on Find a Grave — the dates of Anna and Bernard Cantor.

Family testimony. Jeff Colvin's chart of 5 December 2021 and the letters of Jeff and Barbara; Gail Cantor's letters (2026); your letter; the letter of Dan of Naum's family (2026); stories written down from the family's words; the family tree file our family keeps, with my written clarifications; Maria Vinitskaya's letter in Davar (Almaty, 2011). Everything from this layer is marked in the text with words such as "the family tree gives", "by the American chart", "Barbara remembers".

Contradictions we keep rather than resolve

Duvid's age in 1919 (50 / 55 / about 60); Nekhama's father (Srul in 1850, Avraham in the tree); Gershko son of Usher's age in 1795 (30 in the Polish column, 36 in the Russian); Gershko's wife in 1795 (Reyzya) and in 1816 (Feyga); Khaim-Bir (son of Gershko in 1818, son of Usher in 1822); Zlata's age at death (written 75, about 61 expected); Motl's birth year (1892 / 1893 / 1896); when Dina Shilshtut died; whether Mindel Ledis was killed in 1919 or went to Kyiv; Anna's birth year (1916 by the gravestone and by her age in 1939, about 1917 in the family tree); when Anna left (1927 by the American chart — but at eleven she was still sending a photograph from home); the year of the photograph of Khaim-Berl with Anna; how many children Sam and Sarah had; the Jewish population of Fastov in 1939 (2,149 / 3,545).

What is not in the project, and therefore not in this text

Usher's own household; the file of the family's transfer to the colony; Sam's passenger record; Anna's immigration record; where exactly in Kazakhstan Dina and David were in 1941–1945, and whether Rivka was with them; the exact year of the move to Kyiv; the birth records of Dina and David; the full text of the Davar article; the Yad Vashem forms; the list of the 23 killed in the colony in 1919.