An extract from Yoysef Shvarts, ‘Tipn un geshtaltn’ (Characters and personalities) from this memorial book to the town of Burshtyn, Ukraine.

Feyge the midwife

The doctors, Mandsheyn and Makh, who began working in Burshtyn from the beginning of the twentieth century, must have really racked their brains to find a way to make a living. For who used a doctor back then? Both the Christian and Jewish residents had their own male and female healers – opshprekhers and opshprekherins. In our shtetl, there were a few of these old women. But the most accomplished of them all was Feyge the midwife.

She was tall and shriveled, with long, drooping hands, but she always had a smile on her face and a clever observation for everyone she encountered. She helped my mother birth seven children, four of which quickly died. Feyge the midwife was also called to the birth of my grandmother’s son Naftali.  She had remedies for every kind of illness. A ball of honey dough for a swelling, a hot brick if the child had signs of rickets, which also required baths of milk and honey.

Two other women in the shtetl – Rokhele Hamer, and Leyotshe, wife of Meyer Teper – would also look after poor new mothers, bringing them chicken soup. They knew that less-well-off women needed to be cared for a while after childbirth.

Feyge the midwife helped bring about 1500 children into the world. She refused to take any money from many of her clients, seeing that they didn’t have a crumb of bread in their homes.

As she got older, her fame as a midwife started to wane. New, medically trained midwives or akusherkes started working in Burshtyn, among them Mrs Nadler and more recently also Asher Blekher’s daughter, Mrs Sore Zamer. Bursztyn was becoming more enlightened, and when really necessary, people were even starting to call the doctors – Dr. Zusman or Dr. Shumer.

Feyge departed this world in the 1930s. She spent her final years with her son, Fethia the healer.

Likht-tsierins – soul candle makers.

Fifty years ago, people used to go to a lot of effort to ensure that the Yom Kiper candles would be made with pure bees’ wax and that, when inserting the wick, the names of all deceased family members would be mentioned. This was rather expensive, and not everyone could afford it. The ritual was done by Leyotshe Meyers and Malke Berkes. Their candles cost a lot of money.

Only the old lady Rokhele Hamer made the candles for free, as a mitsve, but only for selected clients. Rokhele Hamer made her living from her small shop, which was near the Polish church. However, because of this and other mitsves, she neglected her shop.

Cite this:

Extract from: Yoysef Shvarts, “Tipn un geshtaltn” (Characters and personalities), in S. Kants ed., Sefer Burshtin, (The book of Bursztyn). Jerusalem, 1960. 263-264. Trans. Annabel Gottfried Cohen.