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Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky)

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Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky)
Volunteers are the heart and soul of any Jewish community. This is also true about Minsk Jewish Campus. It is hard to give an exact number of MJC volunteers, but some 800 people of different ages donating their time and effort to the community can proudly call themselves volunteers of MJC.

 

There are volunteers dedicated to the Jewish History and Culture Museum of Belarus. One of them is Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky). Having come to the “Mogilev Ghetto” exhibition opening in 2002 he fell in love with the museum and the work done there, and his heart is still in it.

 

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Abram Belen’ky
Abram, Mikhail’s father, was born in 1905 into a family of a poor saddlemaker Yefrem Belen’ky. There were six children in the family – two girls and four boys. After the revolution all the boys graduated from universities and became engineers. After his graduation from Leningrad Polytechnic University in 1930, Abram was sent to the Far East of Russia to conduct design and survey works. He became part of the big construction campaign of a broad gauge railway line in Russia that was later called the Baikal-Amur Mainline. In the end of December 1930 his wife Genya and his month-old son Mikhail joined him in the Far East.

In 1931 Abram Belen’ky was sent to an expedition to Khabarovsk and never came back. Today, 80 years after the tragic event, it is impossible to find out about the circumstances of the death of the head of design and survey group in the Far East Abram Belen’ky.

After his death Genya and her little son returned to Mogilev. In a couple of years she remarried and Mikhail took his stepfather’s surname – Izrailsky.

There is a settlement at 132nd km of the Baikal-Amur Mainline named after Abram Belen’ky. Having one’s name on the map is always a sign of recognition of some outstanding service performed to one’s country, and having a point on the map of the former USSR bearing the name of a Jew is something quite extraordinary.

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For many years Mikhail was trying to trace his father’s route. Having graduated from a military college in Kaliningrad, he specially asked to be sent to the Far East for service. In 1960s as army disbandment had begun, Mikhail moved to Minsk and went all the way from the locksmith to master, started to study by correspondence first in Polytechnic college and then in the university. Since 1966 through mid 90s Mikhail was a leading specialist in a design department. He has two children, grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.

Mikhail says that his volunteering in the museum adds special meaning to his life. Thanks to his thorough archival research new names appeared in the list of Jews who fought in the resistance movement in Belarus, and a map of ghetto locations and Holocaust memorials in Belarus was made. If Minsk Jewish campus had been big enough to have streets, one of them would have definitely been named after Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky).
 
13.04.2012

Tamara Feiman

alt Tamara Feiman belongs to the generation for which growing up in the Jewish environment and living Jewish values is a natural way of life.
Her parents managed to keep their Jewish identity despite growing up in the denationalized environment of the Soviet Union.
Since she was a child Tamara has been actively involved with emerging Jewish organizations. She attended the first Jewish kindergarten in Belarus and then continued her Jewish journey in Chabad religious school «Lauder Shneur College». She has been attending the Young Leadership School for two years and has worked in day camps and family camps as both an assistant and madricha. She has also participated in seminars and Shabbatons, visited the Atlanta, Georgia JCC Camp Barney Medintz, and worked as a madricha in Camp Szarvash. Her warmth and care are well-known to the special needs children from Ivenets orphanage who she visited as part of Helping Hand program.
13.04.2012

Maya Lomakina

alt The life of Maya Lomakina is that of hard work and privation. Her story, however, is that of optimism and hope.
Having cared first for her younger sister when she was a young girl herself and then for her own severely ill husband for most of her life, at 65, with a “bunch” of chronic diseases like acute myocardial infarction,  high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and liver problems, Maya has nobody to take care of her. Her mother and sister made aliyah a long time ago, and her only daughter lives with her family 20 km away from Pinsk and can not visit Maya very often.
21.01.2012

Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky)

alt Volunteers are the heart and soul of any Jewish community. This is also true about Minsk Jewish Campus. It is hard to give an exact number of MJC volunteers, but some 800 people of different ages donating their time and effort to the community can proudly call themselves volunteers of MJC.
There are volunteers dedicated to the Jewish History and Culture Museum of Belarus. One of them is Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky). Having come to the “Mogilev Ghetto” exhibition opening in 2002 he fell in love with the museum and the work done there, and his heart is still in it.
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