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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Joseph Trumpeldor Died and Charles Bronson was Born-Tatars and Jews in Ukraine-Crimea

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                      
Charles Bronson, born Charles Buchinsky, was born to a Polish-Lithuanian immigrant father of Lipka Tatar ancestry on November 3, 1921 and died August 30, 2003.  He was the 11th of 15 children and learned to speak English when he was a teenager. He was one of America's favorite movie actors.   "He starred in films such as Once Upon a Time in the WestThe Magnificent SevenThe Dirty DozenThe Great EscapeRider on the RainThe Mechanic, and the Death Wish series. He was often cast in the role of a police officergunfighter, or vigilante in revenge-oriented plot lines"

Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group in eastern Europe and northern Asia and are a native people the Volga region of Russia, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.  Most live in the Russian Federation.  There are 5.5 million, which includes 2 million in the republic of Tarstan, 2 million in Bashkortostan and 2.5 million in other parts of Russia.  Many wound up in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine after  the Soviet Union broke up.  

The inner Crimea around 1420 became a split kingdom.  The Ottomans conquered the Genoese possessions in 1475 and made the inland Tatars vassals.  They were also useful for raiding Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania, and they were protected  from reprisals by the belt of the depopulated steppe.  What happened next was massive emigration and a loss of finances from the land.  The people that stayed were mainly Tatars, which was then a Muslim Turkish-speaking blend under the leadership of the descendants of the Mongol invaders.  

The meeting of Tatars and Jews resulted in problems. When the Russians conquered the Crimea from the Turks, Jews suffered a great deal.  Many Jews left for the Ottoman territory.  In 1783 Russia annexed the Crimea.  At that time there were 469 Jewish families made up of people from the Rabbanite and the Karaite groups living there.  Tatars raided Ukraine and Poland-Lithuania in the 16th centuries.  There was a Tatar alliance with Chmielnicki in 1648, and this brought many Jewish captives into the Tatar hands.  They were usually recovered by their people through ransoms that had to be paid.  

Crimea was a potential Jewish homeland being it became part of the Pale of Settlement, land set aside where only Jews were allowed to live.  Catherine the Great II had taken the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in 1783 so she encouraged Jews to move there.  By the late 1800s Crimea had become a training center for future Zionist pioneers.  They used this land to test agricultural techniques before they moved to Palestine.  It was Joseph Trumpeldor who once trained potential immigrants  there. 
                                                             

Joseph was born November 21, 1880 in Pyatigorsk, Russia and died March 1, 1920.  He had helped to organize the Zion Mule Corps and to bring Jewish immigrants to Palestine.  He served in World War I for Russia and in the Russian/Japanese War He died defending the settlement of Tel Chai in 1920 in Palestine  and then became a national hero. "  "During World War II the German Wehrmacht temporarily occupied Pyatigorsk. The Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D had its headquarters in Pyatigorsk in 1942.  The German occupation resulted in the killing of many Jewish inhabitants of the region.  

Though Russia had become atheistic at one time, they now have Islam as their 2nd largest religion.  Tatars are Muslims." In the middle of the Volga Basin reside populations of Tatars and Bashkirs, the vast majority of whom are Muslims." Sunni, Shjia and Sufi groups make up over 5,000 registered religious Muslim groups.  29,268 registered Russian Orthodox religious group exist since December 2006 and the Muslims make up over 1/6 of all of them.  

There are 2 million people living in Crimea.  15,000 of those are Jews.  300,000 are the Crimean Tatars, descendants of Tatars that Joseph Stalin deported 70 years ago.  That's because he accused them of working with Nazi Germany when Germany occupied Crimea.  There lots of anti-Semitic acts going on right now, reminiscent of the Nazi days.  Old habits die hard.   

"The Tatars are overwhelmingly opposed to the Russian annexation. Bakhchysarai, a town near Simferopol with a Tatar majority, is one of the few places in Crimea where people fly the Ukrainian flag from their homes and cars, despite the large presence of Russian soldiers besieging the nearby Ukrainian Army base."  

Religious minorities of the Crimea do not want to go with Russia.   "Throughout the uproar in Ukraine and subsequent invasion by the Russians, the Jewish population in Crimea has been subject to several hate crimes, including an incident where vandals spray-painted swastikas and "death to Jews" on the only Reform synagogue in Crimea's capital, Simferopol. While there was no way of knowing if the vandalism was done by pro-Russian supporters or local neo-Nazis, one of Ukraine's chief rabbis, Jacob Dov Bleich, accused Russia of staging "anti-Semitic provocations" to discredit the Ukrainian government and create a need for a Russian takeover."

Reference:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Russia
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/.premium-1.578829  
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Crimea.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bronson  
http://www.policymic.com/articles/84543/crimea-s-persecuted-religious-minorities-don-t-want-it-to-become-part-of-russia                                                       

4 comments:

  1. So Nadene...Are you saying that the majority uprising in Ukraine is Islamic? I am hearing Christian and other such things...clueless? Good article

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  2. I don't know how religious most Russians are but Islam is the 2nd largest. Of 2 million people, 300,000 Tatars are Muslims in Crimea. Christianity, Judaism, etc were all wiped out of Russia at one time not too distant. When I was in Israel 1980-81 in Hebrew classes, our teacher was secretly sending Hebrew lessons to Sharansky who was in prison. Russians were coming into Israel when we were there in 1980.

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  3. So my mother is a Lipka. She is blue eyed and red haired. (I am a Garcia.) Is there a good probability that she is ethnically Jewish? My grandmother on my fathers side is a Stein, but she had dark curly hair. Is there a possibility that she was of Jewish/German descent? You seem to know quite a bit about genealogy so I was curious to know if you are aware of any of these things.

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  4. JJ Garcia, Lipka is a Tatar name, not a Jewish one. However, Stein has possibilities and Jews did come from the Middle East and most have had dark hair, and curly, too. My grandmother and aunt had black curly hair. Yes, she could be of Jewish/German descent, but the real proof has to be in taking a dna test. I advise you to take one and find out both your line of your mt haplotype (of your mother-her mother-her mother) and your Y haplotype of your father, his father, his father, etc.) . Then later you can take a familyfinder test (autosomal) and find out who you match dna with. It's too hard to go by surnames. Don't forget, King David was supposed to have had red hair. He was referred to as a gingy (ginger colored hair).

    ReplyDelete