“She Was Burning Some Papers in the Russian Stove…”

The J-Doc digital archive contains the archival investigation file of Riva Moiseevna Reiderman, a milliner from Zhmerynka, born in 1900.

On 2 September 1924, Reiderman was arrested by the Podolian OGPU on charges of participating in illegal Zionist activity. She was probably a member of the Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair.

At the time of her arrest, Reiderman tried to burn some papers in the stove. However, the unburned scraps were seized and added to the case file. These fragments, preserved by chance, allow us to reconstruct, at least in part, what young Zionists in the USSR were reading in the 1920s.

Scattered sheets, covered in difficult-to-read handwriting in Russian and Yiddish, preserve a list of texts studied in the Zionist circle: “The National-Cultural Struggle in Palestine,” “Collective and Private Land Ownership,” Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” a list of articles by Max Nordau, “Uganda and Palestine,” and other materials. These notes make it possible to judge the circle’s interests and intellectual agenda.

One of the sheets contains information about how the group’s work was organised, written in hard-to-read cursive Yiddish. Judging by the case materials, the investigators were either unable or unwilling to examine these notes in detail.

In the end, Reiderman was released: the order closing the case stated that her guilt could not be proven. Her later fate is unknown.